Calling All Collectors: Dick Tracy Is Hot Stuff : Memorabilia: North Hollywood archivist joins scramble for old Tracy toys, games and books.

Mumbles, Big Boy Caprice, 88 Keyes, Little Boy Beard, Flyface, Flattop, the Brow--some of the most dastardly enemies that Dick Tracy ever faced. Enough to scare any self-respecting crime-stopper out of his two-way wrist radio.

But they don’t faze Paul Maher. He has ‘em all in hand, even the sinister Rhodent and the slippery Spots, in the form of an antique Dick Tracy board game.

“This game is based on the old Dick Tracy cartoon show” (from 1961), said Maher, 37, cradling the item gently. “That’s how I remember Dick Tracy the best. Other people might remember him from the radio show, or the serials, or some of those low-budget 1940s movies. By the way, this game goes for $150.”

Lest that price sound like a crime in itself, it helps to remember that finding the Dick Tracy board game--and the plethora of other Tracy-ana in Maher’s custody--required a good deal of sleuthing. For as soon as collector extraordinaire Maher heard that Warren Beatty was bringing the hawk-nosed detective to cinematic life, he began haunting swap meets and collectors’ shows in search of every bit of memorabilia he could glom onto--of Tracy, Sam Catchem, Tess Trueheart, Sparkle Plenty, B.O. Plenty and the rest of the denizens of the legendary comic strip.

Enough, ultimately, for the former archivist for Hanna-Barbera studios and Walter Lantz (creator of Woody Woodpecker), to devote an entire corner of his archives to cartoonist Chester Gould’s funny-page police detective.

His archives? Indeed. Not just a collector of Dick Tracy items, Maher is also the founder, owner, caretaker, cataloguer and protector of what he calls the Children’s Television Archives--a three-story North Hollywood townhouse crammed floor-to-ceiling with memorabilia of characters such as Tracy, Bugs Bunny, Felix the Cat, Caspar the Ghost, Bozo the Clown--and just about every inked creature that ever lived in a comic strip or cartoon.

“The cars are the ones that hurt the most, as far as prices go,” said Maher, carefully hoisting an enormous tin squad car housing Tracy and Sam Catchem, dating from about 1950. “If this was in absolutely mint condition and had the windshield and the siren on the side, it’s worth-- honest-to-God-- about $1,000, without the box! I’ve had other people tell me that they’ve seen them with the windshield, but without the Dick Tracy inside. So maybe someday I can fix the problem.”

Indeed, anyone looking to build a Tracy collection at this point is pretty much out of luck. Maher’s hard-won collection--including toys, games, photos, articles and books--numbers no more than 50 items. Yet it’s worth, he estimates, somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000.

“If I went to a collectors’ show right now, mostly likely I wouldn’t find any more Dick Tracy,” Maher said. “I mean, I can call all the collectors’ stores all over, and they’ll tell me we’d like to, but we already have four people in line.”

Why the paucity of Tracy collectibles? Reason No. 1: Tracy has not existed outside a comic strip since the 1961 cartoon show, and as a result, merchandising of Tracy-related items has been minimal. Reason No. 2: Larry Doucet.

“I have more than 2,000 items in my collection, and I’ve been collecting for more than 30 years,” said Doucet, a 43-year-old Yorktown Heights, N.Y., consulting engineer regarded as the king of the Dick Tracy collectors. “When I first read Dick Tracy when I was a 10-year-old I was immediately hooked on the character. It was instantaneous. The stories, the great villains grabbed me. I started a quest for every comic book I could find. When I ran out of all the comic books, I knew there had to be more. So I started buying everything else I could find--board games, cars, whatever.”

Yes. Doucet has the tin car--with the windshield--and it has indeed been appraised at about $1,000. The author of the forthcoming “Authorized Guide to Dick Tracy Collectibles” (Chilton, $12.95, with a foreword by Jean Gould O’Connell, Chester Gould’s daughter) also counts among his many prized pieces things such as a Tracy cap pistol engraved by Chester Gould in 1978, some of the first Tracy character dolls and a Miller Bros. Hat Co. felt fedora, circa 1947, with a Tracy logo inside. The value?

“Well, people are pretty much speculating and hoarding this stuff and asking a lot more than it’s worth,” said Doucet, reached by phone. “Especially because of the movie. Some of these items, like dolls, are worth several thousand dollars. I have, for example, one of three known copies of a Dick Tracy comic book called No-Numbered Feature Book of 1937, and that’s worth over $3,000. But it really comes down to what people are willing to pay.”

What of the slew of new, Disney-authorized Tracy merchandise? Well, without the pre-movie groundswell of interest, as there was months in advance of “Batman,” Tracy-related sales have been slow--or so says Bill Liebowitz, owner of the Golden Apple comic book stores in Hollywood, Northridge and West L.A. The sales “reps felt that people needed to see more publicity on the movie,” he said, “so they didn’t take orders for merchandise until April.” Liebowitz does not predict a repeat of Batmania.

“I would think ‘Dick Tracy’ will be a good solid merchandising, but I don’t see anything hysterical,” he said. “I don’t see people coming in and demanding Madonna blowup dolls. I could probably sell a lot of those but . . . I mean, Disney is just doing an exceptional job. If it can be marketed, they’re going to do it. It’s probably safe to say that everyone in America will know about Dick Tracy. The question is whether they will have a shirt with a tommy gun on their chest, or if they will just go to the movie.”

Maher, whose archival material is regularly loaned out for use in television and movies, disagreed.

“Batman proved to manufacturers that Dick Tracy can work,” said the collector, wearing an oversized Tracy T-shirt. “There’s even a car that might be this year’s equivalent to the Batmobile. Even if the reviews are bad, it’s automatic. And this Tracy is a mysterious guy, in a sense a modern-day vigilante out to stop all the nonsense in town. He’s more of a person that Superman or Batman. He reminds me almost of a Peter Falk-like character, only with class.

“I can see a lot happening with this. There’s going to be a whole line of Dick Tracy cars, and I’ll bet you there’s going to be a Dick Tracy trench coat, hat, watch, two-way wrist-radio. The merchandising that you see right now is just the beginning of it.”

But it is the be-all and end-all of bachelor Maher’s existence, really--the stuff that keeps people such as him and Doucet in the business of collecting.

“Collecting,” he said, “all relates to a part of a person that we all wish we’d kept, and kept alive. That’s the one thing Peter Pan had, in a sense. He was able to know how to keep that going and not lose it.

“When I was 13 years old, I felt stupid with all my collection of Beany and Cecil stuff and Shari Lewis hand puppets. So I took it all to a swap meet and sold it for 50 bucks and got a transistor radio, felt really cool for a while with that transistor radio. Now I hate myself for having done that.”

It seems that he’s compensated for the error in judgment. A few of his most prized Tracy items:

The Dick Tracy Siren Pistol--”There were a number of different guns,” Maher said. “I’ve seen others, but never this one.” The heavy tin revolver, which sounds like a ray-gun from a Daffy Duck cartoon and probably dates to the late ‘40s, goes for “maybe a thousand--maybe more.”

Dick Tracy (squirting) Machine Gun--in a box proclaiming, “ Shoots over 500 shots in one fill! “ with Dick’s cartooned head saying “ Okay, boys let’s get goin’ and stop or I’ll shoot! “ “There have been thousands of these made in the early ‘50s,” said Maher, “but it has to survive, to get to this point in 1990. It has to make it through all those years! That’s the fun of getting something in mint condition. The box is in mint condition, and the product itself has never been squirted! Found it at a collector’s show, and to me, it’s like a crown jewel. You put this in a case.”

Junior and Dick Tracy salt-and-pepper shakers from the mid-’40s.

A Big Little Book titled “Dick Tracy Encounters Facey.”

A Dick Tracy Two-Way Wrist Radio from the early ‘60s.

A Dick Tracy Golden Book. “This simple little Golden Book-- 60 bucks ,” said Maher proudly. “You won’t find it at any shows.”

Maher, who has played host at tributes to everyone from the late animator/puppeteer Bob Clampett to Vance Colvig (L.A.’s Bozo the Clown in the early ‘60s), the late Jay Ward, and Jimmy Weldon (father of Webster Webfoot), speaks of his Tracy-ana and the rest of his archives in the expert tones of an art appraiser--handling the toys and irreplaceable memorabilia with downright reverence. They are, after all, his business as well as his hobby.

But it goes beyond business. There is love in his voice as he shows his original animation cels of Bugs Bunny (autographed by Fritz Freleng), his Movieola projector owned by Walt Disney in the 1920s, his thousands of dolls, toys, mugs, hand puppets of every character from Crusader Rabbit to Lambchop, his taped interviews with legendary Southern California kiddie-show hosts Sheriff John, Engineer Bill, Walker Edmiston and Tom Hatten, his Oscar Meyer Wiener Wagon model autographed by “Little Oscar” himself, Jerry Marrin.

“When you look at TV for a second and say, ‘God, I haven’t seen that since I was a kid!’ what does that do to you?” said Maher, who so loves television that he has one in just about every room--including a small set mounted on the bathroom wall for shower-viewing.

“Your memory is important,” he continued. “As a kid you look at that record jacket of something like ‘Bozo on the Farm,’ and it’s important! You look at it maybe a hundred or a thousand times. Now, after all these years that it’s been erased from your memory, you suddenly see it here, and it’s ‘Wow, I had that!’

“And when people come into this room, there’s such a mixture of different times! I’ll have people as old as my grandpa see a Dick Tracy car and say ‘Oh my God, I had one of those!’, and I’ve had kids come in here and go right to the Ninja Turtle dolls and go ‘Ohhhhh. I haven’t seen those.’ And the Dick Tracy car doesn’t mean anything to them.”

A Dick Tracy car having no meaning to a child? Those days, it’s safe to say, are over.