Comics-Casper TB

This travel bug has the modest goal to circulate more than five years and to be moved by at least 25 cachers.  As of 8-Oct-19 it had survived for 2.7 years and had been moved by 10 cachers.

Please drop it in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching small event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; the bag keeps the trackable clean, protects the number and prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take the travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission is needed to leave the U.S.

Travel bug photos are appreciated and will be re-posted here.

My youth was in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  Drawing from that period, this is one of a series of travel bugs made to commemorate favorite characters from comic books, comic strips, movie cartoons, B-movies and animated feature-length movies.  Some of the characters had only a brief existence, some survived as radio and early TV programs and some have been digitally-modernized into some of the blockbuster movies of today.  There were many other characters, but these are the ones on which I was willing to spend my dimes (comic books) and quarters (movie and popcorn).  However, I didn’t pay for the daily comic strips or Sunday funnies that came with the newspaper.

Casper the Friendly Ghost is a fictional character and the protagonist of the Famous Studios theatrical animated cartoon series of the same name. According to the 1995 feature film Casper, his family name is McFadden, making his name Casper McFadden.

Given that Casper is depicted as a ghostly, portly little boy, there is a controversy among fans and critics of the series as to whether or not he is a dead child.  This somewhat macabre premise was later abandoned in favor of the idea that ghosts were merely a type of supernatural being, similar to ghouls, goblins, etc. He was thereafter portrayed with feet and shown to have ghostly parents and became slightly slimmer.

Casper was created in the late 1930s by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo, the former devising the idea for the character and the latter providing illustrations.  The idea was intended initially as the basis for a 1939 children's storybook.  The first cartoon to feature Casper, was released by Paramount in 1945 with a few differences from the book. In the cartoon adaptation, Casper is a cute ghost-child with a New York accent, who inhabits a haunted house along with a community of adult ghosts who delight in scaring the living.  Casper, however, is a noncomformist among ghosts: he would prefer to make friends with people. He packs up his belongings and goes out into the world, hoping to find friends. However, the animals that he meets (a rooster, a mole, a cat, a mouse named Herman, and a group of hens) take one horrified look at him and run off in the other direction.