Some time in late 1969(?) or 1970, DC comics and ABC created product tie-in comic books and cartoon episodes based on the famous and very popular Mattel toys.
Rumor has it that the cartoon was canceled because it was not much more than a 1/2 hour commercial. As we know Toth designed the characters and created some of his best comic book art in the DC comic book.
Here is the Hotwheels Cartoon opening theme and some small scans of some Toth Newspaper Comic Strip Ads.
Unfortunately not much Toth art in the opening theme bit. It's more like a commercial than an opening theme. If this opening is any indication of the show, I can see why in the "dark ages" of TV that they had some issues with it. Now of course everything is a big product blur; practically every cartoon has toys and vice-versa.
It would be nice to see an episode of this cartoon. IMDB details for the show.
Also as a special bonus, the Mostly Ghostly Music Sharing Blaaahhhggg!!! has a download link to the ghastly tie-in album (which includes the Skyhawks cartoon theme). Who knew they had music too?
The site activity totaly dropped off after the new site code was put in place. Some people report having problems, and I'm not able to recreate them on my side to fix them.
The old forum is still available if people want to tell me what's wrong and I'll try and fix it. Or vote if I should just dump it and go back to the old code.
Sorry if I'm the last to hear this, as I see we lost Dave back in early March, but the Chicago Tribune published the news in their weekly obituary round-up only yesterday (April 6, 2008).
I'm very saddened to hear Dave was so sick and has succumed to his Lukemia, it's a sad loss to the comic world, I'll miss his work.
Here is from the book's description: "Noel Sickles drew comics for three brief years, yet his groundbreaking work on the 1930s aviation adventure series Scorchy Smith is a milestone in the history of newspaper comic strips. Over the past 70 years, however, readers have seen only occasional excerpts of this seminal work. Now, IDW's Library of American Comics presents Scorchy Smith and The Art of Noel Sickles, a comprehensive, oversized volume that collects, for the first time, every Sickles Scorchy strip, from December 1933 through November 1936."
Alex Toth was a contibuter to the old reprints published by Nostalgia Press in the seventies. Now we will have 352 pages of Noel Sickles Scorchy Smith! Cool huh?
After many hours of web development I present to you the new Tothfans version 2.0. This new Tothfans website code allows everyone to participate and contribute content of all sorts in a new and simpler way.
New features:
- Create galleries with images (called "image sets")
- Upload images to other people's image sets
- Post your own articles, news stories, etc. (called "posts")
- Comment on specific images, posts, image sets.
- New front page integrated forums (called "discussions")
- Avatars for your user account.
Think about it as a group contributed newsletter devoted to Alex Toth. Kinda like Wikipedia where you are the contributor. Imagine articles written by fellow tothfans discussing Toth's history, influences, etc. Everyone can contribute themselves rather than going through the hassle of sending me stuff.
Now there is one small catch to this Alex Toth website utopia - to make sure the website is not perverted and turned into a spam free-for-all, all articles go into a queue for approval before contributions appear on the site. So please be patient and allow me some time to review and approve content. My only goal is to keep the site free from spam, inappropriate content, defamation and flame wars.
If I may ask, please be brutally honest and prove some feedback to me on the website. There is still a bunch of rough edges that need smoothing. So, If anything is confusing, broken, or just plain sucks LET ME KNOW (please).
Tothfans has always been the great website it is thanks to all the fantastic and generous participation from far and wide. So let's keep it up and content make our website the best ever.
Sincerely,
Jeff Rose
P.S. Your old forum Username and Password will work to log in. The system will ask you to update some small information only the first time you login in.
