The Creationists have coopted Alley Oop! This comic strip from the earliest memories of my childhood was a fanciful creation of V.(incent) T. Hamlin who found himself in Iraan, TX during an oil boom in deep West Texas. Some fossilized dinosaur tracks were discovered by oil field crews and Hamlin created a nonsensical prehistoric era where men and dinosaurs coexisted. Science has proved that the dinosaurs lived gazillions of years before humankind walked the earth. Carbon dating of fossil remains and other such technologies demonstrate that the dinosaurs died mysteriously (an asteroid strike?) long before human beings existed. The best the Creationists can do is republish Alley Oop as "proof" that men and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time. If this is (fair & balanced) folly, so be it.
[x Toonpedia]
Alley Oop
By Don Markstein
Vincent T. Hamlin developed an interest in fossils while working on advertising layouts for a Texas oil company in the early 1930s. When he decided to try his hand at a comic strip, the prehistoric past suggested itself as a topic. He named his Stone Age hero after words used by French gymnasts and trapeze artists ("Allez Oup"), surrounded him with supporting characters (girlfriend Ooola, pal Foozy, antagonist King Guz, pet dinosaur Dinny, etc.), and started sending the whole menage out to syndicates.
The strip was bought by a small syndicate named Bonnet-Brown, which began distributing it on December 5, 1932 — but less than six months later, Bonnet-Brown was no more, and Oop was homeless. Shortly after, tho, Newspaper Enterprise Association (syndicator of Our Boarding House, Wash Tubbs, Out Our Way and other well-known features) picked it up. Its "official" start date, August 7, 1933, is actually the day it started appearing as an NEA strip. The Sunday page began September 9, 1934. He's been appearing seven days a week ever since, making him one of the earliest, and certainly the longest-running cave man in comics.
Don Markstein's Toonopedia (subtitled "A Vast Repository of Toonological Knowledge") is a Web encyclopedia of print and animated cartoons. While the site aims for comprehensiveness, it makes little or no pretense of having a neutral point of view. Markstein is the sole writer and editor of Toonopedia.
Markstein, who has been a cartoonist for Walt Disney comics, has focused his attentions on American and other English language cartoons, with the goal of developing the largest online resource on American cartoons.
Text © 2005 Donald D. Markstein.
[x Reason]
Artifact: Dinosaurs vs. Darwin
By Jesse Walker
It was Claude Bell, the proprietor of an inn on Interstate 10, who erected the dinosaurs of Cabazon, California. First came Dinny the apatosaurus, built in the ’60s and immortalized in the 1985 film Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Then came a giant Tyrannosaurus rex, left incomplete when Bell died in 1989. Like the original dinosaurs, these beasts have evolved with the times: First they were denounced as eyesores, then they were embraced as icons, and now they’ve experienced a religious conversion.
The Los Angeles Times reports that creationists have been buying roadside dinosaur parks around the country and turning them into anti-evolution museums. Visit the Cabazon Dinosaurs today, and you can pick up Darwin-bashing literature at the gift shop; at similar attractions you’ll see the evidence, such as it is, that dinosaurs lived in the Garden of Eden and were transformed from vegetarians to carnivores by man’s original sin. “Go to Disneyland, they teach evolution,” the evangelist Kent Hovind of Pensacola’s Dinosaur Adventure Land complains to the Times. “It’s subtle—signs that say, ‘Millions of years ago.’ This is a golden opportunity to get our point across.”
As a card-carrying evolutionist, all I can say is this: Keep the faith, Dinny. Roadside attractions should be weird. And better a private park than a public school.
Jesse Walker is the Managing Editor of Reason, where he has written about a variety of topics, from pirate radio to copyright law to suburban sprawl. He is the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America, published by New York University Press in October 2001.
Walker's articles have appeared in a number of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Salon, The New Republic, L.A. Weekly, National Review, No Depression, Telos, and Z. He has also worked as a DJ, a dishwasher, and a miscellaneous office grunt, and was once hired to help move a clandestine dog farm.
Walker is a graduate of the University of Michigan, where he received a B.A. in History.
Copyright © 2005 Reason
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