Blondie (comic strip) was adapted into a long-running series of 28 low-budget theatrical B-features, produced by Columbia Pictures. Beginning with "Blondie" in 1938, the series lasted 12 years, through "Beware of Blondie" (1950). The two major roles were Penny Singleton as Blondie and Arthur Lake (whose first starring role was another comic strip character, Harold Teen) as Dagwood. Faithfulness to the comic strip was a major concern of the creators of the series. Little touches were added that were iconic to the strip, like the appearance of Dagwood's famous sandwiches—and the running gag of Dagwood colliding with the mailman amid a flurry of
What a Cartoon! Dog", "Mike, Lu & Og", "Sheep in the Big City", "Whatever Happened to... Robot Jones?", "", "Grim & Evil" and "Megas XLR" as well as Fox's "Family Guy". The series is influential for birthing a slew of original Cartoon Network hits and helping to revive television animation in the 1990s. Once it had several original shorts, those became the first Cartoon Cartoons (a collective term for retro Cartoon Network original series). From 2005 to 2008, "The Cartoon Cartoon Show" was revived as a block for reruns of older Cartoon Cartoons that had been phased out by the network. Fred Seibert