The Bygone Golden Age Of Kids

I've probably mentioned before that the 1950s and 60s was a golden age for kids. We had it easy. We didn't have to work the farm, no depression and there were huge wonderful companies who spent their time thinking up great ways to entertain us.

The Toy companies had genius designers and inventors. Just check out the design and functionality of Johnny 7



We had the best toy weapons ever. I think we were better armed than the Marines. There were lots more like these too. We used to organize street wars with all the kids in the neighborhood and at the end of a Saturday afternoon, the lawns would be littered with our twitching expiring plastic bullet ridden bodies. Our Moms would revive us with wholesome sugar coated cereals.


I guess they stopped making this kind of stuff after the Hippies decided that toy guns inspired us to be violent. But I think we had a lot more violence in the generation that grew up with Barney and Care Bears.

MORE HAPPY KILLING TOOLS

Just from a design standpoint alone, compare Johnny 7 to the kind of design that the 70s replaced it with:

70s soft warrior with soft featureless dim flashlight weapon

Incidental Character Designs By Post

As has been pointed out and acknowledged, Warren Kremer created the Harvey comics house style that the other cartoonists followed. This makes it a bit hard to tell the different artists apart. All the main characters are basically the same design. Little Audrey is Casper with ears and clothes and hair. One way to tell the different artists apart is to look at the incidental characters in the stories. Each artist drew the non-regular characters more in their own styles.
Spooky is a generic Harvey character, but the ghost next to him is a very specific design.

Howie Posts's incidental characters are generally more specific and cartoony than the other cartoonists at Harvey.
They are also cuter; they have big heads in proportion to their bodies. Some of the Harvey artists draw really tiny heads and eyes - which isn't very cartoony.







This cover is likey by Warren Kremer. Good looking and well balanced.Here is a stark contrast between the Howie Post comic on the left and the other artist on the right. Bill White says it's Kremer, but then that makes me think someone else did the cover since that's in a different style.

More Nostalgia From The Fun Era

The Happy Yesterdays

Here's Pete Emslie and his sister Lynne enjoying the idyllic days of the 60s, not realizing what horrors were on their way to destroy western civilization.

The Lumpy NowsBack to the fun era...

All this stuff when I was a kid really made me want to be part of the whole fun world of kids' entertainment and toys when I grew up.
This was a great concept: "HEY KIDS! NOW YOU CAN BEAT UP ALL THE CHARACTERS THAT HAVE BROUGHT YOU SO MUCH JOY!"

BUT THEN!!!I grew up and was booted into a strange new world of backwards reasoning. This is what had happened to cartoons and I had to work on shows that I'd swear were meant to punish kids. This is what the hippies did to us. They should make hippie bop bags now so we can beat them up.

A few years later Ralph and I tried to turn things around and it worked for a while after.