Fearless Fosdick - Beyond The Strip-within-a-strip

Beyond The Strip-within-a-strip

• Fearless Fosdick invaded the 1968 presidential campaign, as Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey accused his Republican opponent Richard Nixon of playing loose with law and order issues. "His privilege, if he wants to play Fearless Fosdick," said Humphrey.

• Sharp-eyed viewers of Warren Beatty's big screen adaptation of Dick Tracy (1990) will have detected a direct, onscreen homage to Fearless Fosdick. The "opera" Tracy is seen attending when his 2-way wrist radio suddenly calls him to duty is titled "Die Schlmpf" in the end credits—presumably after Elmer Schlmpf, the maniacal (albeit deceased) product-tampering fiend from "The Case of the Poisoned Beans."

• "Fearless Fosdick" is also the title of a jazz instrumental by Bill Holman, recorded live by Vic Lewis and His Orchestra with Tubby Hayes in 1954. Another, unrelated jazz composition, "Fearless Fosdick's Tune," was composed and recorded by Umberto Fiorentino for his Brave Art/Columbia-Sony CD, Things to Come (2002).

• Fearless Fosdick is an example of a metafictional character—a character who exists in a separate fictional realm within an already fictional universe. Other metafictional (or fictional fictional) characters in modern popular culture include Itchy and Scratchy and The Happy Little Elves, the cartoons-within-a-cartoon in The Simpsons, and the science fiction "works" of fictional author Kilgore Trout, which reappear sporadically within the novels of Kurt Vonnegut.

• The popular Canadian children's novel The Secret World of Og (1961) by Pierre Berton features a cat called "Earless Osdick," because he kept his ears down like the dog he thought he was.

• Fosdick's oft-mentioned weekly salary of $22.50 is a direct reference to Al Capp's own pitiful salary when he was still an anonymous "ghost" on Ham Fisher's Joe Palooka, according to Li'l Abner expert Denis Kitchen. Kitchen believes that Fisher was meant to cringe every time the amount was mentioned, as he writes in the notes to Al Capp's Li'l Abner: The Frazetta Years.

• According to The Marx Brothers Scrapbook (1974, Richard J. Anobile, ed.), comedian Harpo Marx, a professed Li'l Abner fan, named one of his dogs "Fearless Fosdick" for its extraordinary dauntlessness.

• Comic book writers Marv Wolfman and Craig Miller developed Fearless Fosdick for a big screen, live-action comedy in the 1990s, but the project to date remains unsold.