Trivia / Pogo

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• Died During Production: Walt Kelly basically worked himself to death trying (with his wife, Selby) to animate his own Pogo special while keeping the daily strip going, due to his dissatisfaction with the Chuck Jones-produced Birthday Special.
• Crossdressing Voices: June Foray voiced Pogo in the Birtday Special.
• Disowned Adaptation: According to Phi Beta Pogo, Walt Kelly despised the Birthday Special, mainly for Chuck Jones mucking about with what Kelly wanted, and how "he took all the sharpness out of it and put in that sweet, saccharine stuff that Chuck Jones always THINKS is Disney, but isn't." Considering that Kelly himself was a former Disney animator, he wasn't saying that lightly. The one thing he was willing to praise was the voices, which he thought were good — though he made a point to add that he himself had provided a lot of the voices, including for Albert, Howland Owl and P.T. Bridgeport.
• Executive Meddling: This happened with the 1980 animated film I Go Pogo. It was meant to get a general theatrical release in 1980 to coincide with the 1980 US Presidential election but the distribution deal fell through. Initially, the film only was released on home video through Fotomat; it did get released on cable television on November 2, 1982, which did coincide with the 1982 US Congressional elections.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: While several book collections were published during the strip's run, all of these are long out of print. In 2007 Fantagraphics Books announced the imminent launch of a Complete Pogo series reprinting the entire run of the original strip (a la their Complete Peanuts series); but, owing to apparent difficulties in obtaining decent source material for some of the early Sunday strips, it took until November 2011 for Volume One (of a projected twelve) to finally see release. As of 2017 — a full decade after the initial announcement — the series still hadn't made it past Volume Three, although things sped up afterward; the fourth and fifth volumes coming out in 2018, the sixth and seventh volumes following in 2020. The characters' Dell Comics appearances have also been collected in a series of books by Hermes Press.
  • Two animated specials were created based on the comics. One was a made-for-TV special called “The Pogo Special Birthday Special”, directed by Chuck Jones. The other was a full-length stop-motion movie called “I Go Pogo/Pogo For President”. Both have only been officially released on VHS. Selby Kelly, before her death in 2005, also distributed and sold unofficial DVD’s of these specials, alongside animatics for an unproduced 1971 animated feature called “We Have Met The Enemy, And He Is Us”. All of these releases have since gone out-of-print, and have become increasingly expensive and rare to find. Your best bet is to watch the animated specials on Youtube.
• Outlived Its Creator:
  • After Walt Kelly's death in 1973, his widow Selby and son Stephen continued the strip for two years before calling it quits, due in part to disagreements with the syndicate over the size and formatting of the Sunday pages.
  • A revival strip ran from 1989 to 1993, originally produced by Neal Sternecky and Larry Doyle and later by Kelly's son Peter and daughter Carolyn.
• What Could Have Been: Long before the Birthday Special, Kelly attempted to produce a one-hour animated special with Bill Tytla, a project that was eventually abandoned.

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