Lone Ranger and Popeye

Once upon a time in America, a much less litigious time, a trip to the circus meant seeing your favorite cartoon and radio stars brought to life. This was before the age of the theme park, where costumed characters are a now common sight. Even Cecil B. DeMille's GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH contains scenes of Paul Jung's "big head" mascot costumes of famous Disney characters included in Ringling's spec.

Try that today and a team of corporate copyright lawyers would eat you alive in ring two.

Oh, you might meet an unlicensed Spiderman or Spongebob at intermission on some shows, but you'll pay $10. a Polaroid for the privilege.

Here we see the Lone Ranger and Popeye happily rounding end track. It would be nice if we could still do stuff like this. I wish Shrine shows still had appearances by TV celebrities like they did in the 60s where you might see the Three Stooges, the Munsters, Bozo or Batman and Robin. Nowadays all we get are the morning zoo team from the local radio station.

"Moo-Head Manny" and "The Poo Guy" are no Batman and Robin. Believe me. What kid cares about morning zoo radio?