Dondi
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dondi was a daily comic strip about a large-eyed, Italian war orphan boy named Dondi. It was created by Gus Edson and Irwin Hasen, and ran from September 25, 1955 until June 8, 1986. Irwin Hasen received the National Cartoonist Society Award for Story Comic Strip for 1961 and 1962 for his work on the strip. But it was more than that-- every Sunday, in major newspapers, it played in hi-tech full color on the very front page of what was still a major entertainment medium sixty years ago, the Sunday "comics," the "funny pages." Dondi was the big time.
Postwar America's embrace of a comic strip sentimentally depicting the assimilation of a war orphan by goodhearted mainstream Americans (in "Midville") is culturally significant to any study of multiculturalism, and multiracialism. It matters enormously that the strip was not read by progressives and intellectuals, but was successful in homes where the Reader's Digest was literature and Arthur Godfrey and Billy Graham were revered. One must imagine Ronny Howard and Andy Griffith reading it together on Sundays in Mayberry.
There had been many post-war Korean adoptions by white families though there were legal boundaries between the races sixty years ago forgotten today. Whites and Asians could not legally marry in many states, including California, until late in the 1960s. Tract homes north and south commonly had sales contracts which required the sellers to resell only to white Christians. Dondi's brief backstory-- which no reader then would remember, of course-- claimed he was Italian. But for a five year old in the late 1950s that was impossible; and he was named and drawn so ambiguously, with a mop of jetblack Asian hair, that posters on comic strip sites now agree they had assumed him to be (if only because of his age) a Korean War orphan, some sort of Asian. "Dondi" is like no Italian name known; but the two syllables mimic most Asian given names, and "Di" (a familiar term for "little brother" in Chinese) is a common inclusion in given names. For a strip that, at the height of the Civil Rights Era, had to run on the front page of newspapers in defiantly white-power, still legally segregationist states, Dondi was daring.
It was so popular it led, in 1961, to a much-maligned family movie. The film version featured David Kory as Dondi, with costars David Janssen and Patti Page. The movie, and especially Kory's performance, has been derided by critics. Film writer Leonard Maltin asserted: "Watch this film and you'll know why Janssen became a fugitive!"
Maltin's profession requires him to watch genres meant for younger children-- films with no more irony than "Barney", like this one, with Arnold Stang and other famous clowns playing cameos. A critic however, should be expected to provide cultural context. A more critically-sophisticated response was posted on the Internet Movie Database: "I was about 9 years old when the movie Dondi came to the Fernrock Theater in North Philly, the neighborhood I grew up in. I had been an avid reader of the comic strip (published in the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer) since it was first introduced and I suppose because of my age at the time, I related to the title character. All I remember today is that I loved it as a kid and cried like a baby at all the sappy parts.
"I am sure if I were to revisit this movie today as a jaded 50-something year old guy, I too might rain harsh words about this movie which has accumulated a whopping 3.3 stars by the reviewers. But I choose to rate it 7.5 based on the way it made me feel when I was nine, and too naive to know old folks in the year 2004 would consider it a piece of crap. Today our kids grow up much too fast. A movie like Dondi might be just what the doctor ordered for your kids as opposed to say - a prescription for Ritalin."
Dondi is not great literature. Put back in context, however, it may be understood as the progressive and forward-looking American cultural event it was.
