Wheeler addenda Woolsey

In honor of Bill Sherman's latest Wheeler and Woolsey-related blog entry, I'm posting this rare 1938 W&W comic strip from the pages of Film Fun, a UK comic weekly that also featured strips starring Laurel and Hardy, George Formby, Harold Lloyd, Abbott and Costello, and, eventually, Martin and Lewis. Interestingly, Bert and Bob are depicted as rivals here, something they never were in their pictures (especially over a woman. Bert had Dotty Lee while Bob usually had his own love interest in the form of women as diverse as Thelma Todd and Jobyna Howland). One quibble with Bill's assessment of Girl Crazy (1932); the W&W version is actually much closer to the original Gershwin musical than the 1943 Garland/Rooney version. Bert was given original Broadway star Willie Howard's Jewish cabby role, revised here for ethnicity as Jimmy Deegan. Bill's keen eye spotted Margaret Dumont in a small role (she was later to appear with the boys in Kentucky Kernels (1934) and their woeful last picture, High Flyers (1938)), and here are a few other notables to be found populating the periphery of Girl Crazy:

• Lon Cheney, Jr. as a dancer!
• Nat Pendleton as a cop (of course)
• Monty Collins as a bartender (familiar face in RKO's Clark and McCullough shorts and later to be teamed with comic heavy Tom Kennedy in his own series at Columbia)

click on de pic for to make it beeg!