Once again, coming to you from the "I had no idea how complicated this would be when I started" department, we have Dinty Moore, the well known brand of canned soups and stews from the Hormel company. The Dinty Moore brand has included a number of different Hormel products over the years, but the best known is, of course, the beef stew. Some in the know, such as myself, may be aware that a comic strip character of the same name existed prior to the launch of Hormel's brand, but even they may not know exactly how the name made it from the newspaper onto the can. I certainly wasn't aware of all the complexities, until now.
In 1913, cartoonist George McManus launched the comic strip "Bringing Up Father," which he wrote and drew for William Randolph Hearst's New York American newspaper, and which was syndicated to newspapers across the country by what would later become known as King Features Syndicate. While it isn't well remembered now, it was very popular in its day, and by the end of its first decade had already spawned several stage plays, live action and animated movie shorts, and multiple reprint book collections. By the time McManus died in 1954, the strip had been syndicated and reprinted in book form worldwide, there had been several live action movies, and McManus had earned over 12 million dollars from the strip. In short, the strip and its characters were very widely known around the world in the early to mid 20th century. After 1954 it was taken over by one of his assistants, Zeke Zekley, and ran all the way to the end of the century, ending in 2000.
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