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Broom Hilda - Wacky, ill-tempered, loved-starved
newspaper comic-strip witch who showed up on television in 1971 as a rotating
segment of the Saturday morning Archie cartoon show (produced by Filmations) and
later resurfaced on animated segments of FABULOUS FUNNIES/NBC/1978-79. Jane
Webb provided Broom-Hilda's cartoon voice.
The original Broom-Hilda
character who lives in an enchanted forest with surreal landscapes, is
1500-years-old, smokes cigars, flies on a broom, and claims to be married to
Attila the Hun.
Her forest friends are a blue, furry naive troll named Irwin and
a purple intellectual buzzard with glasses named Gaylord.
Broom Hilda once dated
Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame. But the date didn't go very well. As
Broom Hilda confessed "How was I to know that his idea of fun was to sit on a
ledge and imitate gargoyles?"
In a moment of passion, Broom Hilda dive-bombed a
marching band and thoroughly kissed them all before flying off with her broom
into the wild blue yonder.
As for Technology, Broom Hilda is not very hip. Once
when a computer said "You've got mail!" she walked outside to her mail box then
returned to shout "Liar!" at the computer screen for misleading her.
TRIVIA NOTE: The Broom Hilda character was
created by cartoonist Russell Myers (b. October 9, 1938-) who hails from
Pittsburg, Kansas.
An alumnus of the University of Tulsa, Myers was hired by Hallmark Greeting
Cards in Kansas City, Missouri in 1960 to write and illustrate greeting cards.
On April 19, 1970 his Broom Hilda comic-strip was born in the Chicago Tribune
Syndicate. Astonished at his success Myers said "I created a little witch, a
little troll and a little buzzard. What’s so magical about that? They paid all
my bills!"
Myers now lives high on a bluff above Zane Grey's fabled Rogue River in Oregon
with his wife, Marina, and their son and daughter.
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