Hands, knees and ...

A slightly 'risque' look at the lighter side of ice skating by commercial artist J. Fredrick Smith; not explicitly cancan on ice, but about as close as we're likely to get in a 50s family journal. Saw this many years ago in an Advertising textbook, recall being vaguely surprised by both the pose and the flashed panties...

Then again, ice skating has always been the perfect excuse to reveal knickers and thighs, even in venues where they might least be expected...

 

Postcard courtesy of BB's Cancan Tumblr.

Let's talk about cultural dissonance...

Back in the 1960s, the Chirrol Chocolate company produced an animated commercial meant to appeal to children. It featured three bishojo characters singing "ふりふりフレーク、チロルチョコ～," which (liberally translated) means something like "shakey-shakey-shakey, Chirrol Chocolate-ah!" The cartoon ended with the girls raising their skirts to reveal their underwear. Most people found it cute and funny; apparently, kids used to sing it on the way to school. Kawaii desu, no big deal.

Fast forward thirty year or so, and the company decides to remake the ad in 1994. Social values have changed, agendas are being pushed, and suddenly, we have thousands of moral guardians mounting a letter-writing campaign to the government, demanding that the "obscene commercial" be banned until the end of time. Apparently, the local P & T association had leapt onto the PC bandwagon that the West had been pushing for the past few decades.

You'd think that the average Japanese politician would have more important things to deal with than a harmless TV commercial, but naturally, the Puritan Brigade got their way as they always do. The advertisement was censored, all copies of the print destroyed, and a valuable piece of popular culture was lost to history. Apparently, nobody and nothing is safe from these self-righteous killjoys, regardless of where they happen to live.

Cartoons and Comics

Depictions of the cancan in mainstream comics tend to be few and far between, but they turn up every now and again, sometimes in the most unexpected of places. Our first example comes from Archie Comics, where Veronica visits the Yukon and is mistaken for a chorus girl (my apologies for the low resolution scans, they're the only ones I could locate on the web).

I think the sequence was drawn by Dan DeCarlo, the artist who more or less defined the Archie Comics' "house style". DeCarlo also drew gag cartoons for various adult magazines and was well-known for his risque sense of humor outside of his mainstream work.

Next, we have  Le Petit Spirou by Tome and Janry, a popular Belgian/French comic strip, (though practically unknown outside Europe). While the main protagonists are mostly young children, the humor is more squarely aimed at adults:

One might think that French comics would be literally bursting with the cancan, but once again, such images are comparatively rare. Chorus girls sometimes turn up in Maurice De Bevere's Lucky Luke, though their costumes often lack the distinctive skirts and petticoats common to the classic ensemble:

On the other hand, a more traditional outfit can be found in some of the animated adaptions of the character, as suggested by this hand-painted cel from 1971's Daisy Town:

And of course, there's the famous Royal Flash gag from 1944's  Stage Door Cartoon (OK, I admit to cheating here a little; I used photoshop to edits Bugs out of the picture):

PS: Will post more as I find 'em. If anyone knows the original source of those Archie Comics pages, please leave a message; I'd be very interested in posting some high-res scans.