Back In Time

Dogpatch lives again in new documentary

The story has to start way back in 1934, when a cartoonist named Al Capp envisioned a place called Dogpatch. “It’s hard to overstate how big a deal in pop culture ‘Li’l Abner’ was in its day,” Chris Foran wrote in the

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on a “Throwback Thursday” comics day. “The strip began in six newspapers on Aug. 13, 1934. At its peak, [it] was published in more than 900 newspapers in North America, with more than 70 million readers. The strip sparked merchandising juggernauts, TV shows, movies, a Tony-winning Broadway musical and even a theme park.

“‘Li’l Abner’ quickly became a cultural obsession,” Foran went on. “One character — the ‘Shmoo,’ a white blob with a cuddly disposition that could provide all sorts of foodstuffs with ease — was so popular that merchandise in its first year generated more than $25 million in sales (about $245 million in 2016 dollars).”

In addition to Li’l Abner, the characters included his constant suitor, Daisy Mae; Mammy and Pappy Yokum, Abner’s parents; and Sadie Hawkins, “a girl so homely her father staged a footrace in which the unmarried women of Dogpatch pursued the hamlet’s bachelors.”

Growing up in California, Danielle Keller had never heard of Al Capp or Dogpatch, although she did have a vague memory of a musical with the Li’l Abner characters. It wasn’t until 2017, when she started working on a documentary film about the theme park, that she realized: “Those Sadie Hawkins dances I grew up going to? They came about because of that comic strip — which, in a way, was ahead of its time, I guess, on that topic. But how weird it was a big part of my high school experience, and I never knew it!”

On the other hand, filmmakers Jeff and Heather Carter both had very clear memories of the theme park, Dogpatch

Courtesy Photos “I loved riding the tram down the hill into the park,” filmmaker Heather Carter recalls of her own childhood visits to Dogpatch USA. “I remember such anticipation building as we went on the tram. It was literally like being transported to someplace...

Filmmaker Jeff Carter found this picture taken with his dad at Dogpatch USA and was inspired to chronicle the glory years of the theme park between Jasper and Harrison. He says the lasting impression of the park “was a little country, a little...