![]() I think I first got interested in Campbell when I heard the story of how he got into New York night clubs back in the 1940s and even 1950s. Again, beautifully done, but in those days, I was into Mad and Wally Wood and Jack Davis, and Campbell was on the other side of a distant horizon. And his black-and-white drawings for his syndicated cartoon, Cuties, are too wispy for my taste. I’d run across copies of Esquire when I was a kid, and I saw his cartoons in the magazine, but his gauzy watercolors – admirable work, no question – never appealed to me qua art. By a perverse extension of logic, then, they also kept him a secret, or – at least, I suppose – never much mentioned him, in order to avoid revealing his race. He was known for harem girls – and other representatives of the curvaceous gender – but not at all for his race.Ĭampbell and his publisher and the syndicate that distributed his cartoons had kept his race a secret, so Southerners wouldn’t reject the publications in which his work appeared. He’s probably the first famous African American cartoonist, but he wasn’t known at the time as being African American. Harvey: I’m interested in Campbell more for his personal history and career than because of his art, although he’s obviously a fine artist. For more Harv, visit here.ĭooley: What’s Campbell’s primary appeal for you? And throughout, he insightfully illuminates Campbell’s artistic achievements.ĭuring the following interview, we discuss Campbell, Insider Histories, and Harvey’s own career. Harvey recounts the legend of Gingrich discovering Campbell after Russell Patterson recommended “a fantastically talented colored kid” in Harlem, “…if you don’t draw the color line.” He details Campbell’s rise to fame and fortune and close friendship and drunken spakeasy carousing with Cotton Club scat-singing superstar Cab Calloway. And, in the words of its founding editor Arnold Gingrich, his full-page color cartoons “catapulted the magazine’s circulation from the start.” Campbell may also be the first African-American illustrator not only to break the color line in mass-market publications, but to earn widespread public acclaim as well. Simms Campbell was an indispensable part of Esquire’s birth in the early 1930s. Surprisingly, the VHS tape can be found for an affordable $15, brand new, on Amazon.E. The two matches together, on one videocassette, represent a trove of WWF/E treasure. And it was always a head-scratcher as to why it never aired on TV, considering it is an epic contest.įurthermore, the Bret-Shawn ladder match has always been invoked as proof by WWF/E fanatics that the Shawn Michaels-Razor Ramon match at WrestleMania 10 was not the very first ladder match in company history despite what the commentators like to tell us. Until its inclusion in the WWE's Top 50 Superstars of All-Time release, the Hart-Flair match in Saskatoon, Canada, was the match most requested match in history. Let's look at 15 video tapes in particular that have earned mythic, underground followings.įinally, we arrive at what many wrestling pundits deem the golden child of the Coliseum Home Video anthology: WWF Smack 'Em Whack 'Em.Īnd the reason being is because it features two of the WWF/E's most historical matches/moments: Bret Hart defeating Ric Flair for his first WWF title reign and the first-ever WWF ladder match between Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart. Notwithstanding pay-per-view releases or matches, only a handful of Coliseum Videos stand the test of time as coveted collectibles to be purchased on either Amazon or eBay, for instance. Many videos either feature batches of boring matches, are lacking in running time or are chock-full of filler material. That beings said, despite their front covers, not every tape stamped with the official Coliseum Video emblem was or is worthy of being tracked down. The artwork on these tapes have always been always eye-catching, underscored by titles that were creative enough to get noticed at a video store. They represent a nostalgic period from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s when the World Wrestling Federation prided itself as more sport than entertainment. Now that VHS is a defunct medium-replaced with DVD/Blu-ray and YouTube-these tapes have become a rarity, sometimes sold for hundreds of dollars for an individual copy, new or used. The last WWF/WWE Coliseum Video was released nearly 15 years ago, but today we still fondly remember the catalog of titles that not only entertained us throughout the years but became increasingly difficult to find.
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