Renowned large-foreground-squirrels-talking comic strip Mark Trail reached its 80th anniversary this past week, and its home of Comics Kingdom ran a blog post discussing the history of the story comic/nature-appreciation comic. The happy parts of the history, no controversies here. The blog has also given me the information I didn’t realize I didn’t know, that there’s a specific reason Mark Trail ever met Doc Davis. Also that Doc’s first name is Tom. For some reason Comics Kingdom included a wrong (and apparently randomly-picked) strip instead of reprinting the first, but fortunately The Daily Cartoonist is on top of things and has the true original strip, and the original Sunday strip.
On thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that in the early 50s there was a Mark Trail juvenile adventure drama. John Dunning’s On The Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio says the show — with Matt Crowley, John Larkin, and Staats Cotsworth as Mark Trail, I assume at different parts in the show’s run; Amy Sidell and Joyce Gordon as Cherry; Ben Cooper and Ronald Liss as “Mark’s young friend”, Scotty, whom I know nothing more about. The announcers were Glenn Riggs and (of course) Jackson Beck.
Archive.org has about three dozen episodes, which is doing pretty well for an old-time-radio children’s series. Many episodes have appealing names like “The Sticks Of Fear”, “Mystery of the Missing Deer”, “The Thumping Beaver”, and “The Lumber King of Diamond Mountain”, all of which sound like titles you’d make up for your extended riff about a Mark Trail radio show. There may be better ways to observe the anniversary of a comic strip that advances the propositions that there should be nature and it’s good for you even if you don’t go camping or hiking or whatever yourself, but on the other hand, the introductory narration is going to give you a pretty impressive giggle and that’s good for you too.
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Thank you for mentioning Jackson Beck, who I’m sure I know from many voice parts but who I know primarily as the narrator of Woody Allen’s “Take the Money and Run.”
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Always going to stand up for Jackson Beck, who’s one of those people who gets into everything everywhere. Including, famously, in the names of some supporting characters in Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man.
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