I Yam What I Yam! (The Popeye Thread)

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Recently, I went back to childhood favorites with my rediscovering the Looney Tunes, and now I've come to Popeye. I bought both the first DVD collection of the original Fleischer Studios cartoons and the first volume of E.C. Segar's comic strip (which is in a wonderful hardcover package by Fantagraphics, by the way).

The 1930s Popeye cartoons are a revelation. Watching them through adult eyes I can see just how unique they were. There was no mistaking a Fleischer Popeye cartoon with any other kind of cartoon ever done. The backgrounds are just as much a character as the characters, and the toons typically are done in "wide shots," with just as much an emphasis on the "set." Really different from the Looney Tunes.

Segar's comic is pretty good too. It can be a bit repetitive (long story arcs done in newpaper strips require constant explanations of the plot to catch new readers up), but once you get past that it's great. Popeye doesn't even show up untill twenty or so pages in when he's introduced as a bit player in a long story arc (the strip's title wasn't "Popeye" it was "Thimble Theater") - he quickly becomes a member of the main cast and where I'm at now (halfway through the first book) is pretty much an even duo with the (soon to be ex) main character Castor Oyl.

Here's hoping the current CGI Popeye film in production doesn't totally screw up the character. Reading the comic strip I think that, if done properly, Popeye could become a kind of wacky, Indiana Jones-type adventure series.

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Finished Popeye the Sailor Vol. 2: 1938-1940, and it's another excellent collection. I did notice a slight dip in quality. The cartoons are still excellent, but not quite as fantastic as the cartoons in Vol. 1 (which might be the best cartoon collection on DVD). The special features clued me in on the fact that by this time the Fleischer's top animators had moved on to working on Gulliver's Travels and Superman, leaving the next generation of creators in charge of the Popeye series. Even though they're not quite as inventive on a whole it still features some of the best cartoons, introducing great characters like Eugene the Jeep and Poopdeck Pappy and producing my all-time favorite Popeye cartoon: Goonland.

BTW, saying that one batch of Fleischer Popeye cartoons are weaker than another is like saying Monster Zero is weaker than Mothra vs. Godzilla. The quality is still crazy high.


I've actually gone a bit Popeye mad recently and decided that since there isn't that much Popeye stuff available (and you can get used DVDs on the internet for cheap) to become a completest and get all the commercially available Popeye stuff I can.

I just received Popeye: 75th Anniversary Collector’s Edition. A collection King Features (owners of Popeye and publishers of the comic strip) put out in 2004 for the anniversary of the character's creation. The set features 85 of the cartoons King Features produced for TV in the early '60s. By then the theatrical Popeye short series had wound down, but then Paramount licensed them all to television and they became hugely popular. Popeye was a hot property again and King Features realized they weren't making any money off it, so they outsourced an all new series of cartoons to various animation studios and put out over 200 cartoons to TV.

Most of 'em are, quite frankly, pretty bad. The animation is as limited as Rocky and Bullwinkle, but without the good writing and nifty character designs. One of the various studios making them was Paramount, the same folks who had just stopped doing Popeye a few years earlier. Theirs are the best of the bunch as far as I can see, in both animation and stories. If they had done the entire series it would have been pretty decent, but they only made like a quarter of them. A lot of the other studios' work looks amateurish, so much so they border on nonsensical ... and yet, I don't really hate watching them. There is something quite nostalgic about them and it took me a while to put my finger on it. This old, limited animation stuff reminds me of similarly cheap stuff I'd seen as a kid: old educational cartoons, that rinky-dink booth that showed cheap cartoons at the county fair, the toon videos you'd get at the dollar store. It's a weird trip!


BTW, it was this series that caused the whole Bluto/Brutus confusion. Bluto was only in one storyline of the original E.C. Segar comic and King Features forgot about that and assumed Paramount invented the character, so they changed his character design into more of a fat guy instead of a muscle bound guy and renamed him to avoid legal trouble. This has apparently caused quite a bit of confusion in generations before mine, but since I was a kid in the '90s and these toons had pretty much dropped out of syndication by then I only knew him as Bluto.

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The next stop on my little Popeye journey is Popeye's Voyage: The Quest For Pappy, a not terribly good but not bad either (thuroughly inofensive) CGI special from 2004 meant to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the character.

There are really only two things of note in this mini (45 minute) movie:

1)The character designs can work in 3 dimensions, and if a TV special from 6 years ago can do it reasonably well then surely the apparently in production Hollywood version can do it too.

2) Billy West makes a fantastic Popeye. His performance is far and away the best thing about this.

[mbozzo]

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[sentaison]

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The method of adaptation of the Popeye film is rather similar to the original Ninja Turtles film: they're both close adaptations of the original comics, but they add the familiar aspects of the better known cartoons for general audiences.

I wonder just what audiences expected out of the Popeye movie. If it had copied the original cartoons completely in tone then it would have been an hour and a half of insane violence and surrealism. I would have probably liked that (though I think the film we got was great), but I imagine the public at large would be just a turned off as they were by the quirky film they got.

[kidnicky]

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