Little Toot is a 1939 children'spicture book written and illustrated by Hardie Gramatky. It features Little Toot, a small young tugboat in New York Harbor who does not want to tug. Instead, he would rather play, making figure eights in the harbor and thus being a nuisance to all the other tugboats. But when he ends up all alone on the open ocean as a storm is rolling in, it is up to him to save a grounded ocean liner.
Publication history
1939, USA, G. P. Putnam's Sons
2007, USA, G. P. Putnam's Sons
The book has been continually in print since 1939. In 2007, in honor of what would have been Gramatky's 100th birthday, Penguin Putnam publishers rescanned the original artwork, added nine original full-color sketches by the illustrator, and brought back detailed endpapers so the book has been restored to its first-edition colors and vibrancy.
The story appeared in an animated segment of the Walt Disney Studios film Melody Time in 1948; the story was sung by the Andrews Sisters, with Vic Schoen providing the backgroundmusical score. In this version, Little Toot disgraces his father Big Toot by recklessly causing an ocean liner - one Big Toot was towing out to sea - to run aground and crash into skyscrapers in Manhattan. Little Toot is banished from the harbor as a result. In exile, Little Toot realizes that he must "grow up" - in other words, give up his careless ways - in order to earn respect from the other boats...including Big Toot, who has been stuck towing garbage scows ever since that fiasco with the ocean liner. Then Little Toot gets his chance: another ocean liner gets stuck on rocks, beyond the 12-mile limit; since Big Toot and the police boats are bottled up in the harbor by a storm, Little Toot must single-handedly rescue the grounded liner...which he does. This version was also adapted into comic strip form in two issues of Walt Disney's Comics and Storiesin September and October 1948. When Capitol Records produced a record with the Disney Little Toot song, it was the first children's record to hit the 1,000,000 sales mark on Billboard, according to then-president Alan Livingston. An animated adaptation of Little Toot and the Loch Ness Monster was seen in Shelley Duvall's Bedtime Stories and was narrated by Rick Moranis. There was also another movie based on Little Toot called The New Adventures of Little Toot. It featured Samuel Vincent as the voice of the title character and was released on home video in 1992 by Strand Home Video.
