{PDF EPUB} Dennis the Menace Television Special by Hank Ketcham the Tragic True Story of Dennis the Menace

Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Dennis The Menace Television Special by Hank Ketcham The Tragic True Story Of Dennis The Menace. Dennis the Menace has been terrorizing his neighborhood for decades. The character's creator, Hank Ketcham, wanted to make his readers feel better about their kids' behavior. His own child, the titular Dennis, was apparently a very rowdy boy. But as much as the cartoon Dennis endured and flourished, including a series of popular movies and TV shows, the real Dennis didn't have as much luck. Ketcham got the idea in 1951 after his wife Alice told him that their son, Dennis, then four years old, had destroyed his room by throwing around fecal matter from his pants. Alice was so mad she called her son a menace, wrote Mental Floss. Ketcham found the thought of his son as being harmful good material, and within five months, the strip was being published by 16 newspapers. Like other popular comic strips at the time, Dennis the Menace would go on to be translated into several languages. Ketcham's comic character really was a menace. In the early strips, Dennis would incite fights, tie swan heads together, and laugh at others' misfortunes. Ketcham toned down this trait in later comics, but the idea that Dennis was a bit of a brat stuck around. In an interesting twist of fate, another Dennis the Menace comic strip came out around the same time as Ketcham's, said the BBC, featuring a child who was just a little older and less of a troublemaker. The British comic was later retitled Dennis the Menace and Gnasher to differentiate it. A less than ideal childhood. Despite the growing fame and success, Hank Ketcham and Dennis weren't exactly joyous. Ketcham's wife, Alice, died in 1959 when Dennis was 12 years old, reported The New York Times . Ketcham moved Dennis and his second wife to Geneva, Switzerland. Dennis had difficulty adjusting to his Swiss school, so Ketcham decided to send his son back to the United States to go to boarding school in Connecticut. Ketcham himself stayed in Geneva for 20 more years before moving to California in 1977. It wasn't the first boarding school Dennis attended. Before his mother died from an overdose, he was attending one in California. According to People Magazine , Dennis felt lonely and wanted his father to spend more time with him than the fictional Dennis. Dennis (the son) had a learning disability, but his father didn't quite understand it. When Alice died, Ketcham couldn't bring himself to tell his son until she was buried. Dennis claimed he would've dealt with her death better had he attended her funeral. After Ketcham and his second wife divorced, Ketcham met the woman who would become his third wife. Dennis attended their wedding, but he wouldn't play a big role in their lives. Dennis told People that he never met his two half-siblings. Ketcham, on the other hand, only knew Dennis been living somewhere on the East Coast. Fathers and sons. Instead, Dennis fought in Vietnam, joining the Marines. During his year-long tour, he said his only letters came from his grandmother and aunt; none from his father. (Hank disputed that.) Dennis was discharged in 1970 and spent three months being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. He then drifted in and out of different jobs. His first marriage ended in a bitter divorce, culminating in him being barred from seeing his daughter. In 1991, he married his second wife, Janet, and lived in Ohio. He barely spoke to his father except when, according to Ketcham, he needed money. Ketcham maintained he never used actual incidents from his family's life in his comic strips. For Dennis, it didn't matter. He never wanted to lend his name to his father's unruly, bratty character. He even said he wishes his father used something else as an inspiration for his work, other than his childhood. It didn't mean, however, that Dennis hated the character or his father. When Ketcham published his memoirs, he sent a copy to Dennis, inscribed "To the REAL Dennis with love. Dad." Dennis displayed the book in his house. Hank Ketcham died in 2001 at 81. He and Dennis had not been close at the time. Dennis the Menace may have made a lot of people laugh with his antics. It may have helped parents cope with their misbehaving children. But, as is often the case with fictional versions of real children, the reality is never as happy. When ‘Dennis the Menace’ Created a Racial Controversy. The portrayal of a black character in a 'Dennis the Menace' cartoon prompted outbursts of violence and apologies from newspapers that published it. David Mikkelson Published 31 March 2015. Claim. Rating. Origin. <!– One of the societal changes that came about in conjunction with the Civil Rights movement in America in the 1960s was the introduction of black characters into popular entertainments where they had previously made only token appearances, usually in subservient and racially stereotyped roles. It was in 1963 that a black actor first won an Academy Award for a leading role (Sidney Poitier garnered those honors for his performance in Lilies of the Field , it wasn’t until 1965 that a prime-time network television drama finally featured a black actor in a lead role (when comedian Bill Cosby was tapped to co-star with Robert Culp in the espionage series I Spy ,) and 1965 was also the year that a black hero was first featured in an American comic book (the unfortunately short-lived Western series Lobo). Another area of social change in the entertainment arena was newspaper cartoons and comic strips, a field that included a number of long-running entries set in seemingly all-white suburbias. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts , which debuted in 1950, had by the 1960s become by far the most popular and influential comic strip of its day, and it was in 1968 that Schulz added a black character named Franklin to the ranks of Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy and the rest of the Peanuts gang. Franklin was a little-used, undistinguished character, though, prompting Chris Rock to joke (incorrectly) in 1992 that Franklin hadn’t spoken a single line in 25 years. Nonetheless, Schulz later discussed in an interview the resistance he’d encountered in using the Franklin character even in a limited role: Later on, when Franklin was introduced into the strip, the little black kid — I could have put him in long before that, but for other reasons, I didn’t. I didn’t want to intrude upon the work of others, so I held off on that. But I finally put Franklin in, and there was one strip where Charlie Brown and Franklin had been playing on the beach, and Franklin said, “Well, it’s been nice being with you, come on over to my house some time.” Again, they didn’t like that. Another editor protested once when Franklin was sitting in the same row of school desks with Peppermint Patty, and said, “We have enough trouble here in the South without you showing the kids together in school.” But I never paid any attention to those things, and I remember telling Larry [Rutman, president of the United Features syndicate] at the time about Franklin — he wanted me to change it, and we talked about it for a long while on the phone, and I finally sighed and said, “Well, Larry, let’s put it this way: Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How’s that?” So that’s the way that ended. But I’ve never done much with Franklin, because I don’t do race things. I’m not an expert on race, I don’t know what it’s like to grow up as a little black boy, and I don’t think you should draw things unless you really understand them, unless you’re just out to stir things up or to try to teach people different things. I’m not in this business to instruct; I’m just in it to be funny. Now and then I may instruct a few things, but I’m not out to grind a lot of axes. Let somebody else do it who’s an expert on that, not me. It was in this climate that Hank Ketcham, the cartoonist whose Dennis the Menace feature had debuted in newspapers in 1951 (and proved popular enough to spawn a live-action television series in 1959), decided to introduce a black character of his own in 1970, the fleetingly seen Jackson: Unlike Franklin, whose race was largely irrelevant to the way Schulz used him in the Peanuts strip, Jackson debuted in a panel that Ketcham specifically intended as a commentary on racial attitudes. Ketcham often employed the technique of spoofing the foibles of adults by having Dennis embarrassingly repeat things he’d heard his parents say but hadn’t understood (such as referring to his mother’s friend, whom she’d said had a dye job, as “the lady with dead hair”), and in other circumstances one might find Ketcham put that technique to endearingly good use here to illustrate the concept that prejudice is something that is learned rather than innate: Dennis is innocently color blind and fails to recognize why he’s supposed to have “race trouble” with Jackson, because he knows the word “race” only as something that denotes a speed contest and doesn’t understand its use as an anthropological term.

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