Bazooka Joe and His Gang Page 4

  The main offices of Topps were located in Brooklyn but moved to Manhattan in 1994. Until 1996, the gum was made at a plant in Duryea, Pennsylvania, where various conveyor belts, coated gum polishers, and suspended tubes filled a football-field-size room. I watched that machinery in motion as Bazooka gum was manufactured and then joined with the Bazooka Joe comic strips. At the starting point, loaves of gum were inserted into a Rube Goldberg–like hopper, where they were then mashed into a rope shape that traveled out of the hopper on a conveyor belt. Products of various sizes were then sliced out of the sugary rope as it moved along.

  “Bazooka the Atom Bubble Gum” store window decal, 1947.

  At the far end, a machine spit out small pieces of gum at an incredible rate. Phtt! There went the gum. Whht! A strip of comics was sliced off. Fffftt! The wrapper was whipped on. And it all happened faster than you could open the package—gum, Bazooka Joe comics, wrapper—all spinning and whizzing at a blinding speed. One could not stand in front of this grandiose gum gadget without visualizing ten million mouths desperately gnawing and chewing in a futile effort to keep pace with the Topps machinery.

  If you ever wondered why the edges were chopped off some Bazooka Joe strips, the aforementioned description should give you the answer. The machine clipped off those strips—whht, whht, whht—so fast that a dozen could flip out even as the operator reached to adjust the positioning of the Bazooka Joe roll.

  Bazooka Joe is seen internationally because the comics are printed in many languages, including Spanish, French, German, and Hebrew. According to Robert Hendrickson’s The Great American Chewing Gum Book (Chilton, 1976), at that time Bazooka Joe was trademarked in thirty countries and Topps products were sold in fifty-five countries with licensed manufacturers in ten of those countries. In Nigeria, a black Bazooka Joe told jokes Nigerian-style. But the Japanese never got stuck on the gum, as noted by Paul Gravett in “The Mystery of Bazooka Joe” (Escape no. 1, 1983): “One country, however, where you won’t find Joe is Japan, not even in Tokyo, due to their restrictions on the sale of gums that stick … Bubble gum had the one social failing of being sticky.”

  Bazooka Pops store display box, 1970s.

  Bazooka Bits store display box, 1970s.

  Cherry Zooks candy box, Topps’s answer to Nerds Candy, 1985.

  Bazooka Joe has a product identification that spans the globe and leaps generations. But for the most part, Bazooka Joe and his pals remain confined to their little world of simple gags, tiny rectangles, and even tinier talking heads. True, there was the Bazooka Super Fun Pad, a 1983 activity book published by Playmore Waldman. The Super Fun Pad presents the characters at a much larger size in follow-the-dot pages, color-by-number pictures, games, magic tricks, and mazes.

  Another exception is the GAF Corporation’s View-Master reel packet, “Bazooka Joe and His Gang.” Topps licensed the character to GAF in 1973, and Bazooka Joe joined the View-Master series of “Cartoon Favorites,” a grouping of about twenty-five comic strip animation properties that included Bugs Bunny, Dennis the Menace, Superman, the Peanuts gang, Mighty Mouse, and Bullwinkle. The packet contained three seven-scene reels, so the Topps characters could “Come to Life” (as GAF put it) in twenty-one full-color, three-dimensional “stereo pictures.” Accompanying the stereoscope reels is a detailed storyline, typeset in a sixteen-page booklet (“A GAF View-Master Picture Presentation”) with eight two-color illustrations and a story synopsis.

  View-Master from GAF, 1973.

  The standard Bazooka Joe format has no continuity, but View-Master put the characters into a full-length story, rather than “gag-a-day” situations. Yet by the time the reader of the View-Master booklet reaches page sixteen, it’s evident that one still knows nothing about Bazooka Joe. Well, okay, he lives in Prairie City, but where is that?

  I worked on Bazooka Joe once, but even that close connection provides no great insights into Joe’s background and life in Prairie City (a name probably provided by GAF, not Topps). The assignment was twofold: 1) write new fortunes to go beneath the strip, and 2) edit the Bazooka Joe dialogue for the 1972 bilingual versions: “Learn French with Bazooka Joe” and “Learn Spanish with Bazooka Joe.” Every balloon remained the same size, but the original English dialogue within that balloon had to be edited down considerably to make space for the same line in Spanish or French.

  Editing the dialogue posed no problem. Gag lines usually worked better when shortened anyway. The fortunes were another matter. In 1973, to write “Kung Fu Sayings” for the back of Topps’s Kung Fu cards, I simply adapted lines from the verses in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (since the creator of the Kung Fu TV series obviously went to this same source). For Bazooka fortunes I was stymied, unable to figure out exactly what a Bazooka fortune was supposed to be, and I sat staring at a blank sheet of paper. It was a bafflement, until I decided to satirize the straight-ahead Bazooka fortunes.

  Blibber Blubber display box from Fleer Chewing Gum product catalog, 1908.

  Over a decade later, comedian Rich Hall appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, pulled out a Bazooka Joe strip, kidded “the guys who write for this,” and got a laugh when he read a Bazooka fortune (“What you think will happen, will”), commenting, “That’s not really going out on a limb or anything, I guess.” Another big laugh. I laughed, too. Then it slowly dawned on me: I was the guy who had written that particular fortune thirteen years prior.

  Tracking the origins of Bazooka Joe, we can open the National Geographic’s Atlas of the World and find two states with a Prairie City—Oregon and South Dakota. Pretty remote, and doesn’t reveal much. So, for the nonce, let’s take another tack: Before Bazooka Joe, there was gum. The Aztecs chewed chicle, the dried sap of the sapodilla tree. General Santa Anna (1794–1876) came to New York and struck a chicle deal with Thomas Adams (1818-1905), who then began some kitchen experiments to find a “new kind of rubber.” Instead, after witnessing a little girl make a drugstore purchase of White Mountain paraffin wax gum, Adams and his sons packaged unsweetened chicle chewing gum balls in boxes (two hundred to a box), devised a brand name and slogan (Adams’ New York Gum No. 1—Snapping and Stretching), illustrated the boxes with a picture of New York City Hall, and soon had twenty-five young women wrapping gum in a Jersey City loft. Their loft was next door to a Loft, namely candy store owner George William Loft, who later expanded into one of the USA’s largest candy store chains, handling more than 350 different types of Loft’s Candy.

  In 1871, Adams patented the first gum-making machine and then added shredded licorice to create the ever-popular Adams’ Black Jack. The first penny candy with pieces individually wrapped in paper was the Tootsie Roll, and when Leo Hirschfield launched this product in 1896 he named it after his daughter, Clara “Tootsie” Hirshfield. Frank Henry Fleer, in 1906, concocted Blibber-Blubber, the first bubble gum, but this “wet” gum was abandoned. Then, in 1928, Walter Diemer (according to Fleer mythology) devised the “dry” formula for Fleer’s one-cent Dubble Bubble, an overnight success that outsold the Tootsie Roll. On the fiftieth anniversary of his invention, Diemer reflected, “The other Walt got all the fame in 1928. That’s the year Disney introduced Mickey Mouse. But we have the same initials. I prefer to be unknown. Do you know why the gum is pink? It’s the only color I had at the time.”

  The color of money was also pink. J. Warren Bowman, down to his last twenty-five dollars, borrowed three hundred dollars and began Gum, Inc., which later became Bowman Gum, Inc., after World War II. Bowman outdistanced twenty other companies to become Fleer’s chief competitor. Promoting his products with picture cards, Bowman made a fortune, cashing in at the rate of a million dollars a month and indulging in some peculiar eccentricities. When he vacationed at his Miami home, he employed a professional organist to perform at an amplified electric organ aimed at the ocean—so he could hear live music while he fished.

  As the money bubble expanded, Topps entered the arena. The origins of the company can be traced back to Morris Shorin,
founder of the American Leaf Tobacco Company. Shorin had four sons—Phil, Abe, Ira, and Joe—and during the Depression they experimented with a one-cent fruit-flavored gum. Topps took off in 1938, and introduced Bazooka in September 1947. First came the five-cent tube of bubble gum marketed in a Tootsie Roll-like shape, with one-cent Bazooka in 1949.

  Joe became the president of Topps in 1941 and was the driving force behind the business. (And while many Shorins played a role over the years in what was then a family business, it was Joe’s son Arthur who led the charge during the eighties and nineties—its greatest period of growth—and for decades was the president and CEO.)

  Meanwhile in schoolyards, kids chewed, blew bubbles, and chewed some more. When World War II was over, the bubble gum boom began and thousands of Bazooka wrappers fluttered through the canyons of Wall Street to inundate returning war heroes. This was one of Topps president Joe Shorin’s greatest promotional stunts: deliver Bazooka wrappers to Wall Street, toss them out of windows, take a photograph, and send the photo to all the wire services. One afternoon’s work—with the result that Bazooka gum received free publicity in newspapers across the country. The bubble continued to expand to such a degree that the Bowman Company was taken over by Topps on April 1,1956.

  Characters were then created to push the products. This was nothing new. Smith Brothers Cough Drops began when carpenter/candy maker/restaurant owner James Smith acquired the recipe from a passing customer and mixed up his first batch in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1847. James Smith & Sons Compound of Wild Cherry Cough Candy was first advertised in 1852. When James Smith died in 1866, his two sons, Andrew and William, continued the family business, calling it the Smith Brothers. To discourage imitators (Smythe Sisters, Schmitt Brothers, and other Smith Brothers), they put their own portraits and the words “Trade Mark” on the glass bowls of cough drops displayed atop drugstore counters. The word “Trade” was placed beneath William’s picture, and “Mark” appeared next to Andrew, chance juxtapositions that led drugstore customers to think of the hirsute duo as Trade Smith and Mark Smith, the Smith Brothers. The image became even more familiar in 1872 when the brothers reproduced it on their package (America’s first “factory-filled” candy package). In 1926, it became a “living trademark” when The Smith Brothers premiered on NBC radio. This was a show of songs and patter, starring Billy Hillpot as Trade and Scrappy Lambert as Mark.

  When the owners of the White Rock Mineral Springs Company, bottlers of Ozonate Lithia Water, attended the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, they saw a painting titled Psyche at Nature’s Mirror by the German artist Paul Thurmann, acquired the rights, and inscribed the words “White Rock” on her stone perch. Thus was born Psyche the White Rock Girl, and today she’s still visible, painted on the sides of trucks that continually cruise past my front door in Massachusetts.

  Angelo Siciliano changed his name to Charles Atlas in the 1930s, and Mac, the ninety-seven-pound weakling, appeared in comic strip ads to move muscles by mail order. Captain Marvel co-creator C. C. Beck also created Captain Tootsie ads for Tootsie Roll; the character was given his own Toby Press comic book in 1950. The Sunday funnies carried color comics for Necco’s Bolster bar (The Bolsters), Nestlé (Nestlé’s Nest and Neddy Nestlé), and Chuckles (Chuckles at the Office). Dik Browne, writer and artist of the comic strip Hägar the Horrible, drew the late-1940s Sunday comics adventures of Roger Wilco for the Walter H. Johnson Candy Company’s Power House bar (later taken over by Peter Paul Candy). Back then, a Power House wrapper and fifteen cents could deliver an “exciting scientific Roger Wilco Magni-Ray Ring” to your doorstep.

  Roll of roughly fifty thousand comics, 1963

  Chicago’s Williamson Candy Co. produced the Amos ‘n’ Andy bar during the 1930s, and Howdy Doody hustled the Mars coconut bar in the early 1950s. The Popsicle, invented in 1922 by Frank Epperson, was adopted as an Eighth Air Force icon during World War II (possibly because of the Popsicle’s resemblance to the two side-by-side bombs clutched in the talons of the eagle insignia familiar to Bombardment Group fliers and ground crews). Actually, what Epperson first invented was the Epsicle, created accidentally when he left a glass of lemonade with a stirring stick in it on an open windowsill during a record-low night in San Francisco. When he changed the “Ep” to “Pop” at the insistence of his children, the Popsicle was born. The five-cent twin Popsicle (two sticks frozen in the paper wrapper) was developed with the notion of sharing: A buyer could break it in half and give the other half to a friend. During the Depression some merchants raked in extra pennies by selling each half for three cents. The twin Popsicle was eventually replaced by a one-stick version in 1986, a response by Popsicle Industries to mothers who found the twin Popsicle “messy.” Although adults consume 50 percent of all Popsicle products, it seems small children couldn’t lick the twin pop fast enough to keep it from dripping. Soon the twin pop will be forgotten, just like Popsicle Pete, the character the Joe Lowe Corporation used to promote the product in the Popsicle Pete Fun Book (1947) and Popsicle Pete Adventure Book (1948).

  During that same postwar period, Topps kept gum chewers reading with reprints of many Fawcett/DC Comics filler cartoon strips by Henry Boltinoff, Harry Lampert, and other cartoonists. In addition to these reprints, Topps introduced its own characters in the numbered “Bazooka Comic” series. Art Helfant (1898-1971), who drew filler strips for more than a dozen different comic book publishers during the 1940s, launched the Bazooka Comic series with Bubbles, a four-panel strip about a tiny, mustachioed, balding guy in oversized trousers. By Bazooka Comic no. 22, Bubbles was replaced with another four-panel strip, Rollo. Rollo, a blond, fat kid described as a “sissy” by one of the other kids, soon left in search of more doughnuts. Still fine-tuning by Bazooka Comic no. 31, Topps decided an “Atom Bubble Boy” named Bazooka was the best plan of action to promote the Atom Bubble Cum. In 1949, eighteen million National/DC Comics readers saw Bazooka (the boy) in a full-page ad series that ran in twenty-nine DC titles. Bazooka (the boy) helped other kids, solved crimes, and captured wrongdoers in aerial antics made possible by blowing giant bubbles. No need to toss out ballast. For a descent, Bazooka (the boy) simply announced the astern phrase “Akoozab! Akoozab! And down I go!” And down he went.

  The product was, as Topps touted it in Chain Store Age, “an honest nickel’s worth for America’s kids!” Fondling the crinkly foil wrap of the Atom Bubble Gum, one knew the promised science-fiction future had arrived at last. The “honest nickel” not only brought “6 big chews” but even more adventures of Bazooka (the boy). This Bazooka Comic, large and legible, measured 61/2 inches wide by 4 inches deep and had two rows of panels. Beneath each Bazooka Comic were the “Bazooka Riddle” (“What is lighter than a feather yet harder to hold?”) and the upside-down answer (“Your breath”).

  Waxed cardboard counter display, 1950s; plastic counter display, 1950s; Bazooka as it would have appeared in stores in 1958.

  When Bazooka (the boy) blew his last breath into the gum and floated off, vanishing into the clouds to become the bubble gum world’s own Amelia Earhart, he had failed to turn “Akoozab” into a national catchword. Perhaps Bazooka (the boy) was too eager, too bland, too nice, too all-American, and maybe not as explosive as one might expect an Atom Bubble Boy to be. At the Topps offices in Brooklyn’s Bush Terminal building (a former shipping depot for troop supplies sent to Europe during World War II), the huge metal doors clanged shut for closed cogitation huddles. When the doors reopened, there stood the wiseacre Bazooka Joe, surrounded by his gang—Jane, Pesty (aka Orville), Pat (aka Li’l Pat), Toughy, Percy, Mort (aka Mortimer), Tex, Mother, Dad, Herman, Sarge, and Walkie-Talkie the Dog.

  The man behind both Popsicle Pete and Bazooka Joe was the writer-artist-publisher Woody Gelman, for many years head of product development at Topps. Born in 1915, Gelman studied at City College, Pratt, and Cooper Union before working on Popeye and Little Lulu animated shorts. He also contributed to comic books by several publishers, creating funny a
nimal characters for St. John, Fox, Western, Marvel, and Hillman, and was the writer-artist on such four-color features as Little Richard’s Imagination (1940) for Sangor and The Kid from Brooklyn (1944-45) for Eastern. Gelman wrote Super Mouse (1944-45) for Pines, and after the war contributed both scripts and layouts to DC Comics for The Dodo and the Frog, Nutsy Squirrel, and Gup the Gremlin.

  Cherry, original, and grape Bazooka counter display box, 1965; box of sugarless Bazooka, early 1970s; plastic tub of Bazooka featuring art by Howard Cruse, 1980s.

  In the mid-1960s, Gelman also wrote and designed The Picture History of Charlie Chaplin, and as the publisher of Nostalgia Press, collected vintage comic book stories and strips into hardcover editions (Flash Gordon, The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, Krazy Kat, and Little Nemo, as well as reprints of E.C. Comics). Earlier, during the postwar years, Gelman saw the promotional possibilities of comics characters linked with products, and teamed with the ex-Fleischer/Paramount animator, Ben Solomon, who also worked on a variety of funny animal comic books during the mid-1940s. The offices of Solomon & Gelman Inc. were located in the heart of Manhattan at 247 West 46th Street. As Woody Gelman and Ben Solomon both independently explained it to me, they were off and running with several accounts, including Popsicle and Topps, but then came an ultimatum: They would lose the Topps account unless they worked solely for Topps. So they waved farewell to the Joe Lowe Corporation. (Goodbye, Pete. Hello, Joe, whaddaya know?)