Beginning in the mid-1960s, the strip became a forum for Capp's increasingly conservative political views.

The gag was often at his own expense, as in the above 1951 sequence showing Capp's interaction with " fans " ( see excerpt ), or in his 1955 Disneyland parody, " Hal Yappland.

According to one anecdote ( from Al Capp Remembered, 1994 ), Capp and his brother Elliot ducked out of a dull party at Capp's home — leaving Walt Kelly alone to fend for himself entertaining a group of Argentine envoys who didn't speak English.

Between 1952 and 1972, he hosted at least five television shows – three different talk shows called The Al Capp Show ( 1952 and 1968 ) and Al Capp ( 1971 –' 72 ), Al Capp's America ( a live " chalk talk ," with Capp providing a barbed commentary while sketching cartoons, 1954 ), and a CBS game show called Anyone Can Win ( 1953 ).

In 1968, a theme park called Dogpatch USA opened at Marble Falls, Arkansas, based on Capp's work and with his support.

In September 1972, Bushnell and Alcorn installed the Pong prototype at a local bar, Andy Capp's Tavern.

Though his uncle Tiny was perpetually frozen at 15½ " y ' ars " old, Honest Abe gradually grew from infant to grade school age, and became a dead ringer for Washable Jones — the star of Capp's early " topper " strip.

* Dogpatch USA: In 1968, an $ 35 million theme park called Dogpatch USA opened at Marble Falls, Arkansas, based on Capp's work and with his support.

Drawn by cartoonist Steve Stiles, the new Abner was approved by Capp's widow and brother, Elliott Caplin, but Al Capp's daughter, Julie Capp, objected at the last minute and permission was withdrawn.

He hosted at least five television programs between 1952 and 1972 — three different talk shows called The Al Capp Show ( twice ), Al Capp, Al Capp's America ( a live " chalk talk ," with Capp providing a barbed commentary while sketching cartoons ), and a game show called Anyone Can Win.

Al Capp's son Colin Capp worked at the park that year, and met and married Vicki Cox, the actress portraying Moonbeam McSwine.

During his twenties, he worked for Al Capp and his brother Elliott Caplin at the Capp family-owned Toby Press, which published Al Capp's Shmoo Comics, among other titles.

He remains the only cartoonist to be embraced by TV ; no other comic artist to date has come close to Capp's televised exposure.

After Capp's death, the Shmoo was used in two Hanna-Barbera produced Saturday morning cartoon series for TV.

* Al Capp's America ( 1954 ) TV series

In 1967, she portrayed Mammy Yokum in an unsold TV pilot adapted from Al Capp's Li ' l Abner.

Capp's father, a failed businessman and reportedly an amateur cartoonist, introduced him to drawing as a form of therapy.

The controversy, as reported in Time, centered on Capp's portrayal of the United States Senate.

The controversy, as reported in Time, centered on Capp's portrayal of the U. S. Senate.

From a recommendation, writer Jerry Caplin, a. k. a. Jerry Capp, brother of Li ' l Abner creator Al Capp, invited Adams to draw samples for Capp's proposed Ben Casey comic strip, based on the popular television medical-drama series.

Conceptually based on Siberia, or perhaps specifically on Birobidzhan, Capp's icy hellhole made its first appearance in Li ' l Abner in April 1946.

The controversy, as reported in Time, centered on Capp's portrayal of the US Senate.

Capp's creation captured the imagination of young people, particularly in high schools and on college campuses.

In 1966, the cave was purchased, along with the Raney's trout pond, by the developers of Dogpatch USA, a theme park based on Al Capp's Li ' l Abner comic strip, and was intended to be incorporated into the park's attractions.

If a sufficiently-wide range of variables were to be tested, a normal shmoo plot would show an operating envelope of some shape not unlike Al Capp's Shmoo, but in practice, this might damage the device under test, and finer-grained views are of much more interest, particularly focusing on published component margins ( e. g .,-5 % Vcc ).

Examples of other media which take part in metafictiveness are Al Capp's Fearless Fosdick in Li ' l Abner, the Tales of the Black Freighter in Watchmen, or the Itchy and Scratchy Show within The Simpsons, as well as the computer game Myst in which the player represents a person who has found a book named Myst and been transported inside it.

After Capp's death in 1979, the Shmoo gained its own animated series as part of Fred and Barney Meet the Shmoo ( which consisted of reruns of The New Fred and Barney Show mixed with the Shmoo's own cartoons ; the two pairs of characters didn't actually " meet ").

Capp's parents were both natives of Latvia whose families had migrated to New Haven in the 1880s.

" It was the prevailing opinion among his friends that Capp's Swiftian satire was, to some degree, a creatively channeled, compensatory response to his disability.

According to Capp's brother Elliot, Alfred had finished all of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw by the time he turned 13.

During one of Fisher's extended vacations, Capp's Joe Palooka story arc introduced a stupid, coarse, oafish mountaineer named " Big Leviticus ," a crude prototype.

( Leviticus was actually much closer to Capp's later villains Lem and Luke Scragg, than to the much more appealing and innocent Li ' l Abner.

Capp peopled his comic strip with an assortment of memorable characters, including Marryin ' Sam, Hairless Joe, Lonesome Polecat, Evil-Eye Fleegle, General Bullmoose, Lena the Hyena, Senator Jack S. Phogbound ( Capp's caricature of the anti-New Deal Dixiecrats ), the ( shudder!

Perhaps Capp's most popular creations were the Shmoos, creatures whose incredible usefulness and generous nature made them a threat to civilization as we know it.

Situations often take the characters to other destinations, including New York City, Washington, D. C., Hollywood, tropical islands, the Moon, Mars, and some purely fanciful worlds of Capp's invention.

" Yet though Capp's storylines often wandered far afield, his hillbilly setting remained a central touchstone, serving both as a microcosm and a distorting carnival mirror of broader American society.

Fearless Fosdick — and Capp's other spoofs like " Little Fanny Gooney " ( 1952 ) and " Jack Jawbreaker "— were almost certainly an early inspiration for Harvey Kurtzman's Mad Magazine, which began in 1952 as a comic book that specifically parodied other comics in the same distinctive style and subversive manner.

" Just about anything could be a target for Capp's satire — in one storyline Li ' l Abner is revealed to be the missing link between ape and man.

Li ' l Abner: A Study in American Satire by Arthur Asa Berger ( Twayne, 1969 ) contained serious analyses of Capp's narrative technique, his use of dialogue, self-caricature and grotesquerie, the place of Li ' l Abner in American satire, and the significance of social criticism and the graphic image.

" One of the few strips ever taken seriously by students of American culture ," wrote Professor Berger, " Li ' l Abner is worth studying ... because of Capp's imagination and artistry, and because of the strip's very obvious social relevance.

) Two years later, Capp's studio issued Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a 1958 biographical comic book distributed by The Fellowship of Reconciliation.

But in 1952, when General Motors president Charles E. Wilson, nominated for a cabinet post, told Congress "... what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa ," he inspired one of Capp's greatest satires — the introduction of General Bullmoose, the robust, ruthless, and ageless business tycoon.

" This character, along with the Shmoos, helped cement Capp's favor with the Left, and would increase their outrage a decade later when Capp, a former Franklin D. Roosevelt liberal, switched targets.

It wasn't the setting that made Capp's strip such a huge success.

The Capp-Fisher feud was well known in cartooning circles, and it grew more personal as Capp's strip eclipsed Joe Palooka in popularity.

Fisher hired away Capp's top assistant, Moe Leff.