75 Years of Dick Tracy

When mystery fans start talking about the ancestry of the modern detective in fiction, you hear a lot about Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, but even though he was born in the same era, you seldom hear a whisper about Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. That’s a shame. Gould’s contribution to the oeuvre is very real, even if it’s sometimes also kinda weird.

Honored or not, we don’t forget Dick Tracy, though it is a surprise to realize that the cartoon shamus, his beloved Tess Trueheart, the singing Mumbles, and sun-damaged Pruneface all turn 75 during the first week of October.

Cartoonist Gould, who died in 1985, was one of those “overnight successes” you hear about most frequently. He submitted ideas to the Chicago Tribune for a decade before Dick Tracy was picked up in 1931; the first strip finally ran early in October of that year. Gould’s characters proved popular, and other newspapers picked the cartoon up quickly. The rest, as they say, is history.

To commemorate the 75th anniversary, The Dick Tracy Show: The Complete Animated Crime Series arrives in stores today. This is the first time that entire series has been offered on DVD. The series originally aired on television from 1961 to 1964, with local personalities introducing the cartoons. Character actor Everett Sloan voiced Dick Tracy, while Paul Frees (Boris Badanov of the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons) and Bugs Bunny’s Mel Blanc offered their vocal talents to other characters.