replied the voice at the other end. [64] The character was voiced by Frank Graham.[65]. I am proud to see the classic logo - my father worked for more than 30 years at Lockheed Martin Advanced Development Projects, known as Skunk Works. (A familiar radio personality, Capp was frequently heard on the NBC broadcast series, Monitor. These scaled-down demonstrators, built in only 18 months, were a revolutionary step forward in aviation technology because of their extremely small radar cross-section. [1] Lockheed took over the building but the sour smell of bourbon mash lingered, partly because the group of buildings continued to store barrels of aging whiskey. Durward Kirby was the announcer. They included Andy Amato, Harvey Curtis, Walter Johnson and, notably, a young Frank Frazetta, who penciled the Sunday continuity from studio roughs from 1954 to the end of 1961 before his fame as a fantasy artist. After this, Capp simply expanded Li'l Abner by another row, and filled the rest of the space with a page-wide title panel and a small panel called Advice fo' Chillun. Mind Works offers you the expertise . 2023 Lockheed Martin Corporation. Other fictional locales included Skonk Hollow, El Passionato, Kigmyland, the Republic of Crumbumbo, Lo Kunning, Faminostan, Planets Pincus Number 2 and 7, Pineapple Junction and, most notably, the Valley of the Shmoon. A superhuman dynamo, Mammy did all the household chores and provided her charges with no fewer than eight meals a day of "po'k chops" and "tarnips" (as well as local Dogpatch delicacies like "candied catfish eyeballs" and "trashbean soup"). [69][70] Starring Peter Palmer, Leslie Parrish, Julie Newmar, Stella Stevens, Stubby Kaye, Billie Hayes, Howard St. John, Joe E. Marks, Carmen Alvarez, William Lanteau and Bern Hoffman, with cameos by Jerry Lewis, Robert Strauss, Ted Thurston, Alan Carney, Valerie Harper and Donna Douglas. The term "Skunk Works" came from Al Capp's satirical, hillbilly comic strip Lil Abner, which was immensely popular from 1935 through the 1950s. In the fourth type, according to MacLean, there were only two: Pogo and Li'l Abner. After 1989, Lockheed reorganized its operations and relocated the Skunk Works to Site 10 at U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, where it remains in operation today. Since the system entered service with the U.S. Air Force in late 2014, Auto GCAS has been credited with seven saves eight pilots and seven F-16s. [38] Other promotional tie-ins included the Lena the Hyena Contest (1946), the Name the Shmoo Contest (1949), the Nancy O. [57] "When he retired Li'l Abner, newspapers ran expansive articles and television commentators talked about the passing of an era. The comprehensive series titled Li'l Abner: The Complete Dailies & Color Sundays, is planned to be a reprinting of the complete 43-year history of Li'l Abner[60] spanning a projected 20 volumes, began on April 7, 2010. Written and drawn by Al Capp (1909-1979), the strip ran for 43 years - from August 13, 1934, through November 13, 1977. In the comic strip Li'l Abner, the "Skonk Works" makes oil from the ground up dead skunks for some unknown . Consequently, Johnson's organization operated out of a rented circus tent, and the adjacent manufacturing plant produced a strong odor that permeated throughout the tent. Lockheed was chosen to develop the jet because of its past interest in jet development and its previous contracts with the Air Force. Fosdick lived in squalor at the dilapidated boarding house run by his mercenary landlady, Mrs. Flintnose. No one was to discuss the project outside the small organization, and team members were warned to be careful of how they answered the phones. Early in the continuity Capp a few times referred to Dogpatch being in Kentucky, but he was careful afterward to keep its location generic, probably to avoid cancellations from offended Kentucky newspapers. First in the 1979 The New Shmoo (later incorporated into Fred and Barney Meet the Shmoo), and again from 1980 to 1981 in the Flintstone Comedy Show, in the Bedrock Cops segments. This aircraft first flew in 1966 and remained in service until 1998. (Response: ", "What's good for General Bullmoose is good for, "Th' ideel o' ev'ry one hunnerd percent, red-blooded American boy! Fellow employees quickly adopted the name for their mysterious division of Lockheed and eventually "Skonk Works" became "Skunk Works.". Skunk Works is an industry leader in rapid prototyping, pushing the boundaries of whats possible to quickly design, develop and test innovative solutions. What sets the Skunk Works apart is its unique approach created by founder Kelly Johnson. "[51] At its peak, the strip was read daily by 70 million Americans (when the U.S. population was only 180 million), with a circulation of more than 900 newspapers in North America and Europe. His engineers turned one out in 143 days, creating the P-80 Shooting Star, a sleek, lightning-fast fighter that went on to win historys first jet-versus-jet dogfight over Korea in 1950. During the entirety of the Cold War, the Skunk Works was located in Burbank, California, on the eastern side of Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport (341203N 1182107W / 34.200768N 118.351826W / 34.200768; -118.351826). ), yet Capp would not budge. Ben Rich and "Kelly" Johnson set the origin as June 1943 in Burbank, California; they relate essentially the same chronology in their autobiographies. as well as some purely fanciful worlds of Capp's imagination: Exceeding every burlesque stereotype of Appalachia, the impoverished backwater of Dogpatch consisted mostly of hopelessly ramshackle log cabins, "tarnip" fields, pine trees and "hawg" wallows. Capp himself originated the stories, wrote the dialogue, designed the major characters, rough penciled the preliminary staging and action of each panel, oversaw the finished pencils, and drew and inked the faces and hands of the characters. [61] The following titles are all single-issue, educational comic books and pamphlets produced for various public services: In addition, Dogpatch characters were used in national campaigns for the U.S. Treasury, the Cancer Foundation, the March of Dimes, the National Heart Fund, the Sister Kenny Foundation, the Boy Scouts of America, Community Chest, the National Reading Council, Minnesota Tuberculosis and Health Association, Christmas Seals, the National Amputation Foundation and Disabled American Veterans,[63] among others. The musical has since become a perennial favorite of high school and amateur productions, due to its popular appeal and modest production requirements. Three members of the original Broadway cast did not appear in the film version: Charlotte Rae (who was replaced by Billie Hayes early in the stage production), Edie Adams (who was pregnant during the filming) and Tina Louise. We develop laser weapon systems, radio frequency and other directed energy technologies for air, ground and sea platforms to provide an affordable countermeasure alternative. Kelly Johnson's elite engineering group was originally housed in a rented circus tent adjacent to a smelly plastics factory. [3] Theirs is the official Lockheed Skunk Works story: The Air Tactical Service Command (ATSC) of the Army Air Force met with Lockheed Aircraft Corporation to express its need for a jet fighter. ", was a devastating satire of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's notorious exploitation by DC Comics over Superman (see above excerpt). Our Multi-Domain Operations/Joint All-Domain Operations solutions provide a complete picture of the battlespace and empowers warfighters to quickly make decisions that drive action. [9] She is consistently the toughest character throughout Li'l Abner. Long before today's widespread use of drones, the Skunk Works built an unmanned aerial vehicle that could hitch a ride aboard an A-12. Of the 552 public libraries in Texas, only 73 received this award in 2022. However, Gussman consulted closely with Capp on the storylines. It became a woman-empowering rite at high schools and college campuses, long before the modern feminist movement gained prominence. A total of six Collier trophies, the most prestigious award in the aeronautics industry, have been collected by the Skunk Works division since 1943, but its quite possible the divisions most impressive legacy has yet to be written. Li'l Abner featured a whole menagerie of allegorical animals over the years each one was designed to satirically showcase another disturbing aspect of human nature. Outside the comic strip, the practical basis of a Sadie Hawkins dance is simply one of gender role-reversal. The F-104 Starfighter, the first Mach 2 aircraft, was developed to compete against Soviet MiGs in the early 1950s. Her moniker was a pun on both salami and Salome. [11] His first words were "po'k chop", and that remained his favorite food. One month after the ATSC and Lockheed meeting, the young engineer Clarence L. Kelly Johnson and other associate engineers hand delivered the initial XP-80 proposal to the ATSC. According to the strip, scores of locals were done in yearly by the . The secret facility was housed in a large tent at what is now Burbank Airport. Mencken credits the postwar mania for adding "-nik" to the ends of adjectives to create nouns as beginning not with beatnik or Sputnik, but earlier in the pages of Li'l Abner. [1][2] In 1964, Johnson told Look magazine that the bourbon distillery was the first of five Lockheed skunk works locations. During the development of the P-80, work was carried out in a circus tent, with harsh chemicals from the nearby manufacturing plant filling it with a strong odor. Before long he was in hundreds more, with a total readership exceeding 60,000,000. Later, Capp licensed and was part-owner of an 800-acre (3.2km2) $35 million theme park called Dogpatch USA near Harrison, Arkansas. "[43] Capp has been compared, at various times, to Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jonathan Swift, Lawrence Sterne, and Rabelais. Al Capp was a master of the arts of marketing and promotion. Fosdick also achieved considerable exposure as the long-running advertising spokesman for Wildroot Cream-Oil, a popular men's hair product of the postwar period. Just four years later, amidst growing fears over a potential Soviet missile attack on the United States, Skunk Works engineerswho often worked ten hours a day, six days a weekcreated the U-2, the worlds first dedicated spy plane. According to publisher Denis Kitchen, Capp's "hapless Dogpatchers hit a nerve in Depression-era America. January 8, 2021 What is Skunk Works? His appearances on NBC's The Tonight Show spanned three emcees; Steve Allen, Jack Paar and Johnny Carson. In one storyline Dogpatch's "Cannonball Express" train, after 1,563 tries, finally delivers its "cargo" to Dogpatch citizens on October 12, 1946, Receiving a 13-year stack of newspapers, Li'l Abner's family realizes that the Great Depression is on and that banks should close; they race to take their money out of the bank before realizing they have no money to begin with. In his essay "The Decline of the Comics", (Canadian Forum, January 1954) literary critic Hugh MacLean classified American comic strips into four types: daily gag, adventure, soap opera, and "an almost lost comic ideal: the disinterested comment on life's pattern and meaning." Wed!! The logo, which features a skunk standing on its hind feet with its front legs folded on his chest and smiling confidently, has generated some confusion for generations born well after LilAbner was pulled from the comic pages.