This “Mickey Mouse hat” cartoon, from 1958, is one that I completely lost track of until I discovered it recently during a search of Wall Street Journals at the library. I was very glad to see it again after all these years (forty-nine years, to be exact).
For those of you who are too young to remember, this is the kind of cliff-hanger sign-offs that were used every day on the radio soap operas.
Was there ever a time when Alex Trebek and "Jeopardy" (my wife's favorite TV show) weren't around? I worked for a long time on "Jeopardy" gags and finally came up with this one, which I thought was pretty good. I spent a lot of time wording the caption "just right", and even tried to make the character look reasonably like Mr. Trebek.
However, my opinion of the worthiness of the gag wasn't shared by the cartoon editors — the cartoon was soundly rejected everywhere, until the Florida Bar News finally took it on. I'm still disappointed that it didn't get a bigger audience.
