Skippy - but not the Kangaroo!

Long before Skippy the Bush Kangaroo was a tiny bump in his mother’s pouch, there was Skippy the US comic strip character – a sort of 1920s version of Dennis the Menace. Written and drawn by Percy Crosby, the comic strip started life in Life Magazine in 1923 and became a highly popular syndicated comic strip running until 1945. 

The central character of the strip, Skippy Skinner, was a mischievous but loveable kid from a reasonably well to do family living in the city and getting up to all sorts of larks and trouble – but also given to regular bouts of reflection and melancholia about his friends, family and the world around him.

Usually drawn wearing a distinctive floppy hat and large collar and tie, the success of this comic strip character gave rise to a lucrative Skippy industry that included feature films, a radio show and a novel. There was also the merchandising so familiar to us today with Skippy toys, dolls, comic books and even a brand of peanut butter.

Original Movie Poster for Skippy

Skippy’s popularity spread internationally. What brought the character to Australia was the Paramount Studios movie ‘Skippy’ made in 1931 and starring a 9-year-old Jackie Cooper in the lead role. Cooper received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role and the director, Norman Taurog, won the Academy Award for Best Director for his work on the film.

What prompted my interest in the film is that while recently digitally copying some of my old family photos I came across some of my father, Alexander, dressed as Skippy and taken at Port Fairy in, I believe, 1932 when he also would have been 9 years old.

My English born grandmother, Ethel, loved dress-ups and was also an expert seamstress. There are many photos of my father as a child decked out in all manner of weird and wonderful costumes – an American Indian, a 17^th Century French courtier, a Chinese Mandarin. As my father and his mother were avid cinema goers, I have no doubt these dress-ups were inspired by the characters of popular films of the day – the late silent, early talkies era – that screened at the Port Fairy cinema.

So why was he dressed as Skippy? I do recall my father saying my grandmother created the costume to enter him in a Skippy look-alike competition when the Jackie Cooper film first screened at Port Fairy. What I don’t recall is whether he won the competition or not.

Alexander Miller as Skippy

Jackie Cooper as Skippy

As a child star Jackie Cooper went on to make a sequel to Skippy called ‘Sooky’ and featured in many other successful films.  He had a prominent role both in front of and behind the camera in the early days of television and, towards the end of his working life, found renewed fame playing the role of Perry White in the Christopher Reeve Superman series. He died at the age of 88 in 2011.

For added trivia, the child star who played the part of Sooky opposite Jackie Cooper was Robert Coogan. Coogan's more famous brother, Jackie Coogan, played the part of the kid in Charlie Chaplin's 1921 silent classic 'The Kid' and went on in later life to become Uncle Fester in television's The Addams Family.