I really wish I were a bigger fan of Popeye than I am. There is an awful lot to love about the Fleischer and Famous cartoons, but I’m afraid that in too big of dosages, it becomes blatantly obvious how repetitious any animated incarnation of Popeye really is. Like it or not, Segar’s brilliant strip was reduced to formula even in the ‘good ol’ Fleischer days’, long before the Famous Studios brand emerged and “ruined” the character. (Gene Deitch is particularly fierce about this.) That’s not to dismiss the large contributions the Fleischer staff made to the world of animation with their pioneering of actual characterization (only previously seen in Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat shorts), because they’re simply too important to ignore.
There’s a lot wrong with Warner Home Video’s Popeye the Sailor Volume Two, but very little of it is with the quality of filmmaking. The period covered, 1938-1940, probably is the most oddball and non-formulatic of any in the series. As noted in the commentaries and documentaries several times, this is when the Fleischers moved from New York to Miami, and the films also made a conscious move from the gritty, urban New York style to the more refined Hollywood type of animation.
Many of the best Popeye shorts ever done are on this set, most particularly Goonland and Hello – How Am I. I Yam Love Sick, The Jeep, Wotta Nitemare, It’s the Natural Thing to Do, and Wimmin is a Myskery are excellent as well. As in the best cartoons on Volume 1, Popeye actually goes through emotional and psychological turmoil that simply was not seen in any other sound era animation until Disney moved to features. Popeye was there first and did it all. Quite well too.
This set may also have the widest variety in a supporting cast ever. Popeye only eats his spinach and socks Bluto in less than half of these. Featured frequently are Swee’pea, Eugene the Jeep, and Poopdeck Pappy, offering unique plot devices to the series. Olive also succeeds to turn medial tasks and situations into colossal disasters, so Popeye is given a variety of trauma to deal with quite frequently.
There’s also a handful of misfires throughout the set, like Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp, the weakest, but enjoyable, of the three Popeye color two-reelers (gorgeously restored for this collection), the amateurishly drawn My Pop, My Pop, and Shamus Culhane’s intriguing Popeye Meets William Tell, the closest the Fleischer shorts ever got to Disney-like animation. (Greg Ford rightfully defends Culhane as a “genius” in his commentary in spite of the film’s shortcomings.)
I remain unconvinced that if anyone else voiced Popeye for as long as Jack Mercer did that the character would have endured the long life that he has had. Jack Mercer, in my opinion, was Popeye. The ad-libbing from all of the characters is a large part of what makes the Fleischer cartoons fun to watch. My theory seems substantiated whenever I screen Famous shorts from the period Mercer was in the service, such as For Better or Nurse, Rocket to Mars, Klondike Casanova and The Island Fling. They tend to fall flat for the audience, in spite of being some of the most dynamically animated and directed Popeye’s ever produced. Lacking Mercer, the audience isn’t very captivated by what they’re seeing.
Quality of the films aside, there is a lot wrong with the restorations. Many of the opening titles are improperly recreated with jarring jumpcuts (sometimes to the television AAP logo) and pieces of music cut off, and many cartoons are interlaced instead of progressively scanned (so they look like hell on a computer screen). Fans have had trouble with freezing, skipping, and other glitches on various cartoons as well. Warners is apparently offering a replacement program, but since the problems span so far across the board (on both discs as well), it seems useless of them to do so.
The commentaries that I have listened to so far are fairly good overall. Unlike last year, they are at least done by people who know what they are talking about (John Kricfalusi was cut). Greg Ford’s track for Aladdin was amazing for the sheer fact that he was able to carry it without getting flustered for a whopping twenty-one minutes. I was pleased to see that the world’s Popeye animation expert Bob Jaques was present on Stealin’ Ain’t Honest, but, by his own admission, he sounds a little tense and unrelaxed (perhaps he should bring in a friend to ease the tension, hmmmm?).
The Out of the Inkwell: The Fleischer Story documentary is quite bad. No individual animators are credited for any of the pioneering done at the studio whatsoever. Most of the controversies are sanitized and presented as ‘family-friendly’ (no mention of Dave’s adulterous affair playing a role in the brothers’ feud), but are no doubt covered well in the unreleased and unfinished documentary on the studio by Ray Pointer (the world’s Fleischer expert, who is wrongfully nowhere to be seen in this set). The documentary also features charlatans and fans more often than real experts, going on irrelevant tangents of focus-testing that for some reason were not left (and stomped on) in the cutting room. More than once is artwork displayed from later color Famous Studios Popeye shorts, indicating no one was spot-checking this thing.
It’s a shame that the best cartoons made anywhere during this period of animation history have been half-assedly compiled on this set, not only for those who want to actually learn about the cartoons, but just for the fans who want to enjoy them. But it am what it am, and that’s all that it am. Now might be a good time to put those recordings of Barry Mills’ The Popeye Show on DVD. At least they did a good job faking the originals.
