Li'l Abner

1959's Li'l Abner was adapted from the hit 1956 Broadway musical--which, in turn, was inspired by the satirical comic strip by Al Capp. Peter Palmer recreates his Broadway role as Li'l Abner Yokum, the handsome, muscle-bound, muscle-brained leading hillbilly of Dogpatch, USA. The citizens of ...more

Al Capp's comic strip -Li'l Abner was phenomenally popular in its prime, roughly the equivalent of -Doonesbury in the 1970s and 1980s -- and, like that later strip, frequently taking on a wide variety of political issues. While the film version includes some political commentary -- particularly in "The Country's in the Very Best of Hands" and in the use of atom bomb testing as a plot device -- the real emphasis is on creating a "live" version of the strip's cartoon world, which it does ...more