YMMV / Dennis the Menace (US)

• Ethnic Scrappy: When Hank Ketcham heard about Charles Schultz taking steps to diversify the cast of Peanuts in the late '60s, he followed his lead by introducing Jackson, an African-American boy, to the cast in 1970. Unfortunately, he was drawn as a Blackface-Style Caricature with pitch-black skin, wide, staring eyes, and bulbous lips, dooming Ketcham's attempts at goodwill. Making matters worse, Jackson received no in-comic dialogue and was the subject of some rather distasteful jokes about his "race trouble" with Dennis—"He runs faster than I do!" says Dennis. Jackson made one other appearance after his debut (which lightened his skin tone and shrunk his eyes and lips) before vanishing from the strip for good.
• Epileptic Trees: Some fans, comparing this Dennis' characterization and the unrelated British character of the same name, have noticed that American Dennis' father looks a lot like the British Dennis and that his grandfather looks a lot like the British Dennis' father, have come to the conclusion that the Dennis that we see here in the U.S. strips is the British Dennis' son.
• Fandom Rivalry: Debates between this Dennis the Menace and the U.K. strip of the same name can get incredibly heated.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • One early strip (6/13/51) has Henry jokingly tell Alice that their misbehaving son problem will easily be solved once he's drafted into the military. The real Dennis, Hank Ketcham's firstborn son, ended up getting drafted into The Vietnam War, and the trauma from that and other incidents led to Dennis being estranged from Hank.
  • Arguably the entire portrayal of Henry and Alice as Happily Married and as Good Parents who share a close bond with their son no matter how much his mischief exasperates them. Not only because the real Dennis became estranged from his father as an adult, but because the real Alice and Hank eventually separated, and then Alice died of a drug overdose, when Dennis was just 12 years old.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • A strip from the '70s has Alice waking up to the sound of the Star Spangled Banner playing on the TV, realizing "He's been watching the late, late show again!" Modern-day readers could be forgiven for assuming that she's referring to The Late Late Show, which actually didn't debut until 1995.
  • The heated fan debates between US Dennis and UK Dennis prove to be quite funny by the time Calvin and Hobbes came out, given that Calvin feels like a perfect fusion between the two (UK's striped shirt, US's blonde hair and more cutesy looks, their shared smart-aleck personality, and UK's physical menace).
• Values Dissonance:
  • In the early '70s Ketcham decided to make the strip more up-to-date by introducing a pair of "ethnic" characters. One, the tomboyish Italian-American girl Gina, was well received. The other, an African-American kid named Jackson, was... well, not so much.^note Jackson should not be confused with Jay, a character created by DiC for its animated version. Jay was far less controversial, as he was not a stereotype.
  • Dennis would get spanked as punishment, even well into the 1980s.
  • An older daily panel had Alice with a cigar and telling someone on the phone that Dennis bought it for her. This was back when minors could buy tobacco products as it was not uncommon for parents to send children down the street to cigar shops, tobacconists, etc. to pick up cigars, cigarettes and so on. This practice has vanished today due to stricter laws and changing societal attitudes towards tobacco, especially with juvenile tobacco use.

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