1) INTRODUCTION
This article is about media spankings of daughters by fathers and looks at spanking as pure punishment. In this day and age such an approach might appear dubious. Feminists and other sensitive souls may complain about husbands spanking wives but at least there they can console themselves that there may be a sexual element or frisson.
But I shall make a further qualification; I shall only deal with father/daughter spankings where they are comic. There is a whole sub-genre of these in comics and cartoons as well as in a few films and TV shows of a certain age.
Some of us find these scenes far more palatable than the Taming of the Shrew stuff that it is the staple of romantic fiction. There are no questionable issues of dominance and submission. The daughter is the protagonist; she is a super-naughty girl and all the father does is to react to her misbehaviour.
This daughter does not bow down to any Head of the Household; she has no Lord and Master. She just gets spanked because she has misbehaved and after a decent interval to allow her bottom to recover she will misbehave again. In her way this daughter is wonderfully anarchic and subversive and there are signs that she may even be being reclaimed by the sisterhood. She is a Young Lady of Misrule.
What is the provenance of these stories? Let’s have a little history.
2) PANTALOON AND COLUMBINE
These disobedient daughters have their roots in Commedia dell’ Arte the popular and long-lasting theatrical buffoonery that emerged in Renaissance Italy. The daughter Columbine was in love with a young whippersnapper called Harlequin much to the disgust of her strict father Pantaloon. These stories also saw the rise to fame of the slapstick long years before the invention of cinema.
After Charles II was restored to the English throne he did away with all of Cromwell’s sour puritanism. The theatres re-opened and the Commedia made its appearance in an English speaking environment. Gradually it evolved into pantomime. Columbine got a little more impudent and disobedient and Pantaloon had trouble on his hands. Quite how he dealt with it we do not know since there was as yet no means to record the performances.
Columbine and Pantaloon.
By the 19th Century Britain’s position as the most important English-speaking nation came under permanent threat. Post-Independence America had an insatiable appetite for entertainment. Pantomime tales and pantomime personnel crossed the Atlantic. New forms of comic buffoonery took root. There was vaudeville and there was burlesque just as there was music hall back in the motherland.
Commedia and pantomime, vaudeville, burlesque and music hall would all be swept aside by the latest popular entertainment vehicle moving pictures. Back in England meanwhile an innovative Dundee publisher was about to usher in the golden age of the children’s comic which would put a new gloss on the riotous daughter who had been emerging over centuries of theatrical slapstick.
3) MACK SENNETT AND D C THOMSON: Templates for the Spanked Daughter
Moving pictures or cinema became hugely popular. The early years of silent cinema in America are associated at least in the popular imagination with slapstick. The content was not always directly derived from Commedia dell’ Arte but there were links. It is perhaps ironic that the great years of screen slapstick played out under the auspices of silent cinema since the original theatrical slapstick was an extremely noisy affair.
Mack Sennett was the great impresario of slapstick cinema and was involved as producer and/or director with most of the great names of slapstick cinema. Sennett was well aware of the comic potential of the Harlequin/Columbine/Pantaloon triangle and produced numerous shorts on the theme.
Sennett always had a professional eye out for a pretty girl and he seems to have combined this with a penchant for giving them a spanked bottom in their films. This certainly happened in the silent years to Mabel Normand (his great love) and to Alice Day. But spankings do work better with the sound on; nor had Sennett quite perfected the Pantaloon-Columbine situation and as the age of sound dawned his favoured “daughter” Thelma Hill was succumbing to drink.
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The City of Dundee in Scotland has traditionally earned its money by means of one of the three Js- Jam, Jute and Journalism. We are concerned with the last named of the three. The 1930s would see Dundee publishers D C Thomson launch a comic that was to influence generations of children. It was called The Beano and it survives to this day.
The Beano was the product of an era that greatly valued the mischievous pranks of the schoolchild whilst finding it equally funny to see the child soundly punished for his- or her!- misbehaviour. This maybe lubricious love of the old-fashioned punishment could of course be squared by the accompanying moral argument that the readership should be under no illusion that naughtiness had to receive its comeuppance.
The Beano introduced the world to the wonderfully subversive MINNIE THE MINX. Minnie was as bold and brash and disobedient as any boy. She regularly broke windows with her catapult. She bullied and mocked other girls and boys who were better behaved than she was.
Minnie was the heroine of her comic strip. The secondary character was her father whose only real purpose was to appear at the end and ensure that justice was done. Minnie had to be made to pay for her transgressions.
Minnie’s father’s weapon of choice was his slipper. Virtually each week he would turn Minnie over his knee and vigorously apply his slipper to her skirted bottom. Stars would appear above her bottom as indicators of the soundness of the spanking she was receiving. Heat would be seen rising from her blazing bottom. A final picture might show the after effects as Minnie painfully clutched her smarting derriere or sat on a huge cushion in an attempt to dilute the pain.
Minnie The Minx was the forerunner of a series of subversive comic strip bad girls. Perforce her successors went underground but Minnie remained one of the stars of a hugely popular mainstream comic and inculcated in generations of boys and girls the comedic value of a naughty daughter getting her bottom spanked by her long-suffering father.
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Meanwhile across the Atlantic Mack Sennett had also hit upon (in more ways than one) a supremely naughty daughter figure who would also torment her father beyond endurance. Just as sound arrived, at last giving slapstick all the noisy splendor of its glorious past, Sennett signed Marjorie Beebe from Fox.
Beebe had made her name in a silent feature of 1928 called The Farmer’s Daughter which itself bore some resemblance to the old stories of the Harlequinade. Marjorie Beebe was the perfect replacement for the ailing Thelma Hill.
She was pert, attractive, funny and physical. She revelled in her new role as Mack Sennett’s prime slapstick comedienne. Pratfalls as well as wisecracks became her stock in trade and the Beebe bottom became the target for all sorts of outrages and humiliations. She misbehaved and she got her comeuppances. Nobody could do bottom rubbing like Marjorie Beebe.
Pride of place in all this bottom based buffoonery goes to Mack Sennett’s two reel short version of Beebe’s old triumph The Farmer’s Daughter. This was called COWCATCHER’S DAUGHTER and was a direct descendant of the old stories of Pantaloon and Columbine.
Marjorie Beebe as Marge Martin was a Columbine for a new age, the age of the Flapper, the Modern Miss with ideas of her own. She was a cowgirl too but she’d been sent to a fancy Eastern seaboard finishing school and she thought she could do as she pleased. What pleased her was to run away to a circus!
Pantaloon her crotchety old father was played by Andy Clyde in his famous “Pop Martin” role with paintbrush moustache and spectacles down his nose. He’s hopping mad when he discovers what his precious daughter has been up to and cannot wait to get hold of her. His right arm is just twitching to get to work on his daughter’s bottom and he has a version of the old slapstick to hand, a razor strop clearly reserved for the occasions when Marge needs her bottom spanked.
Marjorie Beebe as Marge Martin was a flesh and blood Minnie The Minx and she got a spanking to match, one of the best ever seen on the silver screen. The Beebe bottom underneath her fetching buckskin skirt was never seen to better advantage. The whole scene, just about the first ever from the talkies, set the bar for future screen spankings.
Word balloons by the author.
4) THE MAKINGS OF A GOOD FATHER/DAUGHTER SPANKING SCENE
We’ve examined two seminal examples of the disobedient daughter going over her father’s knee and having her bottom soundly spanked. But how do such scenes work? There are clear difficulties of acceptability but the best examples such as the two described effortlessly transcend them.
- The good father/daughter spanking scene is essentially light-hearted. The lead-up will have concentrated on the daughter’s mischief making and the tone of the spanking will fit the tone of the build-up.
- Though the prevailing mood is comic the good scene will still carry a real charge, a frisson. This is not easy to achieve but in these examples the father is always just stern enough to carry off the task of punishment and the daughter’s sudden change of heart at the sight of the slipper or razor strop is a turning point too. From then on both parties will be concentrating on the daughter’s bottom.
- The daughter will be the lead character. The piece will be named for her- Minnie The Minx, Cowcatcher’s Daughter. She will be pretty enough, charming and humorous and she will also be extremely naughty.
- The father must not be a brute. He will be a normal enough father figure driven to distraction by his daughter’s behavior.
- The audience will therefore be sympathising with the father by the time he rolls up his sleeves and puts the daughter across his knee. The daughter though likeable will be perceived to deserve her comeuppance.
- The daughter will give as good as she gets. Most of the time she will be in control with her pranks. The spanking will be a temporary reversal when she is shown she can’t behave exactly how she wants to.
5) POST MINNIE, POST COWCATCHER. WHERE NEXT?
It was always going to be difficult to improve on such magnificent bottom-spanking originals as Minnie The Minx and Cowcatcher’s Daughter. Minnie would indeed continue to get her weekly spanking for many a long year in The Beano. But there would come a time when society’s views changed and it was considered unseemly for a daughter, even one so naughty as Minnie, to be put across her father’s knee. Minnie survives to this day but the slipper does not.
The situation in the movies was different. There were plenty of spankings in mainstream Hollywood and in European films too after Cowcatcher’s Daughter but few packed the same punch as Andy Clyde and Marjorie Beebe. I believe there is a reason for this. Cowcatcher’s Daughter was a two reel short and could devote itself fully to the story of Marjorie Beebe having her bottom spanked. Such scenes got lost in feature length films, particularly those between fathers and daughters which would be brief and ill-prepared.
But for each there was a place to go. The successors to Minnie The Minx went underground; the new Marjorie Beebes were to be found in the 30 minute television sitcoms.
6) SITCOMS AND SPANKING MAGAZINES
Television began to assert itself after World War II. The 1950s brought with them a highly popular father/daughter sitcom called My Little Margie. Gale Storm in the title role seemed to press all the buttons for the naughty daughter in need of a good spanking over Daddy’s knee. All of those six qualifiers listed above were generally present in an episode of My Little Margie. It is therefore a trifle disappointing to have to record that over three years Gale only got her bottom spanked once.
But it was a good enough scene. She had got herself a lawyer boyfriend and reckoned that at 21 she could do as she pleased. That was until her father’s lawyer said she was “an adult child” being still financially dependent on her father and therefore answerable to paternal discipline. So she got her bottom spanked- in front of the boyfriend.
My Little Margie lacked the slapstick panache that had been present in Minnie The Minx and Cowcatcher’s Daughter. Its verbal humor did not quite gel with the spanking scene. Slapstick was not quite dead either- The Three Stooges and Andy Clyde himself were still going strong in their two reel shorts. And for these purposes there was a delicious slapstick sitcom a decade on in the 1960s called McHale’s Navy.
McHale’s Navy attempted to do for the US Navy what Sgt Bilko had done for the Army. It was not as good but it wasn’t at all bad (after all some of us rate Bilko the best sitcom of all time). Both were male ensemble productions of course but in one delightful episode of McHale called “Babette Go Home” there was a brief but rather good spanking.
Babette was a French minx who had stowed away on board to be with one of McHale’s crew. She was played by Susan Silo who has gone on to be a major star in cartoons and other voiceovers. That’s not surprising; here’s one fellow who when he first saw Babette thought the actress was French. She probably qualifies as the naughtiest girl ever in the whole history of spankable daughters on film and television. She set off a torpedo!
Her father, a VIP took a lot of persuading that his daughter was not the shyest of little flowers. But as the great Ernest Borgnine as McHale put it “I think your little flower is starting to bloom.” The father soon realised the truth of that as Babette took the ship for a ride and fired off the torpedo.
When she deigned to came back to shore she went straight over her father’s knee- in front of the whole crew. Her father counted out the spanks in French ending with “And one for the torpedo!” as he administered an almighty spank on the seat of her thin summer dress. She squirmed and yelled as he made her bottom smart.
Spanking from McHale's Navy. Word balloons by the author.
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Fast forward another decade into the 1970s and a proper Minnie The Minx had re-emerged thanks to Britain’s premier spanking magazine Janus. She was called Paula and her strip The Perils of Paula. Paula’s father played a similar role to Minnie’s but he shared it with Paula’s Headmaster at school. Her father was frequently spurred into action by the sight of Paula’s terrible school reports by which time her Headmaster might already have visited her bottom.
Because Janus catered for a very difficult readership to The Beano – adults with very defined interests in place of children- Paula’s father was able to hoist her skirt up and pull her panties down. Father and headmaster both would put Paula over their knee and soundly spank her bare bottom which had her wailing. She soon recovered though and started preparing her next bit of mischief. Late on in her career Paula rather surprisingly was made a school prefect and used to delight in sending other girls to the Head and listened to them yelling as they got their bottoms smacked. But Paula’s final port of call remained her own father’s knee whence she would be sent upstairs with one hand clasping her still bared bottom and the other wiping away her tears.
Web-Ed's note: it is assumed here that Paula is in the "upper sixth" (if we've got the U.K. education system
terminology correct) and is eighteen years old.
7) THE LAST SPANKED SITCOM DAUGHTER AND THE ONLINE COMIC RESURGENCE
The decades since Paula disappeared from Janus back in the 1970s have seen little of note in the mainstream arena. Political correctness had killed off the film spanking be they of wives or daughters and though we have more recently seen a few green shoots of spanking recovery it is doubtful whether the father/daughter scenario of Cowcatcher’s Daughter and “Babette Go Home” will ever enjoy much of a renaissance. The last scene of any promise occurred in the film version of the British sitcom Father Dear Father. This was a sort of 1960s British version of My Little Margie the main difference being that here there were two late teenage daughters and both were badly behaved mainly with boys. There were a few threats but nothing of substance and the closest was undoubtedly the film version in the early 1970s when the younger daughter deliciously played by the impish Ann Holloway tried to elope with her ragamuffin boyfriend. His beat-up old van broke down on the next corner from where she lived and she had to return home with her tail between her legs.
She stood before her father and told him she knew he was not very pleased with her. “No I’m not” he said menacingly “And you’re probably thinking I’m not too big to have my bottom smacked” she added. “Exactly!” he replied “In there young lady”. He pointed to the next room and frogmarched her inside. Most regrettably the camera did not follow and there was no further reference to her being spanked.
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There are no more such series being made and even the likes of Janus are disappearing as magazines go online. But the internet is of course the great new spanking arena. God bless the Internet! Spanking delights are now available at the click of a mouse and the relative anonymity and the overall relaxing friendliness has had a further welcome effect. Female spankos (spankas?) now feel able to participate along with the men.
I won’t dwell on the myriad spanking marvels available in this new era. [The Web-Ed] here and his wonderful Chicago Spanking Review is keeping the flame burning for latter-day naughty daughters of comic and cartoon and the burning bottoms they end up with after a spanking over father’s knee. He has a fabulous collection of spanking goodies to peruse. But I will mention one recent discovery of mine, a girl who follows directly in the wayward shoes of Minnie The Minx and Janus Paula. Her name is Lita and she’s a little belter. Many thanks to her imaginative creator Peskinhead.
Lita is as naughty at home as Minnie and as naughty at school as Paula. She has the most wonderfully minxish expression. Her father’s weapon of choice is the belt and Lita has to bend over the table and get her pantied bottom walloped with it. Her translucent panties betray the reddening behind underneath. Lita’s expression as she gets whacked tends to be both tearful and defiant. She fully deserves her place in the spanking canon with Minnie and Marge Martin, Babette and Paula.
[Web-Ed's note: you can find Lita on this page at AnimeOTK.]
