(Fun with names and language play, but mostly Zippyesque popular culture in many manifestations.)
In recent days, Zippy has gone to a psychic shop (offering “crystals, past lives, tarot cards”), to the Tropical Treat in Hanover PA, to Luna Park in Sydney (NSW), to the ghost of a Mickey Rooney hotel in Downington PA, and to the ghost of the Justin Time diner in Meriden CT.
The Zippy from September 30th, featuring Mary’s Coffee Shop, which also offers grinders:
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Plays on several senses of grind, plus the idiom one-hit wonder (with its phonological play on /wʌn/).
In two recent Zippy strips, Zippy and Griffy, raging over limited animation, visit a diner in Delaware and an abandoned diner in Kentucky:
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Three things: Hanna-Barbera; The Hollywood diner in Dover DE; and the Happy Days Diner in Cave City KY.
In today’s Zippy, Bert and Bob talk movies at the Charcoal Pit:
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The topic is the new movie Wonder Woman, the candy Milk Duds comes up in passing, and the locale is the Charcoal Pit in Wilmington DE.
Today’s Zippy, on the theme (more or less) of single-mindedness:
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The food is standard diner fare: meat loaf, grilled cheese sandwiches. And the diner is the South Street Diner in Boston, which touts its reputation.
Two cartoons for today: a Mother Goose and Grimm with alien signage; and a Zippy in the coffee shop of an Anaheim bowling alley, where Diane Arbus is evoked:
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Today’s Zippy, set in a place that’s hard to trace:
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Steeped in popular culture. It’s a launderette (possibly with some connection to a bus terminal or an airport terminal or computer terminals), or at least it says it is; a gas station (selling kerosene); a convenience store for food (like, maybe, Stewart’s Shops, in upstate New York, but anyway, some place named Stewart’s where you used to be able to get legendary salami subs, at least back in 1971); and (last panel) a diner (where the figure of Death seems to be having a soda).
I haven’t tracked down any part of this definitively. For me, an exceptional failure. But intriguing.
[News flash! Fresh information! (From Jim Martin.) Turns out the problem was likely due to my advancing cataracts. The building in the cartoon is the Terminal Luncheonette (now Restaurant, apparently), not Launderette. In Willow Grove PA (north of Philadelphia):
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Note the kerosene, even.]
Today’s Zippy has Little Lulu’s sidekick Thomas “Tubby” Tompkins traveling across worlds to race to the Central Diner in Peekskill NY — the Sunset Diner of Tubby and Lulu’s 1950’s cartoon childhood:
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(Wilbur van Snobbe and Iggie Inch are, of course, two more Little Lulu characters.)
A mildly poignant Zippy, in which things have come to the point where Griffy almost misses Richard Nixon. And another deeply poignant episode in the Doonesbury account of Lacey and Jeremy’s adventures in senior dating.
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