Little Golden Books

Now, Blake, what is it you've been reading? Have you been reading little golden books?

Good morning, everyone.

Welcome to Australia Overnight.

It's an open...

So you finish the sentence, in other words, Back In My Day.

The other thing that we probably didn't get to, but we can probably certainly have a look at it, Little Golden Books.

A great read of Little Golden Books that have been around a long time.

But the first of those Little Golden Books came online.

Tom Goldberg, who was a longtime editor.

He started with Western Publishing, Golden Books, and Disney eventually hired him to handle their comic books that were published, created at the Disney Studios, but published overseas.

So apparently he was always looking for somebody to work on those and I always say he was the first person or almost the first person who I talked to who assumed that I could do what I was claiming I could do or wanted to do.

There was no like, what makes you think you can do this? You know, who are you? He was like, fine, let's give it a try.

Mm.

So from the 1930s they would publish, you know, book titles, and, and by the '40s and '50s you get into the Little Golden Books and so on.

And so there were often people up in Wisconsin of all places-

[laughs]

So the movie Wicked, let's say, then these huge companies are, you know, cashing in, capitalizing on witchcraft.

So they're putting, do you remember Little Golden Books? I remember that when I was a little girl, Little Golden Books has Wicked Books.

I saw those in the local BJ's warehouse and I was shocked, honestly.

I guess I shouldn't be at this point, but it is sad to see the increase and it is in everybody's face.

I love like, whether it was going to be comics or puppetry or, you know, children's books.

Um, I love little golden books was like my favorite thing as a kid.

Um, you know, uh, so I was just collecting as many of those as I could.

Um, And I think that's when it kind of was like really starting to take shape, but I would love to do this.

Um, and then, you know, about 10 pages in the book, you're like, oh my God, I still have like 22 pages to go on this thing.

Yeah.

360 hours exactly yeah you're starting to look at the clock and be like hi you know this is creeping into like what budget and so you yeah some of that starts to play into it you know like i gotta stay on course here and um and at that same time i'm juggling you know i work on usually about four to six books a year so you know you're i'm having to jump over here and the different worlds that can get challenging when you're like over here i'm working on one that's as I started doing some of these new like little golden books that are a little bit more realistic.

So it's like, you know, you realize them and now you're over here and it's very whimsical.

I've had a lot of it is.

But some of this stuff basically formed what we understand to be early Archie and the Golden Books, that old version of the American Sonic lore for a long time that was kind of consistent across several media products.

So what we had here is, like, it's a version of what would become SatAM, but with lots of other stuff in it.

We've got, like, flipping...

There's actual colours there.

Yeah.

It's much more in line with, you know, what we saw in early Archie and the Golden Books, where it was more like kind of a lot of factories and not, you know, the big fortress is the centerpiece.

I

And one particular artist stood head and shoulders above everyone else at Disney.

He was the anonymous artist who wrote, designed, and inked Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics, published under Disney's license by Dell Comics, a division of Western Publishing, which, by the way, was best known for its Little Golden Books series of children's books.

This artist was good enough, and his style was distinctive enough, that fans and fellow artists started to recognize his work.

They called him the Good Duck Artist, or simply the Duck Man.

I have kids.

I mean, my kids are old now, but when they were little, I can't recall singing these fairy tales or singing these nursery rhymes or talking about these fairy tales or, you know, most of the books you read were, you know, what was that brand? Golden Books or whatever it was.

And a lot of those books were based off of old fairy tales, but they were sanitized versions to have happy endings, but not to actually warn kids, children of what could happen.

And as we've been, as I've been doing this show for, you know, ever now, almost six years, we've talked about these times.