Friday, January 31, 2025

Friday nostalgia: Who remembers 1970s flip-it cartoon books?

Flip books — with their illustrations that change slightly from one page to the next and thus appear to be in motion when "flipped through" rapidly — have a long history that arguably dates back to the 15th century.

For some of my generation, our introduction to flip books was with the pocket-sized books of the 1970s that featured cartoon characters spanning Walt Disney, Looney Tunes, Woody Woodpecker, etc. The books measured about 3.5 inches by 5 inches, and, while all of them had illustrated tales, many of them had the additional novelty of a flip-it story in the upper-right corner that you could thumb through. 

There's this book, for example, The Lost Road Runner Mine, which is credited to Carl Fallberg and was published by Western Publishing Company in 1974 as a Merrigold Press Big Little Book

Fallberg (1915-1996) was a longtime writer/cartoonist, so I'm guessing he's the illustrator of this volume. The story itself is odd, as it gives names and dialogue to Road Runner and his offspring. There's also a villain called Grumbley. Realistically, it's noted that the cactus-filled desert is "only 120 degrees" in the shade. I can vouch for that now. Sigh.

There are a lot of Big Little Books with flip-it cartoons on eBay these days, typically selling for only a few bucks apiece. I'll put this one into a Little Free Library; hopefully someone from Generation Alpha discovers it and is delighted and intrigued. But I wanted to blog about it here first, before downsizing it as part of my Resimplify Me efforts, which have been going well.

What are you memories of flip-it books? Have you kept any favorites on your shelves all these years? Please comment below!

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