Popeye the Sailor: 1933-1938
Studio: Warner Home Video
WorkNameSort: Popeye the Sailor: 1933-1938
A tattooed smoker with a knack for trouble, he could almost qualify as one of Hollywood’s bad boys. Really, he’s just Popeye ‘ brawler, spinach fiend and sailor man extraordinaire. Born on the newspaper page in 1929, Popeye began as a bit player in the ‘Thimble Theatreâ?� comic strip. Its creator, E.C. Segar, brought him in for a single story line, a decade into the strip’s run. The established stars had been Olive Oyl and her family, but, soon enough, the muttering seaman with the inflated forearms and the signature squint had stolen both Olive’s and America’s hearts.
A few years later came the animated cartoons, 60 of which are collected on this terrific four-disc set. There are also commentaries, documentaries, a treasure trove of additional early animated shorts (Krazy Kat, Koko the Clown, Bobby Bumps) and other features. But the shiniest gems here are the earliest Popeyes, created by Max and Dave Fleischer at their New York studio for the purpose of being screened in theaters for audiences full of children and adults.
Like a lot of people, I caught up with them decades later on TV, and I’ve been a fan ever since. As a kid, they got me to request spinach for dinner, after which I went around the house, evidently empowered, lifting furniture. I think I may like them even more now. (And, in fact, their appalling ethnic stereotyping make them less-than-suitable for children today, as noted in warnings at the start of each disc and on the cover of the box.) Certainly their visual qualities ‘ including a sort of lumpen surrealism ‘ are more obvious to me now. At the end of ‘Seasin’s Greetinks!â?� our hero slugs the troublesome Bluto; the stars that emerge near the villain’s head turn into sparkly decorations that wrap themselves around a nearby fir tree.
Most of these toons are in black-and-white format, but a couple of the longer, later ones, ‘Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailorâ?� and ‘Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves,â?� are in color. The vivid use of contrasting hues in these toons is astonishingly beautiful and very different from anything you’ve ever seen from Disney or Looney Tunes. The way the Fleischers work with shades of green in particular (and not just for spinach) is so gorgeous it’s shocking. But all of these little movies are marvelous, right from the first; ‘Popeye the Sailor,â?� technically an entry in the Fleischers’ popular Betty Boop series, was really a sailor-man spin-off. They’re strong at the start and, you might say, strong all the way to the ‘finich.â?�
This article appears in Aug 1-7, 2007.