Dick Tracy
Dick Tracy is a
comic strip detective and a popular character in
American pop culture. The character of Dick Tracy is a hard hitting, fast shooting, and supremely intelligent
police detective who has matched wits with a variety of often grotesquely ugly
villains. Dick Tracy was created by
cartoonist Chester Gould in
1931 for a
newspaper comic strip also entitled
Dick Tracy. The strip, which made its debut appearance on
October 4,
1931, was distributed by the
Chicago Tribune Syndicate. Gould wrote and drew the strip until
1977.
Early years
|
Chester Gould's Dick Tracy strip for September 23, 1944 |
Chester Gould introduced a raw violence to comic strips, reflecting the violence of
1930s Chicago. Gould also did his best to keep up with the latest in crime fighting techniques and, while Tracy often ends a case in a shootout, he uses
forensic science, advanced gadgetry, and plain hard thinking to track the bad guy down. It has been suggested that this comic strip was the first example of the
police procedural mystery story. Others have noted that actual mystery plots were relatively rare in the stories since the comic strip format is a difficult one for that kind of plot. The real focus, they argue, is the chase with the criminal seen committing the crime and Dick Tracy figuring out the case and relentlessly pursuing the criminal who becomes increasingly desperate as the detective closes in.
The strip's villains are arguably the strongest appeal of the story. Tracy's world is decidedly black and white where the bad guys are sometimes so evil, their very flesh is deformed to announce their sins to the world. The evil sometimes is raw and coarse like the criminally insane Selbert Depool ("looped" spelled backwards, typical Gould). At other times it is suave like the arrogant Shoulders, who can't help thinking that all women like him. It can even border on genius like the
Nazi spy Pruneface who is not only a machine design engineer but also dabbles with a chemical
nerve gas.
However, by far the most popular villain was
Flattop Jones, a freelance hitman who had a large head that was as flat as an
aircraft carrier's flight deck. In a classic storyline, Flattop was hired by
black marketeers to murder Tracy and he came within a hairsbreath of accomplishing that before deciding to
blackmail his employers for more money before he did the deed. This proved to be a fatal mistake since it gave Tracy time to signal for help and he eventually defeated his assassin in a spectacular fight scene even as the police were storming the hideout. When Flattop was eventually killed, fans went into public mourning.
Reflecting some of the era that also produced
film noir, Gould tapped into the existential despair of the criminals as small crimes lead to bigger ones and plans slip out of control and events happen sometimes for no reason at all because life can be unpredictable and cruel. Treachery is everywhere as henchmen are killed ruthlessly by their bosses, bosses are betrayed by jilted girlfriends and good people in the wrong place at the wrong time are gunned down.
Evolution of the strip
In January of 1946, Chester Gould changed
Dick Tracy forever with the introduction of the 2-Way Wrist Radio. This seminal communications device, worn as a wristwatch by Tracy and members of the police force, became one of the strip's most immediately recognizable icons, and (along with the similar personal
communicators seen in
Star Trek twenty years later) can be thought of as an early precursor of later technological developments, such as
cellular phones, in real life. The 2-Way Wrist Radio was eventually upgraded to a 2-Way Wrist TV in 1964, and again to a 2-Way Wrist Computer in 1987. This development also led to the introduction of an important supporting character, Diet Smith, an eccentric industrialist who financed the development of this equipment.
Towards the end of the 1940s, Gould took steps to shake up the
status quo of his strip. In late 1948, for instance, a botched security detail led to the death of the semi-regular character Brilliant, the
blind inventor of the 2-Way Wrist Radio (among other devices) and son of industrialist Diet Smith. As a result, Chief Brandon, Dick Tracy's superior on the police force and a presence in the strip since its 1931 inception, voluntarily resigned in shame. Pat Patton, heretofore Tracy's rather buffoonish partner, was promoted to police chief in Brandon's place. (Gould would later explain this seemingly improbable turn of events by stating that, within the strip's reality, Tracy was offered the job first but had declined, personally recommending Patton instead.) To take Patton's place as Tracy's sidekick, a new character, Sam Catchem (based on Gould's old friend, Al Lowenthal), was introduced. Finally, on Christmas Day 1949, Dick Tracy and Tess Trueheart finally married, after a rocky courtship lasting the eighteen-year history of the strip to that date.
Gould changed Tracy with the times, sometimes with mixed results. Successful additions included topical storylines about television,
juvenile delinquency,
graft, and other new developments in American life as the 1950s wore on. Less successful were elements of soap opera that began to permeate the strip, as much time began to be spent with Dick, Tess, and Junior (along with the Tracys' new baby daughter, Bonnie Braids) at home as a family, and some stories from this period began to resemble an early
sitcom, albeit one with dark underpinnings of crime drama in the shadows that would rise up to attack the family directly, such as when Bonnie Braids was kidnapped by a fugitive named Cruey Lou, or when Junior's girlfriend, Model, was accidentally shot and killed by her "J. D." brother.
And as technology progressed farther, so too did the methods Tracy and the police force used to track and catch criminals; within the strip these took the form of increasingly fanciful (for the time)
atomically-powered gadgets and devices developed by Diet Smith Industries. This eventually led to what Gould thought was its logical conclusion in the
1960s with the advent of the Space Coupe, a spacecraft with a magnetic propulsion system. This started a much-derided series of stories, known informally as the strip's "Space Period," that saw Tracy and friends having adventures on the Moon and meeting
Moon Maid, the daughter of the leader of a race of humanoid people living in what was called "Moon Valley," in
1964. This in turn led to an eventual sharing of technologies, with Moon technology becoming standard issue on Tracy's police force. The most obvious example were the air cars, cylinder like vehicles that carried a rider in the air. This meant, logically, the villains had to be even more exaggerated in power, resulting in an escalating series of stories that completely abandoned the urban crime drama roots of the strip. Finally, the escalating scope and scale of the stories led to the advent of the character known as "Mr. Intro," only ever seen as a disembodied voice, whose goal was nothing short of world domination in the vein of a
James Bond villain; Tracy eventually had to resort to an atomic laser beam to annihilate Intro and his island base. Many readers felt that this effectively spelled the end of storytelling in
Dick Tracy, as if Tracy had this kind of power at his disposal, it was left to be wondered exactly how any Earthbound foe could ever believably challenge him again.
Despite the fact many believed Gould to have written himself into an inescapable corner with the Moon stories, he kept on with them. By 1968, after an on-again-off-again romance, Junior actually married Moon Maid, and the couple eventually produced a daughter, Honey Moon Tracy, who had antennae and magnetic hands. Not long thereafter, Tracy was offered the post of Chief of Police in Moon Valley, meaning the strip was likely to soon abandon Earth entirely if Gould had continued unabated.
And then, reality intervened. The
Apollo 11 mission in 1969 put an end to the Space Period, as Gould felt obligated to bring his ostensibly reality-based strip back down to Earth when the Moon was found to be barren of all life. However, the accountrements of the abandoned science-fiction stories, such as the Space Coupe and much of the high-tech gadgetry, remained for many years afterward (and Junior and Moon Maid were still married, although the latter greatly receded from the storyline).
In the
1970s, Gould even less successfully tried to modernize Tracy by giving him a longer hair style and
mustache, and by adding a supposedly "hip"
sidekick, Groovy Grove. Unfortunately, Groovy was designed to appeal to young college-age people of the period, but Gould had misread exactly how much his strip, with its unflinchingly
conservative views of the police and society (mirroring Gould's own views), was seen by that audience as being part of the very "establishment" many of them were rebelling against. (Groovy's first appearance in print, as it happened, occurred during the same week as the
Kent State shootings.) Meanwhile, older readers and those who shared Gould's viewpoint disliked Groovy on the grounds that, his allegiance to law and order aside, he still looked and talked much like a typical
hippie. Nevertheless, Groovy remained with the strip, off and on, until 1984, when he was killed off by Gould's successors. As for Tracy's mustache, apparently even Gould realized this had been a mistake on his part, as eventually he drew a strip in which Sam, Lizz, and Groovy held Tracy down for an enforced shave.
Later, during one of Max Allan Collins' first stories as the strip's writer, the gangster known as "Big Boy," whose gang members had killed Tess Trueheart's father years ago (making him, effectively, the first
Dick Tracy villain of all) learns that he is dying and has less that a year to live. Big Boy, still seeking revenge on the plainclothesman who sent him up the river, decides he wants to live just long enough to see Tracy precede him in death. To this end, he puts out an open contract on Tracy's head worth one million dollars, knowing that every small-time hood in the City would take a crack at the famous cop for that amount of money. One of the would-be collectors rigs Tracy's car to explode, but inadvertently blows up Moon Maid instead (she had to use Tracy's car to run an errand). A funeral strip for Moon Maid explicitly states that this has officially severed all ties between Earth and the Moon, thus formally and permanently eliminating the last remnants of the Space Period. (The lone exception was Honey Moon, who received a new hairstyle to cover up the antennae that betrayed her extraterrestrial origins, and was never again referred to as being anything more than a normal human girl; eventually she was phased out altogether.) Junior later marries Sparkle Plenty (Daughter of B. O. and Gravel Plenty) and has a daughter named Sparkle Plenty Jr. In the 1990's Tracy's own son Joseph Flintheart Tracy take on a role similar to Junior in the earlier strips.
More successful was the decades-long substory of the Plenty family, a group of goofy
redneck yokels headed by former villains,
Bob Oscar "B.O." Plenty and
Gravel Gertie. The family provided a humorous counterpoint to Tracy's adventures. Their daughter,
Sparkle Plenty, first gave the strip an infant character, and later a pretty young adolescent girl character; unlike most comic strip children, including
Dick Tracy's own Junior for many years, she was allowed to grow up (albeit slowly) and eventually marry. Another successful addition was that of Lizz the Policewoman (she was never given a full name) as one of Tracy's sidekicks. She proved be to an active and formidable female character in a manner that was groundbreaking for comic strips of that era.
However, the later stories were often shackled with a stubborn grousing condemnation of the
rights of the accused which often involved Tracy being frustrated by criminals because of legal technicalities and proselytizing about it. A not at all atypical sequence from this period saw Tracy, having caught a gang of diamond thieves red-handed, forced to let them walk because he could not
prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that the diamonds were in fact stolen. As he saw the thieves get off scot-free, Tracy was heard to grumble, "Yes, under today's interpretation of the laws, it seems it's the police who are handcuffed!"
Gould's plots had also started to meander beginning in the late 1960's, often going off on odd tangents (that had nothing to do with the main story being told, Gould including them mainly because he thought they were amusing) and featuring characters whose motivations and goals seemed to change from strip to strip. Since Gould usually did not plot
Dick Tracy stories in advance, feeling that if he himself could be surprised at the twists and turns of a given plot then the reader would be as well, this was most likely unintentional on his part. Further working against him was the sharp reduction in size and space of newspaper comics that occurred around this period; for example, the
Dick Tracy Sunday strip, which had traditionally been a full-page episode containing twelve panels, was drastically cut in size to a half-page format that offered, at most, eight panels. Gould never really adapted to these new restrictions, and
Tracy plotlines, heretofore usually lasting months, could be told in weeks or even days as he struggled to tell meaningful stories within the limits imposed on him. All of this combined to make comics stories that, while still somewhat entertaining when read in daily installments, do not read nearly as well when brought together as a collection.
Beginning in the early 1950s, the Sunday strip included a frame devoted to a page from the "Crimestoppers' Textbook", a series of handy illustrated hints for the amateur crimefighter. This was named after a short-lived youth group seen in the strip during the late 1940s, led by Junior Tracy, called "Dick Tracy's Crimestoppers." This feature continued until Gould retired from the strip in 1977, though Max Allan Collins would later reinstate it (and it continues to this day). After Gould's retirement, Collins initially replaced the Textbook with "Dick Tracy's Rogues Gallery," a salute to memorable
Tracy villains of the past.
Later years
Gould retired from the strip in 1977 and Dick Tracy was taken over by
Max Allan Collins and longtime Gould assistant
Rick Fletcher. Collins reversed some of Gould's science-fiction changes by having the character Moon Maid killed off in
1978, as well as doing away with other Gould creations of the
1960s and
1970s, and generally taking a less cynical and simplistic view of the
justice system. Rick Fletcher died in
1983 and was succeeded by
Dick Locher, who had assisted Gould on the strip in the late 1950s, early 1960s. In
1992, Tribune writer and columnist
Mike Kilian took over the writing; Kilian died on
October 27,
2005. Since
January 9th,
2006 Dick Locher has been receiving sole credit on the strip, meaning he is now drawing and authoring the storyline.
Chester Gould won the
Reuben Award for the strip in 1959 and 1977. In
1995, the strip was one of twenty included in the
Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative
postage stamps.
Radio
Dick Tracy had a long run on radio, from 1934 weekdays on NBC's New England stations to the ABC network in 1948. Bob Burlen was the first radio Tracy in 1934, and others heard in the role during the
1930s and
1940s were Barry Thompson, Ned Wever and Matt Crowley. The early shows all had 15-minute episodes.
On CBS, with Sterling Products as sponsor, the serial aired four times a week from
February 4,
1935 to
July 11,
1935, moving to Mutual from
September 30,
1935 to
March 24,
1937 with Bill McClintock doing the sound effects. NBC's weekday afternoon run from
January 3,
1938 to
April 28,
1939 had sound effects by Keene Crockett and was sponsored by Quaker Oats, which brought
Dick Tracy into primetime (Saturdays at 7pm and, briefly, Mondays at 8pm) with 30-minute episodes from
April 29,
1939 to
September 30,
1939. The series returned to 15-minute episodes on the ABC Blue Network from
March 15,
1943 to
July 16,
1948, sponsored by Tootsie Rolls, which used the music theme of "Toot Toot, Tootsie" for its 30-minute Saturday ABC series from
October 6,
1945 to
June 1,
1946. Sound effects on ABC were supplied by Walt McDonough and Al Finelli.
Directors of the series included Mitchell Grayson, Charles Powers and Bob White.Cast members at various times included Walter Kinsella as Pat Patton, Helen Lewis as Tess Trueheart and Andy Donnelly and Jackie Kelk as Junior Tracy. Announcers were Ed Herlihy and Dan Seymour.
Film serials
Dick Tracy made his live action debut in a self titled 1937 Republic
serial starring
Ralph Byrd. The charecter proved very popular, and a second serial,
Dick Tracy Returns, appeared in 1938, and
Dick Tracys G-Men in 1939. The last was
Dick Tracy vs. Crime Inc. in 1941.
In these serials Dick Tracy is portrayed as a "
G-man" rather than a police detective, and aside for himself and Junior no comics characters appear in any of the four.
Early feature films
After that Dick Tracy graduated to four feature films, starting with
Dick Tracy, Detective (1945). This was followed by
Dick Tracy vs. Cueball in 1946 and
Dick Tracy's Dilemma in 1947. Perhaps the best known of the films was the last,
Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, with the titlular villain portrayed by
Boris Karloff. The first two films starred Morgan Conway, while in the later two Ralph Byrd reprised his role as Dick Tracy.
Television
The strip also had limited exposure on
television with a short-lived live action series and two
animated ones. In the first cartoon,
Mel Blanc voiced several characters including a junior detectives named
Go-Go Gomez which was essentially a human version of his famous fast mouse
Speedy Gonzales and
Jo Jitsu a specialist in combat and very intelligent; although a parody of
Charlie Chan many elements of Chinese and Japanese Culture were mixed into the character. Tracy would simply sit back and let Gomez and his other subordinate flatfoots mop up crooks like Pruneface, Itchy, Mumbles, Flattop, Cheater Gunsmoke, B.B. Eyes, and Tracy's other idiosyncratic villains. The show has not been seen in years because of its slightly racist undertones and use of ethnic stereotypes and accents, but recently resurfaced on pay-view digital cable channels. The second exposure to television was a feature in
Archie's TV Funnies, produced by
Filmation, which adhered more closely to the comic strip. There was also an unsuccessful
television pilot from the producers of the live action
Batman television series.
1990 film
In
1990,
Warren Beatty revived some interest in the character with his film
Dick Tracy. Beatty directed the movie and starred as Tracy. In the film, Beatty was after a surreal comic strip-inspired world with only primary colors, restyled automobiles, and extensive makeup treatments for Tracy's famed villains. However, some people complained that the weak storyline was slightly overwhelmed by the casting which included stars such as Beatty,
Madonna,
Al Pacino,
Charlie Korsmo,
Dustin Hoffman,
Dick van Dyke, and
R.G Armstrong as well as many other notable cameos. Madonna's soundtrack album
I'm Breathless: Music from and Inspired by Dick Tracy spawned two top-ten hits including "Vogue" and "Hanky Panky". Broadway composer
Stephen Sondheim wrote several songs for the film, including "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)" which won the
Academy Award for Best Song. There were also several other
unreleased Madonna songs that were recorded for the
film but not used at all, and several in the film whose versions were changed for the album. The track "Back in Business" in the movie is not at all related to "Back in Business" on the album, for example.
Comic books
The first Dick Tracy comic book was produced in 1947 by Sig Feuchtwanger and was a give away comic in boxes of
Popped Wheat cerial. In January 1948 Dell began the first Dick Tracy comic book series and which ran to 145 issues ending in 1961, though it was published by
Harvey Comics from issue #25.
Dick Tracy was then revived in 1986 by
Blackthorne Publishing and ran for 99 issues. Disney produced a 3 issue series tie in for their 1990 film.
Video game
In August 1990,
Bandai America, Inc. made
Dick Tracy into an
NES game loosley based on Beatty's film. It was also released in
1991 on the
Game Boy.
Sega also made a Dick Tracy video game for the
Sega Genesis and
Master System in 1991 as a
side-scrolling arcade action adventure game.
Ride
Disney had designed a ride for their
Disney MGM Studios theme park in
Orlando, Fl. called Dick Tracy's Crimestoppers, which would have introduced the interactive dark ride technology used in
Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin and
Men in Black: Alien Attack!. The ride was killed by several factors: one being the financial disappointment of the movie's run in theaters and the second being that Eisner was not keen to the idea of tourists "shooting up" bad guys.
Recent events
Media outlets recently reported that there is a legal battle being waged over just who owns the rights to the Dick Tracy character. Warren Beatty has announced plans to make a sequel to his 1990 movie. At the same time, television producers have announced plans for a new Dick Tracy TV series. Both sides claim that they are the legal owners of the rights to Dick Tracy. A lawsuit is pending.
Although the comic strip's public profile has diminished since the 1990 Beatty film, it is still run in several newspapers. Apart from that, it is a common
allusion in
North America for unusual-looking criminals often to be described as resembling the strip's grotesque villains, while the lead character's wrist communicator is a typical example used when the possibility of an actual communication device being developed along the lines of something from science fiction is raised.
Filmography
*
Dick Tracy (
1937, serial, 15 episodes, starring
Ralph Byrd)
*
Dick Tracy (1937, feature version of the above serial, starring Ralph Byrd)
*
Dick Tracy Returns (
1938 serial, 15 episodes starring
Ralph Byrd)
*
Dick Tracy's G-Men (
1939, serial, 15 episodes, starring Ralph Byrd)
*
Dick Tracy vs. Crime Inc.(
1941, serial, 15 episodes, starring Ralph Byrd)
*
Dick Tracy (
1945, film starring
Morgan Conway)
*
Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (
1946, film starring Morgan Conway)
*
Dick Tracy's Dilemma (
1947, film starring Ralph Byrd)
*
Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947, film starring Ralph Byrd)
*
Dick Tracy (1950-1951, live action television series starring Ralph Byrd)
*
The Dick Tracy Show (1961, animated television series with voices including
Everett Sloane and
Mel Blanc)
*
Dick Tracy (
1967, television pilot starring
Ray McDonnell)
*
Archie's T.V. Funnies,
Dick Tracy episode,
1971*
Dick Tracy (
1990, film starring
Warren Beatty)
*In
Al Capp's
Li'l Abner, there is a comic-in-the-comic detective called
Fearless Fosdick, clearly modeled on Dick Tracy.
*Many of the comic characters were based on local citizens of
Woodstock, Illinois where
Chester Gould wrote the majority of the strip. However, Gould modeled many characters after close associates like his publisher,
Joseph Patterson, as Big Frost and even himself, as Pear-Shape Tone.
* In an episode of
Superman: The Animated Series which starred
Gilbert Gottfried as imp
Mr. Mxyzptlk who comes literally out of the comic section Clark Kent is reading-look closely-one of the comic strips on the newspaper page is Dick Tracy.
*Dick Tracy's name was the inspiration for the name
Dick Grayson, the first
Robin*A
Daffy Duck cartoon spoofed Dick Tracy as "Duck Tuacy".
*
Dick Tracy: "Black Pearl of Osisis" (2/8/38)*
List of recurring characters in Dick Tracy*
List of Film Serials*
Dick Tracy comic strip*
Don Markstein's Toonopedia - Dick Tracy*
Dick Tracy Pinbacks*
NCS Awards*
1937 Dick Tracy Serial in Public Domain from Intenet Archive*
Dick Tracy, Detective, 1945 feature film from Internet Archive*
Dick Tacy vs. Cueball, 1946 feature film from Internet Archive*
Dick Tracy's Dilemma, 1947 feature film from Internet Archive*
Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, 1947 feature film from Internet Archive*
A detailed database and cover gallery for Dick Tracy's many Comic Book incarnations
