Alley Oop

For the basketball term, see Alley oop (basketball).

Alley Oop is a syndicated comic strip created in 1932 by American cartoonist V. T. Hamlin, who wrote and drew Alley Oop through four decades for NEA (Newspaper Enterprise Association). Initially, Alley Oop was a daily strip which had a run from December 5, 1932 to January 3, 1933. Beginning August 7, 1933, the early material was reworked for a larger readership. "Alley Oop" is also the name of the strip's title character.

A mix of adventure, fantasy and humor, the strip added a Sunday full page, on September 9, 1934. It also appeared in half page, tabloid and half tab formats, which were smaller and/or dropped panels. During World War II, the full page vanished due to the drive to conserve paper, and it was reduced to a third of a page.

When V. T. Hamlin retired in 1971, his assistant Dave Graue took over. The last daily by Hamlin appeared December 31 1972, and his last Sunday was April 1 1973. From his studio near Caesar's Head, North Carolina, Graue wrote and drew the strip through the 1970s and 1980s until Jack Bender arrived in 1991. Graue continued to write the strip until his August, 2001, retirement; on December 10, 2001, the 75-year-old Graue was killed in Flat Rock, North Carolina when a dump truck hit his car. The current Alley Oop Sunday and daily strips are written by Carole Bender and illustrated by Jack Bender.

Alley Oop was one of the comic strips characters commemorated by a U.S. postage stamp.

Characters and settings

The character's name derived from the "let's go" phrase allez oup, used as a cue by French gymnasts and trapeze artists. Alley Oop was a sturdy citizen of the prehistoric kingdom of Moo who rode his pet dinosaur, Dinny, carried a stone war hammer, dressed in nothing but a pair of fur shorts, and obviously would rather fight dinosaurs in the jungle than deal with his fellow countrymen in Moo's capital (and only) cave-town. In spite of these exotic settings, the stories were mostly satires of American suburban life. The first stories centered on his dealings with his fellow cavemen -- his friend Foozy and his girlfriend Ooola, Moo's King Guzzle and Queen Umpateedle, the King's Grand Wizer and assorted citizens. Oop and his pals had occasional skirmishes with the rival kingdom of Lem, ruled by King Tunk. The names Moo and Lem are apparent references to the fabled lost continents of Mu and Lemuria.

On April 5, 1939, in a calculated move to vary plotlines, Hamlin introduced an unusual plot device -- a time machine invented by the 20th-century scientist Dr. Elbert Wonmug (who bore a rather suspicious resemblance to the Grand Wizer). The name Wonmug was a bilingual reference to Albert Einstein, since Ein Stein translates as One Mug in German. Arriving in the 20th Century, Alley Oop became a test pilot for Dr. Wonmug, embarking on expeditions to various periods and places in history, such as Ancient Egypt, Arthurian England and the American Old West. Oop accompanied Cleopatra, King Arthur and Ulysses in his adventures and even traveled to the moon. Modern characters included the sometimes villain, sometimes hero G. Oscar Boom.

Oop in pop culture

The long-run success of the strip made the character a pop culture icon referenced in both fiction and pop music. An educated Neanderthal known as Alley Oop is a character in Clifford D. Simak's witty, Hugo-nominated science fiction novel The Goblin Reservation (1968).

The cover story for the June, 1959, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was Philip José Farmer's The Alley Man, with a thinly disguised Alley Oop as the central figure in a novella about the last Neanderthal who has survived into the 20th Century. In a 1960 review, P. Schuyler Miller described this Hugo-nominated Farmer tale as "a robust, rambling comic tragedy of a dying species, trying to keep its heredity straight, clinging to its old legends, holding its own against the G'yaga, the False Folk who have inherited the Earth. The roaring, rutting, one-armed Old Man Paley who lives on the city dump and hunts the Old King's hat of power through its alleys, who guzzles beer and seduces social workers with equal facilities, is Alley Oop as seen by Eugene O'Neill."

In 1960 Hamlin's character was immortalized in a one-hit-wonder song, "Alley Oop," by the The Hollywood Argyles. With words and music by Dallas Frazier, it begins like this:

(Oop-oop, oop, oop-oop)