Dick Tracy - November 5, 2015

Dick Tracy - November 5, 2015
Artist: Joe Staton

Writer: Mike Curtis

When we last left Dick Tracy and Vitamin Flintheart, Vitamin was telling "Richard" about his latest role: Scrooge in "Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol!"

Let's pick up the action in the next day's script:

So, in the Tracyverse, Mr. Magoo is a real person!

This is not a surprise, actually, because as Tracy mentioned, he had worked with Mr. Magoo on a case once.

That was actually 50 years before, as chronicled in the "Dick Tracy and the Mob" episode of "The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo" TV series in 1965.

That series was a spinoff of "Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol" in which Quincy Magoo is presented as a famous actor playing a variety of roles.

On the "Dick Tracy" episode, Tracy sought Magoo's help to infiltrate Pruneface's gang by impersonating the villain Squinty Eyes (as recapped by Tracy in the comic strip).

This meeting was presumably possible because UPA, the cartoon studio Mr. Magoo put on the map, had also produced the astonishingly non-PC "The Dick Tracy Show" cartoon series in 1961.

Another interesting, but no doubt unintentional, tie-in centers around Dick Tracy's voice. It was provided by veteran actor Everett Sloane, who had also done Tracy's voice on the earlier series.

Everett Sloane with Orson Welles in "Citizen Kane" (1941).

Everett Sloane being one of Orson Welles's cronies from the old Mercury Theatre radio days and the portrayer of Marley's Ghost in the famous 1939 Campbell Soup Playhouse broadcast starring Lionel Barrymore!

So, the 2015 Dick Tracy creative team of Joe Staton and Mike Curtis seems to be indicating that the TV episode is canonical, which is interesting because it features a bunch of classic Tracy villains, some of whom, such as Flattop and the Brow, had (SPOILER) previously met their demise in the comic strip years before.

But, hey, I think it's awesome to have a nod to that 50 years prior meeting of Tracy and Magoo!