On Today's Little Oop - 2 August 2020

It must have sounded like a good idea. The new creative team would start a new Sunday strip focusing on Alley Oop as a child. But, as CIDU Bill posted soon after the first Sunday, who ever wondered what Alley Oop was like as a child. But Joey may have pulled something when she flexed her creative muscle. Bad idea after bad idea flowed naturally like a mountain stream going downhill. She gave Oop a family, a downtrodden dad and pleasantly plump mom as well as a baby sister with a smelly diaper, good for many chuckles. To keep Oop company, Joey gave him a new, best friend and one that she could check off her socially conscious checklist by making him black. I was going to say "African American" but that made little sense because in this time frame there is no Africa or America. Making him black makes no sense either because Moo, and Lem, are tiny societies with a homogenous population. They could all be black or they could all be white but both wouldn't be possible. Her new creations, rather than looking like Hamlin's original creations, looked more like they were from Bedrock, home of  1960's cartoon series "The Flintstones". And increasingly Moo began to look more like Bedrock with buildings, jobs, businesses and domesticated dinosaurs. Joey, though, ventured to take it a step further by having some dinosaurs humanized, as shown by Little Oop's gym teacher. Anybody thinking about it for a second could see plot holes all over the place but Joey just doesn't get it or care.While the Sunday strip fit with the concept of a weekly, one-shot humor strip, much like a Sunday episode of "Gasoline Alley" or "Funky Winkerbean" but the problem, though, was the strips were neither funny nor interesting and she seemed to quickly tire of the locale. Enter little Penelope, a precocious (is there any other kind?) ten year-old, who uses her self-made time-machine to plop into Moo from 2020, startling our little hero. (think of the odds of two time-machine inventors entering the same place in roughly the same time-frame - amazing!) And so, Penelope brings Little Oop to the 21st Century where he seems to be nonplussed as well as not even missing his family. Today's strip involves Penelope working on a diorama because that's what little geniuses like to do in their summer vacations. Too bad a meteor can't take care of our favorite cartoonist.