The Deputy Dawg Show–a cartoon series from the studio Terrytoons–aired on television during the last years of legal segregation in the early 1960s, and Jim Crow in the South significantly shaped the program. The show’s official advertising agency developed promotional events for the cartoon in segregated venues. A major film company distributed episodes of the series for segregated movie theaters. Also, the program’s main character–a southern deputy as a white, anthropomorphic dog–became an unofficial symbol of southern law enforcement during the Jim Crow era, and skin color influenced how people responded to the figure.
Larz Bourne, a southerner from Tennessee, created the series while at Terrytoons in New York. He had entered the animation business in Florida, when Max Fleischer ran his studio there in the late 1930s and early ’40s. After serving in World War II, he moved to New York to work as a writer at Famous Studios, and while there he set many cartoons in the South. In the mid-’50s he relocated to Terrytoons, and in 1959 the studio began production on his Deputy Dawg series. According to the Sarasota Journal of April 25, 1963, Bourne wanted to create what he called a “Dixie-voiced” character.The program depicts the South in contemporary terms–a rarity for a cartoon. It is not set in antebellum times, unlike parodies of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, nor does it romanticize Reconstruction as Walt Disney’s film Song of the South does. To an extent the series borrows from Disney’s presentation of southerners as anthropomorphic animals. Deputy Dawg has more social power than the other animals at the swamp–none of whom are white. Muskie Muskrat, who shares the brown skin color of African Americans, is the white dog’s most frequent antagonist. Also, Muskie is prone to stealing eggs from the Sheriff’s hen house, reflecting the ethnic stereotype of African American laborers stealing chickens from slaveholders and employers. On the other hand, Deputy Dawg drives an automobile and uses a telephone. He does not glorify the Confederacy but readily admits that the North won the Civil War in the episode Rabid Rebel. Also, many episodes gently rib regional stereotypes. “Everybody’s friendly here in the South,” says Muskie in the episode The Space Varmint; Deputy Dawg refers to the contraction “y’all” as “fluent South-land” in Welcome Mischa Mouse.
The television network CBS owned Terrytoons at the time but chose to syndicate the program instead of directly airing it. CBS hired the advertising agency Liller, Neal, Battle & Lindsey (LNBL) of Atlanta, Georgia to handle the series, and LNBL relied significantly on southern businesses to support the cartoon. Southerners William W. Neal of North Carolina, C. K. Liller of Atlanta, and James L. Battle of Atlanta founded the agency in 1940 and attracted regional sponsors for radio and television programs for years. For The Deputy Dawg Show, LNBL secured sponsorship from fellow Atlantan Herman W. Lay of Lay’s Potato Chips. Lay’s company had a strong regional consumer base, and the viewers who saw the show in the South could also buy his chips at local stores. His company invested $400,000–almost all of its budget–into sponsoring the cartoon.
CBS also used southerners to reach out to broadcasters in their region. Three of the network’s southern branch managers–James Thrash of Atlanta, George Deiderick of St. Louis, and Carter Ringslop of Dallas–pitched The Deputy Dawg Show at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention in early 1960. After two weeks of sales in May 1960, CBS made $600,000 in sales to fifteen major television stations. The network packaged the 104 short cartoons comprising the series as twenty-six half-hour blocks, thus allowing four episodes per block. By the following month LNBL sold the series to forty-five markets in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and five stations outside the Deep South.
The Deputy Dawg Show was an instant success upon its debut that fall. The show topped the ratings in seventeen of the forty-five markets where it aired during November 1960. Of those seventeen cities where the program dominated, only four were not in the South. CBS immediately went to work on a second batch episodes after the reports of high ratings, and it completed another 104 films in the spring of 1961. Also, the program attracted three million viewers in over one million households between 1960 and 1962. As advertisements for Lay’s potato chips aired during the commercial breaks, the company sold fifteen percent more chips during those two years. Lay’s $400,000 gamble yielded a lucrative payoff.
However, some civil rights activists in the South saw Deputy Dawg as a symbol of police enforcement of segregation laws against African Americans. In the summer of 1961, college students integrated some chartered buses and drove through the Deep South to test recent federal desegregation of interstate buses. Officers in Mississippi arrested the “Freedom Riders,” and a judge sent them to the Maximum Security Unit at the state penitentiary. The riders loudly sang songs to keep up their spirits while incarcerated. When a portly prison deputy named G. M. Tyson told them in a thick drawl to stop singing or he would take their mattresses, they sang anyway. In Stokely Carmichael’s autobiography Ready for Revolution, he recalled that he and his fellow student inmates derisively nicknamed Tyson “Deputy Dawg.”
Segregation affected promotional gimmicks for the show. LNBL and Lay’s arranged a “Deputy Dawg Coloring Contest” at a television station in Greensboro, North Carolina in the fall of 1961, but at the time Greensboro was a community of rigid segregation and tense ethnic relations. Student activists had started anti-segregation sit-ins there in February 1960, and since then European Americans grew increasingly hostile to African Americans’ demands for civil rights. Thus, efforts at desegregation in Greensboro met with crushing resistance. The contest took place in this volatile climate, and a costumed Deputy Dawg appeared at the local station to congratulate the contest winners–all European Americans–in person.
Throughout the second season (1961-62), LNBL and Lay’s coordinated a publicity tour for The Deputy Dawg Show. They arranged for a person in costume as Deputy Dawg to greet attendees at various events and to make appearances at stores. As with their marketing to television stations, the agency and company restricted the star’s travels to the South. Consequently, African American children had to suffer Jim Crow’s humiliation in order to see Deputy Dawg in person. This idea was not novel, for such promotions for cartoons had taken place for decades. However, Deputy Dawg’s southern excursion was affected by rapid changes in Jim Crow.
When the tour began in September 1961, it barely missed becoming engulfed in a prolonged civil rights demonstration. That month the live-action Deputy Dawg visited the Midtown Shopping Center in the downtown area of Albany, Georgia. The city was semi-rural and rigidly segregated, and only the most liberal European Americans there referred to African Americans by the respectable term “Negroes.” No African Americans worked in the downtown stores, nor did they serve in the police department or in local government positions. Consequently, only European Americans greeted the star at Midtown. Later that fall the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee brought its year-old sit-in campaign to town, and the activists continued desegregation efforts there through 1963.
From Albany the sit-ins continued to spread throughout the South. Some communities responded by stubbornly holding on to Jim Crow, but others began to slowly desegregate. By the time the costumed Deputy Dawg appeared at a parade in Atlanta, Georgia in the summer of 1962, the city desegregated buses, trolleys, restaurants, movie houses, and some public schools. LNBL and Lay’s had nothing to do with this progress, but they could now claim that their character appeared at an integrated event.
Terrytoons did not produce new episodes of The Deputy Dawg Show for the 1962-63 season. While the first two seasons remained in television syndication, CBS put six old episodes in theatrical circulation via Twentieth Century-Fox. This decision once again placed the character in segregated venues. In Kingsport, Tennessee, the Taylor Drive-In Theater played the cartoons Where There’s Smoke and Nobody’s Ghoul. The character received even greater exposure in the much larger city of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for Deputy Dawg episodes appeared in two theaters there. The Dalton Theater presented Big Chief No Treaty in February 1963 and Astronut twelve months later. Meanwhile, the Regina Theater ran Nobody’s Ghoul in July 1963. These facilities either excluded African Americans entirely or exiled them to balcony seats providing poor visibility of the screens.
After one more season of new episodes (1963-64), Terrytoons ceased production of The Deputy Dawg Show. Bourne created series spinoffs Astronut and Possible Possum for the studio, but neither of them generated the same intense popularity as the canine officer had. In addition, the show’s demise coincided with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the summer of 1964, which made segregation illegal. The death of Jim Crow gave Deputy Dawg the distinction as the last new cartoon character shaped by the discriminatory system. Reruns of The Deputy Dawg Show aired in syndicated television for the next two decades, but the days of costumed characters visiting “whites only” venues were over.