By Phil Rosenthal, the Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO, Illinois — Through more than 85 years of hardships and challenges — spanning the Great Depression, a world war, foreign cabals, corruption at home, several kidnappings and, well, being an orphan — she somehow always found a way to triumph.
In the changing media landscape, however, Little Orphan Annie has run into adversity not even she could overcome. The sun will come out tomorrow, but the tomorrow after June 13 will be the first in generations to dawn without “Annie” appearing in a daily newspaper.
The final Sunday panel of the strip, once seen in hundreds of papers but now run by fewer than 20, will end with Daddy Warbucks uncertain over what happened to Annie in her latest run-in with the Butcher of the Balkans. And, leapin’ lizards, what about her dog, Sandy? Arf.
The cliffhanger is actually a show of faith that there’s still life in the old gal. At least that’s the view of Tribune Media Services, which launched the strip during the Calvin Coolidge administration and profited mightily as it parlayed pop-icon status into an oft-performed hit musical, a hugely popular 1930s and ’40s radio series, movies and merchandise.
“Annie is definitely not dying,” said Steve Tippie, Tribune Media Services’ vice president of licensing. She “will definitely have a life beyond this newspaper incarnation. . . . The daily newspaper strip will go away. Now, that doesn’t mean that Annie won’t come back . . . whether it’s [in] comic books, graphic novels, in print, electronic. It’s just too rich a vein [not] to mine.”
What’s ironic is this version of the strip is going away, said Tippie, because it has been targeting young readers who rarely “are encouraged to read newspapers these days.” Yet in the nearly 44 years when creator Harold Gray was presiding over it until his death in 1968, “Little Orphan Annie” was decidedly adult despite the preteen heroine at its center.
One wouldn’t necessarily know that from the upbeat 1977 Broadway musical and subsequent films that have come to define the strip’s characters. Or the late 1930s and ’40s children’s radio program that’s recalled in the wry holiday film “A Christmas Story.”
But Jay Maeder, who would team with artist Ted Slampyak to produce the strip’s final years, wrote in 1997 that it was “the eeriest comic strip of all time” and in the Depression became “a terrifying pilgrimage through a loony, dark, paranoid and quite particularly American nightmare.”
Today’s “Annie” has been recast as a kids adventure, with the auburn-haired orphan very much a 21st-century girl and Warbucks what Tippie described as “sort of a buff, bald Clive Owen-type,” who, separately and together, have adventures around the world.
Story Courtesy of The Chicago Tribune
