Bazooka Joe
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Bazooka Joe is a comic strip character, featured on small comics included inside individually-wrapped pieces of Bazooka bubblegum. He wears a black eyepatch, lending him a distinctive appearance. He is one of the more recognizable American advertising characters of the 20th century, due to worldwide distribution, and one of the few identifiable ones associated with a candy.
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[edit] Characters and story
Bazooka Joe is joined in his various misadventures by a motley crew of characters, who came from the tradition of syndicated kid gang comic strips such as Gene Byrnes' Reg'lar Fellers and Ad Carter's Just Kids. The group includes:
- Pesty (formerly Orville), who may be Joe's younger brother, with a 1950s cowboy sombrero
- Mort, a gangly boy who always wears his red turtleneck sweater pulled up over his mouth
- Joe's tubby pal, Hungry Herman
- Joe's girlfriend, Jane
- Toughie, a sailor hat-wearing, streetwise type
- Walkie Talkie, a neighborhood mutt
The comics generally consist of soft, child-friendly jokes, as well as small advertisements for kitschy merchandise one could purchase with enough comics and a few dollars. From the very beginning in 1954, the bottom of the comics included "fortunes" similar to those one would find in a fortune cookie but with a comedic bent.
[edit] Development
Sometime between 1952 and 1954, Woody Gelman, the head of Product Development at Topps,[1] approached the cartoonist Wesley Morse to create Bazooka Joe and his Gang. Morse, the original artist on Bazooka Joe, was also the artist for many of the pornographic drawings collected into so-called "Tijuana bibles" or "eight-pagers", popular in the pre-war period, which are considered a precursor to the underground comix of the 1960s and 1970s.
As with almost all advertising characters of the 20th century who had any sort of longevity, the style of the Bazooka Joe comics changed with the times, with Joe eventually adopting a more contemporary look by the 1990s, complete with low-slung, baggy jeans.
Bazooka Joe comics were localized or translated for sale in other countries. For example, the Canadian version featured bilingual (simultaneous English and French) text balloons.
[edit] In popular media
In the Seinfeld episode "The Cafe", Jerry pulls his turtleneck over his mouth while he is staking out a café owner across the street from his window. Jerry jokingly says "Bazooka Joe" to his friend Elaine as a reference to the character Mort from the Bazooka Joe strip.
[edit] Film
In May 2009, it was announced that Bazooka Joe was to be adapted into a Hollywood movie.[2]
[edit] References
- ^ Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, p.117, Dave Jamieson, 2010, Atlantic Monthly Press, imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc., New York, NY, ISBN 978-0-8021-1939-1
- ^ Kit, Borys. "Hammer gets 'Bazooka Joe' to chew on". Hollywoodreporter.com. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/film/news/e3ib5e9d934e920f549482e05a1c7491bad. Retrieved 2009-05-22.
