Felix the Cat & Yeti

Okay, this may be merely a Felix the Cat cartoon, but it also may be one of the worst illustrations of misrepresentations in comic history. This cartoon with Felix the Cat and the Abominable Snowman is from 1958.

How many misstatements and mistakes do you see in it? (No, I’m not really upset. I’m just playing along with some kind of mock insult to our cryptozoological legacy.)

– Abominable Snowmen at the North Pole (the Arctic) – They actually are reported to live in the montane valleys of the Himalaya and cross the snowfields, allegedly, when visiting other cartoon characters in neighboring valleys.

– Chinese-appearing Inuit (“Eskimo”) living in igloos at the North Pole (a bit of the old tyme racism, humm) – Wrong, wrong, wrong.

– Four-toed humanlike footprints left as Yeti tracks – Incorrect, they are usually five-toed and more anthropoid.

– White, snowy and/or icy appearance of the Abominable Snowmen (“fake” and “real”). Yeti are actually reported to be reddish brown to black, except in wrong-headed and hastily written media rehashings.

– Height of Abominable Snowmen. How tall do you think that huge “real” one is in this cartoon? Twenty-two feet high? Did someone say “True Giant”?

– That map of North America, with Alaska located above Canada, as an ice sheet, and being the same as the “North Pole.” Cartoon artists are not geographers. Please check your maps, captain.

I’m amazed that those of us growing up in the late 1950s and the early 1960s didn’t completely flunk out of school if we took some of these cartoons as facts turned into comics. Yikes.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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