Anybody out there remember the Teenie Weenies? They inhabited a syndicated cartoon strip created by William Donahey and published in many news papers for more than 50 years, starting in 1914. I read it in the Sunday funny papers that my grandparents had; our Newark Star-Ledge funnies didn’t have the Teenie Weenies.
As you can see, the Teenie Weenies were miniature people for whom expressions like “a house of cards” could be taken literally: like the Borrowers, they had to build their homes and tools from objects created by us gigantic people. Unlike the Borrowers, there was a whole community of Teenie Weenies living together, each of them defined by some external characteristic–The Cowboy, The Clown, The Policeman, The Chinese Man, etc. Most of them didn’t have names, but were called by the costumes that they wore.
Yeesh. That’s starting to sound like college. Or a Democrat convention. I suppose you could think of the Teenie Weenies as The Village People in HO scale–but all of this does them a disservice. The Teenie Weenies were who they were, it was pure fantasy, and a lot of people liked them just the way they were.
Astonishing False Facts: Today communities of Teenie Weenies are often found living on the fringes of golf courses, where they specialize in stealing golf balls and tees. We have not yet discovered what they do with them.