Actually, Villains Like Mumbles, B-B Eyes, Mr. Bribery, Big Boy, and Pig E. Bank are Not Killed by Tracy Himself and Continue To Make Appearances Even they Think They are Dead.
Quazire Jones There was a level of bloody violence in a daily comic strip in the newspaper that would not be seen in movies until the 1960’s and TV until the 1980’s.
It was a different time do unto others as you would want done to yourself karmic Justice, most important part of Dick Tracy would you can always count on your real friends secret society Avast kickery besides it's all in the name it was a dick
@@Scyllax I recall when I was a kid, this would have been the early 70s probably, something of a scandal blew up around Dick Tracy and the violence in the strip. It flared up when in one strip Lizz the police woman was being held hostage in the back of a car. She managed to get the gun off the baddy by holding down the cigarette lighter in the car until it was blazing hot and using it to burn the dude's gun hand. I don't know why that strip was so noteworthy, but a real shit storm blew up around it. They ran a segment on Walter Cronkite debating if Gould was going too far considering that most of his audience were kids. I seem to recall comic producers agreeing to tone it down. The whole episode had a "Won't somebody please think of the children!" vibe to it.
@@silentotto5099 in an age of brutal censorship that would not surprise me with the code and other shit that made people see the world through rose coloured glasses of a delusion Dick Tracy might have been a little to close to what really happened in the outside world people have a tendency to die in some pretty gruesome ways.
Said a few times now, I'd love an adult live action Dick Tracy with all it's original gritty violence intact, along the lines of HBO's Boardwalk Empire. Would be perfect on Netflix Etc.
Ironically, Dick's first ever villain, Big Boy, died of old age. Well, he was really old and so easily stroked out when he learned Tracy had escaped one last death trap BB had set up against him, but he wasn't shot or eaten alive by a giant clam or anything.
@@SneedyKetler That was a very rare case where a villain's death was just ignored and retconned away by the next creative team, mostly because that writer/artist (one of Gould's successors himself) was not very well liked by fans. Last time I checked, Mumbles was still alive, and I think he's probably the oldest Tracy surviving villain by this point.
Its implied that Big Boy is Behind Every single criminal in the city. That is Not True. Broadway Bates, The Tramp, and Larceny Lu are the Only villains not Related to Big Boy.
My Dad had two Dick Tracy Big Little Books from the 30s. Tracy would whip out his Tommy Gun and absolutely swiss cheese the bad guys. No blood, but they were just filled with holes, with a dozen lines drawing the paths of the bullets. Harsh.
Of course, these stories were coming on the heels of some pretty bloody real life gangsters. For all the romance of the story, Bonnie and Clyde would regularly just murder random cops on the highways without warning. They would use heavy automatic weapons while most cops were carrying .38 revolvers. They had to be killed in a hail of bullets from ambush. Law enforcement were fed up with all the bloodshed and high-profile gangsters of the era that. This is the crisis that led to the rise of importance of the FBI in a country that HATED the idea of a national police force. The US didn't have effective federal level law enforcement yet. All of these mobile gangsters had to be dealt with by the individual state agencies. Even the first FBI angents tended to get killed. Yes, I'm glad that heroes eventually ended up doing the whole, "No! You don't want to lower yourself to their level. It's not worth it!" spiel in regards to killing (and I get a little annoyed when Superman goes around snapping people's necks), but I can also understand the thinking of someone born in 1900. WOW that was long! Sorry. [Edited: See corrections in comments below.]
It's DILLINGER, not "Dilenger." It wasn't a "reassigned Texas Ranger" that shot Dillinger as he and his two lady friends (one of whom was Anna Sage, the "Lady In Red" who betrayed him) were coming out of that Chicago movie theater (7/22/1934); it was a squad of agents (there's only one "n" in that word) of the United States Bureau Of Investigation (which a year later, would be renamed the Federal Bureau Of Investigation, or FBI), led by Melvin Purvis, who became something of a minor celebrity after this incident, plus his leading the agents who killed Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd a few months later. Furthermore, the G-Men (as the Federal agents were called) didn't walk up behind John Dillinger and shoot him down in cold blood; when he came out of the theater, they called on him to surrender, but he tried to run away while trying to pull his gun out of his pants pocket (some say the gun got stuck in the pocket's fabric), and the agents shot him just as he was running into an alleyway. I think the reason for your confusion is that you might have been thinking of Frank Hamer, the former Texas Ranger who led the posse that killed Bonnie and Clyde (5/23/1934).
The FBI (originally the Bureau of Investigation) were created in 1908/1909 to deal with a wave of anarchist attacks (like the shooting of President Rutherford B. Hayes and the Haymarket Bombing in Chicago). Originally Special Agents could only carry sidearms as a private citizen and had to be escorted by local police officers who had to arrest the suspects for them.
@@SidneyBroadshead That's funny, I never heard of President Hayes being shot. Are you sure you're not thinking of some other President? The only one I know of who was assassinated by an anarchist was William McKinley in 1901.
Thanks for doing an episode on these strips. For all its influence, Dick Tracy is far too overlooked by modern audiences This includes the 1990 film, which is a marvel of production design. Down to the color palette for the wardrobe, set design, etc. Every green, the same green...every blue, the same blue...to truly emulate the look of the Sunday strips. In many ways, it paved the way for subsequent source-obsessed adaptations like Sin City.
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I loved the Dick Tracy movie. Its right up there w/ being underrated like the Rocketeer.
@ I saw it in a theater when it first came out. Believe me it wasn't underrated at all then, it was hyped up for months and merchandise was everywhere. Still have some of the action figures somewhere.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. This is THE BEST comic channel BY FAR, on TH-cam.
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Really interesting stuff. Comic strips are really big part of the comics landscape and its history, but they so often tend to be ignored. Glad you're showing them off.
As much as I LOVE the Disney movie, I've always hoped for a modern Dick Tracy film closer to this tone. Maybe with R rated comicbook films becoming normal, we'll eventually see a more accurate Tracy picture.
I guess the Brow's account was "flagged!" But in all seriousness, the way Chester Gould handled the constant demand for new villains is practically a master class in serialization. Give the character an interesting look and gimmick, have him or her be so morally reprehensible that one can't help but root for Tracy and the gang to nail the perp, lead a merry chase for a few weeks, then just when we're all at the point of begging for Tracy to just catch the guy already, unleash the comeuppance barrage. It's a formula open to a fair amount of improv.
Not all of the criminals in the Dick Tracy stories were completely "morally reprehensible." Some of them actually reformed, like Gravel Gertie, for example, or B.O. Plenty (who married Gravel Gertie and had a daughter with her named Sparkle Plenty, who became a famous singer). There was also the Mole (who was not just a criminal, but a murderer as well), who renounced his evil ways after spending 19 years in prison, and later became a farmer in Missouri. He even attended the wedding of Tracy's adopted son, Junior, to Sparkle Plenty in 1982, along with Pearshape and Influence, two other reformed crooks whom Tracy had captured years before (they were almost all killed when Angeltop, the vengeance seeking daughter of Flattop, tried to bomb the church where the wedding ceremony was held).
I loved Dick Tracy as a kid, and the fact that villains usually came to a poetic bad end didn't escape me. I remember hating the Dick Tracy movie when it came out, because in my mind Tracy should have been done as a relatively straight cop drama only with James Bond level super crooks.
It's so funny to me how Gould always insisted the Police were being treated unfairly for being unregulated then in the first example in this video Dick Tracy, a character he created with the goal of being an honest good cop up and commits a warcrime.
Glad to see a comics TH-camr talking about the comic strips from the 1930s. In many ways they were more influential than the actual comics magazines of the time. Newspaper strips had a wider audience than the magazines that were really just looked at as kid's stuff by their creators. Dick Tracy and Buck Rogers were household names. Superman didn't really mass popularity until the radio show. The real Golden Age of comics was in newsprint not the magazine rack. I don't know if you'll ever see this comment Comic Tropes, I know this is an older video, but it would be awesome if you did a video on Hal Foster's Prince Valiant. I don't know if you're familiar with it at all, but it's a masterpiece of it's era that still holds up well. It had a great impact on artists like Jack Kirby. Foster was a master of visual storytelling, and anyone who aspires to be a comic artist should study it like The Bible.
Selling bootleg tires during as2 was a big black market business. Being unregulated the tires were often defective and unreliable- quite dangerous and not a benign crime.
8:00 -- For my fellow viewers, the reason DT went after BB was because BB had tried to kill him in revenge for his criminal brother who had died in an earlier storyline. The ire theft thing was more of a means by which DT managed to track him down.
Yes , you are right. DT killed a crook named Jacques who tried to murder a socialite, Debby Thorndyke and Dick Tracy. Tracy shot him. It turned out the guy was BB Eye's brother. Tracy and Pat Patton were looking for tire bootleggers(this episode occured during World War II ) Because the military had priority on tires the government rationed new tires. BB Eye's gang stole new tires and sold them on the black market. Spring 1942.
BB Eye's wanted revenge and captured Tracy and Patton and encased them in paraffin cylinders. The crooks planned to slide them in front of a train. Tracy was able to get free and he and Patton removed the stairs before the crooks came down. BB Eye's fell down and Tracy punched him out . Tracy got BB's gun and shot it out with BB Eye's gang. The gang was captured and BB Eye's was put in hand cuffs. They were near a river and BB Eye's jumped in He was pinned under a lot of garbage and was trapped by a tire. He drowned , just like Flattop.
Man... Reading old Dick Tracy reprints was a nightmare for me as a kid growing up. It was the most scariest brutal comic strip I ever did read in my life. God, way ahead of its time. Deaths was seriously gruesome, and many surviving characters do get hurt too.
Mumbles actually survived his second 'death' as well and would make a few returns since, making him a rare example of recurring Tracy villain. Tellingly, he's also one of the few villains not to die in the Warren Beatty movie. A few Tracy villains actually lived enough to be reformed, including Blowtop (Flattop's brother, who wasn't deformed but had awful temper and would constantly 'blow his top'), Lips Manley and Gravel Gertie, who was briefly mentioned in this video.
M. Hall Well quite a few of Batman’s Rogues Gallery villains were as well, such as The Joker (although it was never mentioned early on how his skin became bleached and his hair green and that grin of his.) and Two-Face, Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum and some others. Even Tracy strip writer Max Collins has mentioned that the Tracy rogues gallery was an obvious influence on the Batman’s rogues gallery, one big difference being that Tracy’s villains were usually killed off at the end of their storylines, Batman’s never were.
@@cha5 Actually, some of the villains in the Batman stories were killed off. In Batman's very first comic book tale, "The Case Of The Chemical Syndicate" (Detective Comics # 27, 1939), there's one segment where Batman encounters two hoodlums on the roof of a house where they have just murdered the owner. Batman knocks one of the killers out with one punch, then grabs the second thug "in a deadly headlock" and hurls him over his shoulder and on to the sidewalk below. A few minutes later, the police, led by Commissioner Gordon arrive; Gordon shouts "It's the Bat-Man! Get him!" A policeman fires his gun at Batman, while another officer checks the body of the crook that Batman had thrown off the roof, presumably to his death. This proves that Batman not only killed criminals occasionally, but that he was wanted by the law for it. At the end of the story, Batman finds the mastermind behind the Chemical Syndicate murders, who tries to pull a gun on him, but the "Caped Crusader" punches him in the face, sending the murderer falling into a vat of acid (we all know what acid can do to human flesh). "A fitting end for his kind," Batman says. There were even a few times when Batman used a gun. In Detective Comics # 32, also from 1939 (in the second part of a two-part story began in the previous issue), a murderer known as the Monk and his female assistant both turned out to be vampires, so Batman shot them both through their hearts with silver bullets. The next issue also showed him firing a gun. Some of the violence had to be toned down when Batman teamed up with Robin in 1940 (he worked solo for his first year), who was originally young Dick Grayson, who worked for a circus in a trapeze act with his parents called the Flying Graysons, until Mr. and Mrs. Grayson were killed by gangsters who sabotaged their act (by putting acid on the trapeze ropes) after the owner of the circus refused to pay "protection" money. Batman, knowing that the town was controlled by "Boss" Zucco, the leader of the gang responsible for the murders, took Dick Grayson under his wing (after explaining to the boy that he couldn't go to the police because "if you told what you knew, you'd be dead in an hour"), teaching the lad everything he knew, including how to fight the crooks if necessary. In the end, they finally got evidence against "Boss" Zucco to send him to the electric chair. Although Batman had apparently decided to stop killing criminals personally, there's a possibility that he was still a wanted man. In the very first official "Batman" comic book, the "Dynamic Duo" first encountered their archenemy, the Joker. After capturing him in the end, a newspaper headline appeared that read, "BATMAN CAPTURES JOKER; LEAVES JOKER IN FRONT OF POLICE STATION AND DRIVES AWAY." This suggests that the police were still hunting for him, otherwise, he would have personally taken the Joker inside the police station. In the last few decades, however, Batman has gone back to working alone (Dick Grayson, alias Robin, now older, had gone off to college back in the 1970s, then got his own comic book adventures), and, unfortunately, has become far more violent than he was in his early days, even to the point of viciously snapping a criminal's neck! I don't know about everyone else, but I prefer the less violent Batman.
Michael Palmieri Well yes Batman did kill some crooks and thugs early on, but by “rogues gallery” I meant villains on the scale of what would be recurring ‘supervillain’s’ on the scale of the Joker, Penguin, Two-Face, Catwoman etc, as opposed to basic thugs, although to be fair the original plan was to kill off The Joker but the decision was that he had too much potential as a villain, and Dr Death and The Monk were examples of supervillains who were killed off pretty quickly.
Though Starfire had close brushes with death (and would probably be able to kill the Joker) but remains unlike M.M. As for the rogues, Half & Half was inspired by Two-Face
When I worked at a newsstand years ago, I remember when the Dick Tracy strips were fazed out of all of the newspapers we carried except for the Washington Post. The Crime Busters section said "DNA Tracings Solve Crimes!" during the OJ Simpson trial. That probably killed the strip in the end: POLITICS!
I remember reading Dick Tracy in the Sunday paper when I was a kid. Tracy and his cops were often in fierce gun battles with bullets flying. My mom assumed I was reading "Peanuts". Dick Tracy saved the taxpayers a lot of money because there were no trial or expensive prisons.
This is a late comment, but I wanted to make it- Cutie Diamond is only wounded by Tracy, and makes it back to his cabin to make a desperate last stand. Propping himself on a overturned chair at the top of the stairs, and bleeding from multiple wounds, Cutie dies while waiting to shoot Tracy when he come up after him. Zora was killed outright, but Tracy only wounded Boris, who is taken back to the city to stand trial. Some Tracy villains came to horrific ends- Gargles is impailed by jagged chunks of broken plate glass, but then so's T.V. Wiggles, only its the sharp corners of large sheets of galvanized tin that puncture his chest instead. Doc Plain is incinerated alive, Karpse freezes to death, Stud Bronzen catches Tracy's bullet with his head, Laffy Smith dies of lockjaw, Nilon and Rod Hoze are run over by a speeding tank truck (its suicide), and then there's Jerome Trohs, who is scalded to death by his girl friend, Big Mama. The story arc featuring Trohs is truly bizarre. Trohs is a criminal lawyer who happens to be a midget. His client is Junky Doolb, arrested and being held for murder in the central jail. Trohs shows up with a Saint Bernard. The dog has a small automatic hidden in its mouth, and when Doolb pets the dog's head, he recovers the gun, then tries to shoot his way to freedom- Only the gun is unloaded. Doolb squeezes off a couple of shots at Tracy, but the gun just clicks, and Tracy kills him. Trohs, who escapes riding the dog like a pony, has murdered his client, to keep Doolb from implicating the midget in a series of crimes. Later, Trohs and his girl friend, Big Mama- A huge, strong woman with a greedy taste for candy- kidnap Tracy and crush his gun hand in a vise. Tracy recovers, his right arm in a sling, and goes after them both. In the end, believing her lover has betrayed her, Big Mama traps Trohs in a shower stall and scalds him to death with a hose of boiling hot water, then gets into a fist fight with Tracy, who using his arm sling, strangles her unconscious. It's wild stuff, and that Gould got away with it is just plain amazing. There's one other thing about Dick Tracy people don't notice- The streak of black humor that ran through the strip- Take Mumbles for instance- A guy who can barely speak a coherent word is the lead singer in a popular vocal group. Instead of drowning he's rescued by septuagenarian health-nut George"Egad, you wouldn't think I was 90 years old" Ozone, and has been deputated by his benefactor into care-taking Ozone's grandsons, whom Mumbles has turned into a pair of incoherent little savages, who at one point, fighting tooth and nail in a shack that's caught fire, start throwing chunks of burning wood at each other. Try to get away with that stuff in a family comic strip nowadays!
I have become a Chester Gould fan from reading the IDW reprint volumes (and I own 18 volumes so far). Gould had a really fertile imagination, a somewhat crude but memorable and individualistic art style and, believe it or not, a warped but hilarious knack for gallows humor. The influence on Batman with the bizarre rogue's gallery is utterly obvious. Also, it's interesting reading a comic written and drawn by a very conservative creator when there are so few in comics history, e.g., Steve Ditko and Frank Miller.
The '90s Dick Tracy movie was actually a pretty great (and family-friendly) adaptation of it. The radio show was geared a lot more towards children; and had a lot of jokes and corny puns in it.
There was a parody of Dick Tracy in the Li'l Abner comic strip, named Fearless Fosdick. He was the opposite of Tracy, in terms of intellect, and he loved shooting his gun. His girlfriend was named Prudence Pimpleton. She was hideous.
After killing that dog, Pruneface desereved what happend to him! Since they made a gritty Archie reboot with Riverdale (which is still weird to me!), they should make a gritty reboot, IN THIS STYLE, with Dick Tracy! That idea I can buy, plus a gritty, gory Dick Tracy reboot sounds awesome, I don't care if it doesn't make sense! If they can make something weird as Riverdale, then this idea is possible! Yeah, yeah, snowflakes might hate this, but f**k'em! I assume the wine Chris was drinking was red? Because Walking Dead-themed, red as in blood = red wine...
The grotesque and perverse was later a trope in Ian Fleming's James Bond stories, guess it proves how Gould would think of the criminals as proper "enemies" to be exterminated. Did Gould perhaps experience the consequences of criminality early on in life? Or did he just have a hard-on for authority and capital punishment? Must read up...
I was really lucky back in the day. Because of the movie, publishers put out ANYTHING that had old Tracy comics. The reprints we're 2 bucks an issue and 64 pages. They just reprinted a single story every issue, gathering it from the strips of the 30'a and 40's. They were so much fun, and my grandmother would read them with me since she would read comics as a child and was looking to reminisce, as well as spend more time with me She did forget how violent they were, so sometimes she pulled the whole "I dunno if you should be....". However, she knew I loved to read and also that I wasn't a psychopath, so she relented and the comics continued. Then, when I was about 9(maybe?), the dollar store by us had collections of the strip from right before Gould's retirement, to Collins and Fletcher strips, and possibly to Locher. They were giant softcover collections like Calvin and Hobbes, only bigger and with at least 250 pages in each......and WERE A DOLLAR!! I got the whole shebang, and was able to catch up with the series. I enjoyed it even more, even when it went in to more campier territory. I had so much fun reading them. Sure....the later ones were not as violent, but they still tried to keep it edgy as much as they could. I love Dick Tracy.
Dick Tracey is one of the few protagonists in fiction that is more memorable for their Rogues Gallery than they are for their character development. He, effectively, functions as a secondary protagonist in his own story due to his adversary which includes Itchy, FlatTop, or BigBoy because he is steadfast in himself and stopping crime than whatever motivation those villains have. What's the important aspects of Dick Tracey? Yellow Trenchcoat? Twoway Communicator? Tommy Gun? Detective? That's it.
"Rogues Gallery" is a Stretch. Though he does have long lasting villains Like Big Boy, Mr. Bribery, Steve the Tramp, The Mole, Mumbles, Pruneface, and B-B Eyes to name a few, Most of the villains are dead by at least their solo story. Heck, Flattop Only has one Story before Killing off.
I remember when I was a youngster back in the 70s and 80s from Dick Tracy still in Sunday morning comics. They had one point where Tracy actually got caught in an explosion on a hit attempt if I’m not mistaken
In 1978 , the villain Big Boy was dying and he put a million dollar hit contract on Dick Tracy. Big Boy wanted Tracy to die before he did. A crook named "Little" Litel placed a bomb in Dick Tracy's car. The Tracy family ate dinner at Junior's and Moon Maid asked to use Tracy's car. Moon Maid was killed by the car bomb as Tracy was lounging on the couch. "Ye Gods"! The writer of the Dick Tracy strip Max A. Collins wanted to put an end to Tracy's moon saga. Collins decided to kill Moon Maid because he felt it was time to bring Tracy back to earth and battle only criminals on earth. Summer, Fall , Winter 1978.
Two things I remember regarding Dick Tracy: 1. The character B.O. Plenty starting out as a hold-up man on the verge of facing a grisly end to being a "good guy" in later strips. 2. Dick Tracy's Crime Busters section where Gould and later creators espoused "Crime Does Not Pay" messages, including an OJ Simpson-era message "DNA evidence catches crooks!" which was probably why only the Washington Post was the only "local newspaper" that still carried the strip as I recall. Nice review. I like Cabernet Sauvignon as well.
8:35 -- You're not far off on that supposition: after Max Allan Collins took over writing "DT", one of the bad guys during the '80s* was Murky Depps, a Mumbles homage (his dialogue was essentially just word balloons filled with squiggly lines) who manufactured dangerously cheap knock-offs of toys, sneakers, etc. sold at flea markets... think John Lithgow's character in "Santa Claus" but as an upper middle class businessman. It's been awhile since I read the compilation book of that adventure, but I think he died because a tire on his car was itself a knock-off and blew badly during a car chase, causing a fatal crash. *Practically symbolized by the fact that one of the brand names he made cheap copies of was a send-up of the Cabbage Patch Kid dolls that were all the rage at the time.
Near the end of the Sunday Funnies run, a story about a madman living on the Moon with long fingernails was pretty gruesome! He would practice kills using a paper-bag, painted to look like his intended, perched on a grapefruit. A few well placed slashes of his nails, and the grapefruit was cut to ribbons. He then picked it up and laughed while drinking the juices were dripping out. Scared me, thought the guy was some kind of blood drinking freak. But then it got worse, as he fled from Tracy, out an airlock, and onto the surface of the Moon! In great detail his agonizing death is laid out for us; frozen tears in his eyes locking them open, ear-drums bursting, capillaries rupturing, mouth and tongue freezing, ice crystals forming in his lungs. Eventually, he is a strange statue on the Lunar landscape.
Hey , it was the Purdy Fallar episode in early 1968. He was a handsome crook and stole Diet Smith's space coupe. The villain Intro wanted to steal gold from the moon and Fallar worked with him to achieve it. He died on the moon trying to escape from Dick Tracy and froze to death on the moon. Dick Tracy impersonated the crook in order to trick Intro's gang.The disguise didn't work and the crooks discovered Dick Tracy was impersonating Fallar. The crooks refused to surrender and Dick Tracy vaporized them with a laser beam. Spring 1968.
What I remember of Dick Tracy is from my childhood, when I tried to read all the newspaper "funnies", even before I learned how to actually read. What I remember most are the cartoons, which seemed to air mostly on the local Bozo the Clown show, for whatever reason. They had less violence than the strip, but a lot more unflattering racial stereotypes than I remember seeing in the "funnies".
Not Quite. In truth the strip had been dropping drastically in popularity and quality for a few years beforehand, both being vastly improved by the Space-Era if anything (Though naturally old fans rebelled, the change brought in many new fans). Additionally several supernatural, unrealistic and/or Sci-Fi elements had been present before the Era began. Examples Includes Diet Smith's inventions, A baby with super-strength, Talking crows, Panther-Dog hybrids, The aforementioned baby being able to control said hybrids, etc..
Great stuff as always! I have never read Dick Tracy, but now I know why Fearless Fosdick, Li'l Abner's favorite comic and an obviois spoof on Dick Tracy, is so over the top violent.
Seems like there was club of criminals call the 52 club, or something like that, that had a meeting place on top of a mesa. After Tracey infiltrated the club he called in an air strike and had the club napalmed.
Yes , this episode of the 52 gang came out around the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Check out the websites, Dick Tracy Depot or Dick Tracy wiki. I didn't have to buy the Dick Tracy reprint books. Go to Google Newspaper Archives. Check out the Victoria Advocate (Texas) Sept.-Nov. 1962. You'll find Dick Tracy in the comic section with other comic strips of the day. Take care!
The fact that Chester Gould was against the presumption of innocence, make difficult to enjoy his story. That honnestly a pretty facist and autoritarian way of thinking.
Yeah I doubt characters like the Mole would've turned a new leaf if Gould was still writing although to be fair he did redeem Gravel Gertie and made her a regular character and friend of Tracy and Co.
It's up to the reader to decide whether they read the story, no one says you have to agree with Gould's views on the police. Hell you could do a Dick Tracy story about Tracy already walking that fine line between being a cop and a vigilante, and finally going too far with his shoot first and ask questions later mentality, results in him killing an undercover police officer who had infiltrated the gang, an informant who was about to turn over vital evidence in a case, or gangsters who had thrown down their guns and were willing to surrender, and have him face the consequences of that mistake
@@snakes3425 I find it interesting that Gould's own views ended up becoming a hindrance to the strip in later years as there were times when Tracy and Co. would spend time complaining about the due process in the span of several strips, which annoyed many readers.
It wouldn't surprise me if Dick Tracy regularly shot innocent black men. I'd say it was a sign of the times if it weren't still actually happening every day...
The brutality of the comics may appear strange to us, but remember this comic ran in the same period when Bonnie and Clyde got Swiss cheesed by lawmen waiting in ambush. Things were different then.
Great video. I've only read one Tracy story (about Flat Top's daughter) that I got back when the Warren Beatty movie was coming out. Being a reprint of a '70s story, I always assumed the violent content was just because it was "newer". I had no idea the original stories were as brutal as they were.
Yeah, he'd be completely perfect. One second all "Daddy Warbucks, we found the lost treasure, hurray!" Next scene, leading a mob to savagely beat a conscientious objector.
Gotta say it just because I'm a fucking loser; the Gachopon was a Patoranger from the Super Sentai franchise. The franchise Haim Saban bought the rights to and used the stock footage of to make Power Rangers, it's pretty good and often darker than Power Rangers (not so much nowadays but the late 80s and early 90s stuff is fantastic) it's sister franchise Kamen Rider is one of my favorite superhero properties and needs way more exposure in the west :)
Finally finished catching up on all of Comics Tropes episodes. Great videos man like seriously I love comics but you've managed to open my eyes way more than I thought someone could. I love your passion and it really shows, even in the earliest episodes. Took me a while to go through em but well worth it. Exited to see what's to come. P.s since you've done dick tracy now, Judge Dredd would be a awesome episode
@@ComicTropes Do Big Vern from Viz, he's like the anti Dick Tracy, he's a criminal (or maybe a delusional guy who thinks he is one) who shoots himself in every single episode. Well except for one where he shot a pensioner and then tried some delicious mulled wine, after being told to give the old man "both barrels".
Funny thing that ocurred to me while reading this, Dredd would... probably like Tracy, actually? At least respect him, I figure that from Dredd's perspective Tracy would be a fine enough example of pre-disaster law enforcement agent. On the other hand, even Tracy would probably think the Judges system goes way too far.
Have you been injured in an automobile accident? Finding it hard to go about your everyday routine due to injury. Call me Schiesty McAchiester and I’ll make it my mission to get you the compensation you deserve. Then I’ll take 40% of that compensation after you’ve thoroughly bent ripped off by our healthcare system and subjected to needless procedures. At McShiesty Law we will treat you like an unwanted step child and make by sure to give you the vaguest of answers to your most important questions. Car accidents, malpractice, hot coffee, or hell, you can just make something up. We are there for us... Er, um you.
As a little boy in Trinidad in the late 80s and early 90s...Dick Tracy was the shizzz! When the movie came out I was so happy to see it on pirated VHS...with Madonna as the villain. Sigh to be a child again yes.
Chester Gould, hated the idea of Miranda Rights, because it would make cops' jobs harder … kills all of his villains by police force. … Yeah, that guy had a warped sense of justice
Dick Tracy: Repeatedly kills every single villain.
Narrator: Dick Tracy, he's a good cop.
Actually, Villains Like Mumbles, B-B Eyes, Mr. Bribery, Big Boy, and Pig E. Bank are Not Killed by Tracy Himself and Continue To Make Appearances Even they Think They are Dead.
Back then that would be considered a good cop. The general public didn't really care about police brutality and murders until Rodney King.
@@maxhydekyle2425Dick gave D for the Criminals
Considering how many criminals died as a result of dealing with him, then maybe Dick Tracy is really the OG Punisher or Dirty Harry Callahan.
Quazire Jones There was a level of bloody violence in a daily comic strip in the newspaper that would not be seen in movies until the 1960’s and TV until the 1980’s.
(;=
It was a different time do unto others as you would want done to yourself karmic Justice, most important part of Dick Tracy would you can always count on your real friends secret society Avast kickery besides it's all in the name it was a dick
@@Scyllax I recall when I was a kid, this would have been the early 70s probably, something of a scandal blew up around Dick Tracy and the violence in the strip. It flared up when in one strip Lizz the police woman was being held hostage in the back of a car. She managed to get the gun off the baddy by holding down the cigarette lighter in the car until it was blazing hot and using it to burn the dude's gun hand.
I don't know why that strip was so noteworthy, but a real shit storm blew up around it. They ran a segment on Walter Cronkite debating if Gould was going too far considering that most of his audience were kids. I seem to recall comic producers agreeing to tone it down. The whole episode had a "Won't somebody please think of the children!" vibe to it.
@@silentotto5099 in an age of brutal censorship that would not surprise me with the code and other shit that made people see the world through rose coloured glasses of a delusion Dick Tracy might have been a little to close to what really happened in the outside world people have a tendency to die in some pretty gruesome ways.
Said a few times now, I'd love an adult live action Dick Tracy with all it's original gritty violence intact, along the lines of HBO's Boardwalk Empire.
Would be perfect on Netflix Etc.
Seems like it would get old quick
@@darkartsdabbler2407 Probably wouldn't last 1 hour episodes, but maybe shorter ones?
Larry, you show up wherever I am on TH-cam and it’s always a welcome surprise.
Police procedurals are known for their staying power. They are mind teasers with a story attached.
Great idea.
Ironically, Dick's first ever villain, Big Boy, died of old age.
Well, he was really old and so easily stroked out when he learned Tracy had escaped one last death trap BB had set up against him, but he wasn't shot or eaten alive by a giant clam or anything.
John Pelt iirc Mumbles also passes of old age after going legit on & off.
@@SneedyKetler That was a very rare case where a villain's death was just ignored and retconned away by the next creative team, mostly because that writer/artist (one of Gould's successors himself) was not very well liked by fans. Last time I checked, Mumbles was still alive, and I think he's probably the oldest Tracy surviving villain by this point.
Its implied that Big Boy is Behind Every single criminal in the city. That is Not True. Broadway Bates, The Tramp, and Larceny Lu are the Only villains not Related to Big Boy.
My Dad had two Dick Tracy Big Little Books from the 30s. Tracy would whip out his Tommy Gun and absolutely swiss cheese the bad guys. No blood, but they were just filled with holes, with a dozen lines drawing the paths of the bullets. Harsh.
pvthitch The original newspaper strips had more blood than movies did until the 1960’s.
Of course, these stories were coming on the heels of some pretty bloody real life gangsters. For all the romance of the story, Bonnie and Clyde would regularly just murder random cops on the highways without warning. They would use heavy automatic weapons while most cops were carrying .38 revolvers. They had to be killed in a hail of bullets from ambush. Law enforcement were fed up with all the bloodshed and high-profile gangsters of the era that. This is the crisis that led to the rise of importance of the FBI in a country that HATED the idea of a national police force. The US didn't have effective federal level law enforcement yet. All of these mobile gangsters had to be dealt with by the individual state agencies. Even the first FBI angents tended to get killed. Yes, I'm glad that heroes eventually ended up doing the whole, "No! You don't want to lower yourself to their level. It's not worth it!" spiel in regards to killing (and I get a little annoyed when Superman goes around snapping people's necks), but I can also understand the thinking of someone born in 1900.
WOW that was long! Sorry.
[Edited: See corrections in comments below.]
That was fascinating! Thank You!
Dang, don't be sorry: that was actually really informative
It's DILLINGER, not "Dilenger." It wasn't a "reassigned Texas Ranger" that shot Dillinger as he and his two lady friends (one of whom was Anna Sage, the "Lady In Red" who betrayed him) were coming out of that Chicago movie theater (7/22/1934); it was a squad of agents (there's only one "n" in that word) of the United States Bureau Of Investigation (which a year later, would be renamed the Federal Bureau Of Investigation, or FBI), led by Melvin Purvis, who became something of a minor celebrity after this incident, plus his leading the agents who killed Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd a few months later. Furthermore, the G-Men (as the Federal agents were called) didn't walk up behind John Dillinger and shoot him down in cold blood; when he came out of the theater, they called on him to surrender, but he tried to run away while trying to pull his gun out of his pants pocket (some say the gun got stuck in the pocket's fabric), and the agents shot him just as he was running into an alleyway.
I think the reason for your confusion is that you might have been thinking of Frank Hamer, the former Texas Ranger who led the posse that killed Bonnie and Clyde (5/23/1934).
The FBI (originally the Bureau of Investigation) were created in 1908/1909 to deal with a wave of anarchist attacks (like the shooting of President Rutherford B. Hayes and the Haymarket Bombing in Chicago). Originally Special Agents could only carry sidearms as a private citizen and had to be escorted by local police officers who had to arrest the suspects for them.
@@SidneyBroadshead
That's funny, I never heard of President Hayes being shot. Are you sure you're not thinking of some other President? The only one I know of who was assassinated by an anarchist was William McKinley in 1901.
i never thought i could have to much fun watching a grown man get drunk and talk about comics
Everyone had their Kryptonite. Comic Trope's kryptonite is "cheap but rather nice" 13.5% Cabernet Sauvignon.
Set the playback speed to 50% and it becomes hysterical
Thanks for doing an episode on these strips. For all its influence, Dick Tracy is far too overlooked by modern audiences
This includes the 1990 film, which is a marvel of production design. Down to the color palette for the wardrobe, set design, etc. Every green, the same green...every blue, the same blue...to truly emulate the look of the Sunday strips. In many ways, it paved the way for subsequent source-obsessed adaptations like Sin City.
I loved the Dick Tracy movie. Its right up there w/ being underrated like the Rocketeer.
@ I saw it in a theater when it first came out. Believe me it wasn't underrated at all then, it was hyped up for months and merchandise was everywhere. Still have some of the action figures somewhere.
You can tell Beatty was a Dick Tracy fanboy.
@@doctorthirteen5727 are you an american?
Pruneface's wife is freaking nightmarish. Imagine seeing that emerging from the darkness.
She Looks like a scarecrow .
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Kind of the person I would imagine would marry someone who would strangle a dog to death.
Bueno Excellent Level
He's a old man who's wrinkles on wrinkles
She's looks like a brothers grimm style witch
Sounds like the Dick Tracy movie should've been a hard-R rating.
John Killion Ryan Reynolds is.... Dick Tracey!
"Angel Top" sounds like the name of a Victoria's Secret bra.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. This is THE BEST comic channel BY FAR, on TH-cam.
Really interesting stuff. Comic strips are really big part of the comics landscape and its history, but they so often tend to be ignored. Glad you're showing them off.
As much as I LOVE the Disney movie, I've always hoped for a modern Dick Tracy film closer to this tone. Maybe with R rated comicbook films becoming normal, we'll eventually see a more accurate Tracy picture.
Odd, I saw the movie on Blu Ray and I have no idea how it wasn't rated R.
I guess the Brow's account was "flagged!" But in all seriousness, the way Chester Gould handled the constant demand for new villains is practically a master class in serialization. Give the character an interesting look and gimmick, have him or her be so morally reprehensible that one can't help but root for Tracy and the gang to nail the perp, lead a merry chase for a few weeks, then just when we're all at the point of begging for Tracy to just catch the guy already, unleash the comeuppance barrage. It's a formula open to a fair amount of improv.
I realize now that this is basically the Punisher before he was cool.
Asides from loving the law and working with the cops, of course.
Not all of the criminals in the Dick Tracy stories were completely "morally reprehensible." Some of them actually reformed, like Gravel Gertie, for example, or B.O. Plenty (who married Gravel Gertie and had a daughter with her named Sparkle Plenty, who became a famous singer). There was also the Mole (who was not just a criminal, but a murderer as well), who renounced his evil ways after spending 19 years in prison, and later became a farmer in Missouri. He even attended the wedding of Tracy's adopted son, Junior, to Sparkle Plenty in 1982, along with Pearshape and Influence, two other reformed crooks whom Tracy had captured years before (they were almost all killed when Angeltop, the vengeance seeking daughter of Flattop, tried to bomb the church where the wedding ceremony was held).
The mini-skits at the beginning of each comic tropes episode give me life
I find them quite annoying.
@@Desmaad you have bad taste
I loved Dick Tracy as a kid, and the fact that villains usually came to a poetic bad end didn't escape me. I remember hating the Dick Tracy movie when it came out, because in my mind Tracy should have been done as a relatively straight cop drama only with James Bond level super crooks.
Dick Tracy is still my favorite comic. I have all the daily and sunday strips from the beginning in 1931 through 1969.
You're the mvp!
It's so funny to me how Gould always insisted the Police were being treated unfairly for being unregulated then in the first example in this video Dick Tracy, a character he created with the goal of being an honest good cop up and commits a warcrime.
Glad to see a comics TH-camr talking about the comic strips from the 1930s. In many ways they were more influential than the actual comics magazines of the time. Newspaper strips had a wider audience than the magazines that were really just looked at as kid's stuff by their creators. Dick Tracy and Buck Rogers were household names. Superman didn't really mass popularity until the radio show. The real Golden Age of comics was in newsprint not the magazine rack.
I don't know if you'll ever see this comment Comic Tropes, I know this is an older video, but it would be awesome if you did a video on Hal Foster's Prince Valiant. I don't know if you're familiar with it at all, but it's a masterpiece of it's era that still holds up well. It had a great impact on artists like Jack Kirby. Foster was a master of visual storytelling, and anyone who aspires to be a comic artist should study it like The Bible.
Selling bootleg tires during as2 was a big black market business.
Being unregulated the tires were often defective and unreliable- quite dangerous and not a benign crime.
I'm starting to wonder if Tracey wasn't some manifestation of DC's "Specter", with how so many of his villains died in horrible ways ^_^
Maybe
Chester Gould is one of my top three artistic influences. His work is so fun to look at. Especially his run during the 40s into the 50s.
8:00 -- For my fellow viewers, the reason DT went after BB was because BB had tried to kill him in revenge for his criminal brother who had died in an earlier storyline. The ire theft thing was more of a means by which DT managed to track him down.
Yes , you are right. DT killed a crook named Jacques who tried to murder a socialite, Debby Thorndyke and Dick Tracy. Tracy shot him. It turned out the guy was BB Eye's brother. Tracy and Pat Patton were looking for tire bootleggers(this episode occured during World War II ) Because the military had priority on tires the government rationed new tires. BB Eye's gang stole new tires and sold them on the black market. Spring 1942.
BB Eye's wanted revenge and captured Tracy and Patton and encased them in paraffin cylinders. The crooks planned to slide them in front of a train. Tracy was able to get free and he and Patton removed the stairs before the crooks came down. BB Eye's fell down and Tracy punched him out . Tracy got BB's gun and shot it out with BB Eye's gang. The gang was captured and BB Eye's was put in hand cuffs. They were near a river and BB Eye's jumped in He was pinned under a lot of garbage and was trapped by a tire. He drowned , just like Flattop.
Man... Reading old Dick Tracy reprints was a nightmare for me as a kid growing up. It was the most scariest brutal comic strip I ever did read in my life. God, way ahead of its time. Deaths was seriously gruesome, and many surviving characters do get hurt too.
I don't think I've ever actually looked at the original Dick Tracy art before, I really like the style.
Mumbles actually survived his second 'death' as well and would make a few returns since, making him a rare example of recurring Tracy villain. Tellingly, he's also one of the few villains not to die in the Warren Beatty movie.
A few Tracy villains actually lived enough to be reformed, including Blowtop (Flattop's brother, who wasn't deformed but had awful temper and would constantly 'blow his top'), Lips Manley and Gravel Gertie, who was briefly mentioned in this video.
But Then Again, Mumbles Not the Only Survivor, B-B Eyes Faked His Death Once.
Batman's Rogues always reminded me of Tracy's goons. The biggest similarity, though? Nightwing/Starfire and Junior/Moon Maid.
Kenn Dunn That is just ridiculous. Most of Dick Tracy’s villains were just disfigured or disabled.
M. Hall Well quite a few of Batman’s Rogues Gallery villains were as well, such as The Joker (although it was never mentioned early on how his skin became bleached and his hair green and that grin of his.)
and Two-Face, Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum and some others. Even Tracy strip writer Max Collins has mentioned that the Tracy rogues gallery was an obvious influence on the Batman’s rogues gallery, one big difference being that Tracy’s villains were usually killed off at the end of their storylines,
Batman’s never were.
@@cha5
Actually, some of the villains in the Batman stories were killed off.
In Batman's very first comic book tale, "The Case Of The Chemical Syndicate" (Detective Comics # 27, 1939), there's one segment where Batman encounters two hoodlums on the roof of a house where they have just murdered the owner. Batman knocks one of the killers out with one punch, then grabs the second thug "in a deadly headlock" and hurls him over his shoulder and on to the sidewalk below. A few minutes later, the police, led by Commissioner Gordon arrive; Gordon shouts "It's the Bat-Man! Get him!" A policeman fires his gun at Batman, while another officer checks the body of the crook that Batman had thrown off the roof, presumably to his death. This proves that Batman not only killed criminals occasionally, but that he was wanted by the law for it. At the end of the story, Batman finds the mastermind behind the Chemical Syndicate murders, who tries to pull a gun on him, but the "Caped Crusader" punches him in the face, sending the murderer falling into a vat of acid (we all know what acid can do to human flesh). "A fitting end for his kind," Batman says.
There were even a few times when Batman used a gun. In Detective Comics # 32, also from 1939 (in the second part of a two-part story began in the previous issue), a murderer known as the Monk and his female assistant both turned out to be vampires, so Batman shot them both through their hearts with silver bullets. The next issue also showed him firing a gun.
Some of the violence had to be toned down when Batman teamed up with Robin in 1940 (he worked solo for his first year), who was originally young Dick Grayson, who worked for a circus in a trapeze act with his parents called the Flying Graysons, until Mr. and Mrs. Grayson were killed by gangsters who sabotaged their act (by putting acid on the trapeze ropes) after the owner of the circus refused to pay "protection" money. Batman, knowing that the town was controlled by "Boss" Zucco, the leader of the gang responsible for the murders, took Dick Grayson under his wing (after explaining to the boy that he couldn't go to the police because "if you told what you knew, you'd be dead in an hour"), teaching the lad everything he knew, including how to fight the crooks if necessary. In the end, they finally got evidence against "Boss" Zucco to send him to the electric chair.
Although Batman had apparently decided to stop killing criminals personally, there's a possibility that he was still a wanted man. In the very first official "Batman" comic book, the "Dynamic Duo" first encountered their archenemy, the Joker. After capturing him in the end, a newspaper headline appeared that read, "BATMAN CAPTURES JOKER; LEAVES JOKER IN FRONT OF POLICE STATION AND DRIVES AWAY." This suggests that the police were still hunting for him, otherwise, he would have personally taken the Joker inside the police station.
In the last few decades, however, Batman has gone back to working alone (Dick Grayson, alias Robin, now older, had gone off to college back in the 1970s, then got his own comic book adventures), and, unfortunately, has become far more violent than he was in his early days, even to the point of viciously snapping a criminal's neck!
I don't know about everyone else, but I prefer the less violent Batman.
Michael Palmieri Well yes Batman did kill some crooks and thugs early on, but by “rogues gallery” I meant villains on the scale of what would be recurring ‘supervillain’s’ on the scale of the Joker, Penguin, Two-Face, Catwoman etc, as opposed to basic thugs, although to be fair the original plan was to kill off The Joker but the decision was that he had too much potential as a villain, and Dr Death and The Monk were examples of supervillains who were killed off pretty quickly.
Though Starfire had close brushes with death (and would probably be able to kill the Joker) but remains unlike M.M.
As for the rogues, Half & Half was inspired by Two-Face
When I worked at a newsstand years ago, I remember when the Dick Tracy strips were fazed out of all of the newspapers we carried except for the Washington Post. The Crime Busters section said "DNA Tracings Solve Crimes!" during the OJ Simpson trial. That probably killed the strip in the end: POLITICS!
"Murdered a dog for it's sweater..." thats somehow worse than killing a sweaterless dog. Screw. that. guy.
I know this response is three years later, but that's actually a perfect set up for a crossover between John Wick and Dick Tracy.
"I'm rubbin' him out!"
"Rrrrrrrrrrrrubbin' him out!"
NoJusticeNoPeace I would like to know if Dick is up before rubbing one out
You've been doing an excellent job with the channel, Chris.
I remember reading Dick Tracy in the Sunday paper when I was a kid. Tracy and his cops were often in fierce gun battles with bullets flying. My mom assumed I was reading "Peanuts".
Dick Tracy saved the taxpayers a lot of money because there were no trial or expensive prisons.
Dick Tracy was one of the most under rated strips in the history of comics. Great material!
This is a late comment, but I wanted to make it- Cutie Diamond is only wounded by Tracy, and makes it back to his cabin to make a desperate last stand. Propping himself on a overturned chair at the top of the stairs, and bleeding from multiple wounds, Cutie dies while waiting to shoot Tracy when he come up after him. Zora was killed outright, but Tracy only wounded Boris, who is taken back to the city to stand trial. Some Tracy villains came to horrific ends- Gargles is impailed by jagged chunks of broken plate glass, but then so's T.V. Wiggles, only its the sharp corners of large sheets of galvanized tin that puncture his chest instead. Doc Plain is incinerated alive, Karpse freezes to death, Stud Bronzen catches Tracy's bullet with his head, Laffy Smith dies of lockjaw, Nilon and Rod Hoze are run over by a speeding tank truck (its suicide), and then there's Jerome Trohs, who is scalded to death by his girl friend, Big Mama. The story arc featuring Trohs is truly bizarre. Trohs is a criminal lawyer who happens to be a midget. His client is Junky Doolb, arrested and being held for murder in the central jail. Trohs shows up with a Saint Bernard. The dog has a small automatic hidden in its mouth, and when Doolb pets the dog's head, he recovers the gun, then tries to shoot his way to freedom- Only the gun is unloaded. Doolb squeezes off a couple of shots at Tracy, but the gun just clicks, and Tracy kills him. Trohs, who escapes riding the dog like a pony, has murdered his client, to keep Doolb from implicating the midget in a series of crimes. Later, Trohs and his girl friend, Big Mama- A huge, strong woman with a greedy taste for candy- kidnap Tracy and crush his gun hand in a vise. Tracy recovers, his right arm in a sling, and goes after them both. In the end, believing her lover has betrayed her, Big Mama traps Trohs in a shower stall and scalds him to death with a hose of boiling hot water, then gets into a fist fight with Tracy, who using his arm sling, strangles her unconscious. It's wild stuff, and that Gould got away with it is just plain amazing. There's one other thing about Dick Tracy people don't notice- The streak of black humor that ran through the strip- Take Mumbles for instance- A guy who can barely speak a coherent word is the lead singer in a popular vocal group. Instead of drowning he's rescued by septuagenarian health-nut George"Egad, you wouldn't think I was 90 years old" Ozone, and has been deputated by his benefactor into care-taking Ozone's grandsons, whom Mumbles has turned into a pair of incoherent little savages, who at one point, fighting tooth and nail in a shack that's caught fire, start throwing chunks of burning wood at each other. Try to get away with that stuff in a family comic strip nowadays!
I'm guessing BB-Eyes is now quite tired of selling wheels; maybe he should now advocate for cleaning up rivers?
I have become a Chester Gould fan from reading the IDW reprint volumes (and I own 18 volumes so far). Gould had a really fertile imagination, a somewhat crude but memorable and individualistic art style and, believe it or not, a warped but hilarious knack for gallows humor. The influence on Batman with the bizarre rogue's gallery is utterly obvious. Also, it's interesting reading a comic written and drawn by a very conservative creator when there are so few in comics history, e.g., Steve Ditko and Frank Miller.
The '90s Dick Tracy movie was actually a pretty great (and family-friendly) adaptation of it.
The radio show was geared a lot more towards children; and had a lot of jokes and corny puns in it.
I'm glad you mentioned Moon Maid. Disappointed you left out "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery", with Daffy Duck as Duck Twacy.
This channel screams old TH-cam and I love it. Hope u never stop having fun filming those campy intros!
(10:05) Flattop is the top villain.He deserves a second chance. Mumbles had many chances (To be fair, Mumbles is as awesome as Flattop).
In one episode of SOUTH PARK (the one where Kathy Lee Gifford came to town), Kenny got impaled on a flagpole like the Brow did!
Thank God you've done away with the whole drinking aspect of this show it is so much better with just your brilliant discussion of comics.
I used to read Dick Tracy from the Chicago Tribune in the 1950's I loved loved it ..
There was a parody of Dick Tracy in the Li'l Abner comic strip, named Fearless Fosdick. He was the opposite of Tracy, in terms of intellect, and he loved shooting his gun. His girlfriend was named Prudence Pimpleton. She was hideous.
After killing that dog, Pruneface desereved what happend to him! Since they made a gritty Archie reboot with Riverdale (which is still weird to me!), they should make a gritty reboot, IN THIS STYLE, with Dick Tracy! That idea I can buy, plus a gritty, gory Dick Tracy reboot sounds awesome, I don't care if it doesn't make sense! If they can make something weird as Riverdale, then this idea is possible! Yeah, yeah, snowflakes might hate this, but f**k'em! I assume the wine Chris was drinking was red? Because Walking Dead-themed, red as in blood = red wine...
The grotesque and perverse was later a trope in Ian Fleming's James Bond stories, guess it proves how Gould would think of the criminals as proper "enemies" to be exterminated. Did Gould perhaps experience the consequences of criminality early on in life? Or did he just have a hard-on for authority and capital punishment? Must read up...
Never realized how bad smacking bothered me until now
I was really lucky back in the day. Because of the movie, publishers put out ANYTHING that had old Tracy comics. The reprints we're 2 bucks an issue and 64 pages. They just reprinted a single story every issue, gathering it from the strips of the 30'a and 40's. They were so much fun, and my grandmother would read them with me since she would read comics as a child and was looking to reminisce, as well as spend more time with me She did forget how violent they were, so sometimes she pulled the whole "I dunno if you should be....". However, she knew I loved to read and also that I wasn't a psychopath, so she relented and the comics continued.
Then, when I was about 9(maybe?), the dollar store by us had collections of the strip from right before Gould's retirement, to Collins and Fletcher strips, and possibly to Locher. They were giant softcover collections like Calvin and Hobbes, only bigger and with at least 250 pages in each......and WERE A DOLLAR!! I got the whole shebang, and was able to catch up with the series. I enjoyed it even more, even when it went in to more campier territory. I had so much fun reading them. Sure....the later ones were not as violent, but they still tried to keep it edgy as much as they could. I love Dick Tracy.
8:33 back in ww2 rubber was a sensible material, it's like stealing morphine from an hospital
Dick Tracey is one of the few protagonists in fiction that is more memorable for their Rogues Gallery than they are for their character development.
He, effectively, functions as a secondary protagonist in his own story due to his adversary which includes Itchy, FlatTop, or BigBoy because he is steadfast in himself and stopping crime than whatever motivation those villains have.
What's the important aspects of Dick Tracey? Yellow Trenchcoat? Twoway Communicator? Tommy Gun? Detective? That's it.
"Rogues Gallery" is a Stretch. Though he does have long lasting villains Like Big Boy, Mr. Bribery, Steve the Tramp, The Mole, Mumbles, Pruneface, and B-B Eyes to name a few, Most of the villains are dead by at least their solo story. Heck, Flattop Only has one Story before Killing off.
I remember when I was a youngster back in the 70s and 80s from Dick Tracy still in Sunday morning comics. They had one point where Tracy actually got caught in an explosion on a hit attempt if I’m not mistaken
In 1978 , the villain Big Boy was dying and he put a million dollar hit contract on Dick Tracy. Big Boy wanted Tracy to die before he did. A crook named "Little" Litel placed a bomb in Dick Tracy's car. The Tracy family ate dinner at Junior's and Moon Maid asked to use Tracy's car. Moon Maid was killed by the car bomb as Tracy was lounging on the couch. "Ye Gods"! The writer of the Dick Tracy strip Max A. Collins wanted to put an end to Tracy's moon saga. Collins decided to kill Moon Maid because he felt it was time to bring Tracy back to earth and battle only criminals on earth. Summer, Fall , Winter 1978.
I loved the reprints when I was little. The Brow's death was one of my favorites.
Binging your videos has been a blessing
Two things I remember regarding Dick Tracy: 1. The character B.O. Plenty starting out as a hold-up man on the verge of facing a grisly end to being a "good guy" in later strips. 2. Dick Tracy's Crime Busters section where Gould and later creators espoused "Crime Does Not Pay" messages, including an OJ Simpson-era message "DNA evidence catches crooks!" which was probably why only the Washington Post was the only "local newspaper" that still carried the strip as I recall. Nice review. I like Cabernet Sauvignon as well.
Dolan sounds like Peter Griffin's long lost brother. Maybe he'll come to take revenge and then get brutalized as well.
Peter would certainly deserve it, as he's become a total sociopath who's guilty of basically every crime in the book.
Dick Tracey 2019: The CoD video game hacker was found HACKED to pieces. And that's what I call justice. 🤠
I have about a dozen of the IDW Dick Tracy reprints.
The earliest ones are probably my favorites.
They were super gritty and not very pc.
willc Comic books had violence and nudity then. Tv is horrifically violent now. “PC” has become whatever you want to piss your panties over.
I had a prose novel, "Dick Tracy vs. the Night Crawler" when I was a kid.
I love the obvious smoke effect, these intros are great!
Fun fact: This video started a running gag in our friend group about Dick Tracy's superpower is causing people to get eaten by rats.
8:35 -- You're not far off on that supposition: after Max Allan Collins took over writing "DT", one of the bad guys during the '80s* was Murky Depps, a Mumbles homage (his dialogue was essentially just word balloons filled with squiggly lines) who manufactured dangerously cheap knock-offs of toys, sneakers, etc. sold at flea markets... think John Lithgow's character in "Santa Claus" but as an upper middle class businessman. It's been awhile since I read the compilation book of that adventure, but I think he died because a tire on his car was itself a knock-off and blew badly during a car chase, causing a fatal crash.
*Practically symbolized by the fact that one of the brand names he made cheap copies of was a send-up of the Cabbage Patch Kid dolls that were all the rage at the time.
Near the end of the Sunday Funnies run, a story about a madman living on the Moon with long fingernails was pretty gruesome!
He would practice kills using a paper-bag, painted to look like his intended, perched on a grapefruit.
A few well placed slashes of his nails, and the grapefruit was cut to ribbons.
He then picked it up and laughed while drinking the juices were dripping out. Scared me, thought the guy was some kind of blood drinking freak.
But then it got worse, as he fled from Tracy, out an airlock, and onto the surface of the Moon!
In great detail his agonizing death is laid out for us; frozen tears in his eyes locking them open, ear-drums bursting, capillaries rupturing, mouth and tongue freezing, ice crystals forming in his lungs.
Eventually, he is a strange statue on the Lunar landscape.
Hey , it was the Purdy Fallar episode in early 1968. He was a handsome crook and stole Diet Smith's space coupe. The villain Intro wanted to steal gold from the moon and Fallar worked with him to achieve it. He died on the moon trying to escape from Dick Tracy and froze to death on the moon. Dick Tracy impersonated the crook in order to trick Intro's gang.The disguise didn't work and the crooks discovered Dick Tracy was impersonating Fallar. The crooks refused to surrender and Dick Tracy vaporized them with a laser beam. Spring 1968.
Man those old comic strips were the best. Popeye, Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, Peanuts.
What I remember of Dick Tracy is from my childhood, when I tried to read all the newspaper "funnies", even before I learned how to actually read. What I remember most are the cartoons, which seemed to air mostly on the local Bozo the Clown show, for whatever reason. They had less violence than the strip, but a lot more unflattering racial stereotypes than I remember seeing in the "funnies".
Nothing better then seeing a new video in my feed.
the opener to this video is the best thing on this channel
He went to the moon, then things got weird.
Not Quite. In truth the strip had been dropping drastically in popularity and quality for a few years beforehand, both being vastly improved by the Space-Era if anything (Though naturally old fans rebelled, the change brought in many new fans). Additionally several supernatural, unrealistic and/or Sci-Fi elements had been present before the Era began. Examples Includes Diet Smith's inventions, A baby with super-strength, Talking crows, Panther-Dog hybrids, The aforementioned baby being able to control said hybrids, etc..
Tracy was a space cop on the Moon in the 60s.
5:29 A criminal killing others with toys...gee, that sounds familiar. Maybe because of a certain Winslow Schott?
I look forward to your videos every week Chris. Keep up the great work as one of my favs👍
Great stuff as always! I have never read Dick Tracy, but now I know why Fearless Fosdick, Li'l Abner's favorite comic and an obviois spoof on Dick Tracy, is so over the top violent.
Seems like there was club of criminals call the 52 club, or something like that, that had a meeting place on top of a mesa. After Tracey infiltrated the club he called in an air strike and had the club napalmed.
Yes , this episode of the 52 gang came out around the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Check out the websites, Dick Tracy Depot or Dick Tracy wiki. I didn't have to buy the Dick Tracy reprint books. Go to Google Newspaper Archives. Check out the Victoria Advocate (Texas) Sept.-Nov. 1962. You'll find Dick Tracy in the comic section with other comic strips of the day. Take care!
@@shawnmalone9711 - Thanks!
@@justinecooper9575 You can read the strip in it's original format😀
Well done! Listening to this while I’m drawing the new mini. Great vid
I love that I can never guess what I'm gonna tune into this man doing.
The fact that Chester Gould was against the presumption of innocence, make difficult to enjoy his story.
That honnestly a pretty facist and autoritarian way of thinking.
Yeah I doubt characters like the Mole would've turned a new leaf if Gould was still writing although to be fair he did redeem Gravel Gertie and made her a regular character and friend of Tracy and Co.
It's up to the reader to decide whether they read the story, no one says you have to agree with Gould's views on the police. Hell you could do a Dick Tracy story about Tracy already walking that fine line between being a cop and a vigilante, and finally going too far with his shoot first and ask questions later mentality, results in him killing an undercover police officer who had infiltrated the gang, an informant who was about to turn over vital evidence in a case, or gangsters who had thrown down their guns and were willing to surrender, and have him face the consequences of that mistake
@@snakes3425 I find it interesting that Gould's own views ended up becoming a hindrance to the strip in later years as there were times when Tracy and Co. would spend time complaining about the due process in the span of several strips, which annoyed many readers.
It wouldn't surprise me if Dick Tracy regularly shot innocent black men. I'd say it was a sign of the times if it weren't still actually happening every day...
You should have way more subs and views dude. Good job really enjoyed every episode I have seen 👍
Im surprised you didn't mention the "I've got an aunt living in Smallville." dialogue at: 5:37. :)
"runs a hose from his car exhaust to the cave to suffocate the criminals" holy shit what the fuck
The brutality of the comics may appear strange to us, but remember this comic ran in the same period when Bonnie and Clyde got Swiss cheesed by lawmen waiting in ambush. Things were different then.
This was good. Getting drunk on the job 😂
I started watching this channel just last weekend. Now I have LSS with your intro.
Amazing that, no matter how schnockered you are, you still have all of the facts straight.
Possibly the best intro to comic tropes yet lol
Great stuff. Thank you! I've subscribed.
This was the absolute best! And now I want to read some old Dick Tracy comics.
Great video. I've only read one Tracy story (about Flat Top's daughter) that I got back when the Warren Beatty movie was coming out. Being a reprint of a '70s story, I always assumed the violent content was just because it was "newer". I had no idea the original stories were as brutal as they were.
Robot chicken
Perfectly encapsulate
Dick Tracy.
He was a dick.
Remember the WB Daffy Duck Dream He was Dick Tracy? That was Dark Too. LOL.
Love this stuff. Thanks!
Dick Tracy was violent, but he'd be scared to death of Little Orphan Annie.
Rayce Archer Tarentino would be the right director for a true Orphan Annie film, her storylines were just as violent and just as memorable.
Yeah, he'd be completely perfect. One second all "Daddy Warbucks, we found the lost treasure, hurray!" Next scene, leading a mob to savagely beat a conscientious objector.
I'm Dick Tracy! Take that, Prune Face!
Now I'm Prune Face! Take that, Dick Tracy!
Now I'm Prune Tracy! Take that, Dick Face!
reason why we never got a sequel to Dick Tracy 1990: Dick Tracy basically gunned down his entire rouges gallery at the end of the movie
Love your videos, Chris. Thank you!!!!
Gotta say it just because I'm a fucking loser; the Gachopon was a Patoranger from the Super Sentai franchise. The franchise Haim Saban bought the rights to and used the stock footage of to make Power Rangers, it's pretty good and often darker than Power Rangers (not so much nowadays but the late 80s and early 90s stuff is fantastic) it's sister franchise Kamen Rider is one of my favorite superhero properties and needs way more exposure in the west :)
Finally finished catching up on all of Comics Tropes episodes. Great videos man like seriously I love comics but you've managed to open my eyes way more than I thought someone could. I love your passion and it really shows, even in the earliest episodes. Took me a while to go through em but well worth it. Exited to see what's to come. P.s since you've done dick tracy now, Judge Dredd would be a awesome episode
Itzmbd I did cover Judge Dredd. I even went to London for it!
@@ComicTropes Do Big Vern from Viz, he's like the anti Dick Tracy, he's a criminal (or maybe a delusional guy who thinks he is one) who shoots himself in every single episode. Well except for one where he shot a pensioner and then tried some delicious mulled wine, after being told to give the old man "both barrels".
Funny thing that ocurred to me while reading this, Dredd would... probably like Tracy, actually? At least respect him, I figure that from Dredd's perspective Tracy would be a fine enough example of pre-disaster law enforcement agent.
On the other hand, even Tracy would probably think the Judges system goes way too far.
Huge Dick Tracy fan here (from the movie) i hope they reboot it with an R rating
Have you been injured in an automobile accident? Finding it hard to go about your everyday routine due to injury. Call me Schiesty McAchiester and I’ll make it my mission to get you the compensation you deserve. Then I’ll take 40% of that compensation after you’ve thoroughly bent ripped off by our healthcare system and subjected to needless procedures. At McShiesty Law we will treat you like an unwanted step child and make by sure to give you the vaguest of answers to your most important questions.
Car accidents, malpractice, hot coffee, or hell, you can just make something up. We are there for us... Er, um you.
"Damn you" rusty nail. He had it coming.
As a little boy in Trinidad in the late 80s and early 90s...Dick Tracy was the shizzz! When the movie came out I was so happy to see it on pirated VHS...with Madonna as the villain. Sigh to be a child again yes.
Chester Gould, hated the idea of Miranda Rights, because it would make cops' jobs harder … kills all of his villains by police force.
… Yeah, that guy had a warped sense of justice