Popeye the Sailor, Volume One: 1933-1938 (review)

The long commercial absence of the Fleischer Studio Popeye cartoons, with their brilliant pacing, wit, and numerous technical innovations, seemed to me as both a fan and a film programmer not only inexplicable but criminal. It is not an exaggeration to say that the situation in part motivated me to enter the world of moving image archiving. Readers of this journal will not be surprised that a rights struggle was at play. The dispute originated between King Features Syndicate, which has owned the character trademark since his first newspaper comic strip appearance, and Warner Brothers, who control the films. Over the years, a handful of titles have slipped into the public domain, appearing again and again on countless videotapes of dubious origin and quality. In the early 1980s, King Features thwarted a legitimate home video release by issuing a strongly worded yet completely ungrounded cease-and-desist letter, keeping these classics from a proper reissue—until now.

In spite of their unavailability on home video, these first Popeye cartoons have long been a staple of television programming. Thirty years ago, in New York City alone one could find three different Popeye programs broadcast on three television stations six days a week. To supplement the lack of any residual payments from TV broadcasts of the original theatrical shorts, King Features backed the production of a new Popeye series with each decade, but only the entries produced by Max and Dave Fleischer in the 1930s have truly stood the test of time.

The films have suffered a variety of injustices over the years. When Ted Turner acquired the MGM/UA catalog in 1986, these cartoons were to meet a far more dismal fate than the feature films Turner had been colorizing at the time—the Fleischer Popeyes were outsourced to Korea to be redrawn! Haste, together with budgetary limitations, resulted in the fine details of the image being carelessly interpreted or ignored altogether, and one of the most distinguishing qualities of the originals—the three-dimensional background sets—were simply traced and flattened down to 2D.

Happily, the cartoons enjoyed a brief resurgence in black and white on the Cartoon Network in 2001. These fake restorations, as they were acknowledged by animation historian and project consultant Jerry Beck, rein-stated the cartoons' original title sequences, which had been excised long ago because they listed Paramount—the previous rights holder.¹ Obviously a labor of love by its producers, "The Popeye Show," became increasing difficult to find on the schedule. Again, licensing was the key issue, as the Cartoon Network, owned by AOL/TimeWarner, elected not to use their primetime hours to feature characters they did not own when they had a wealth of owned properties to support their merchandising interests.²

In the capacity of film festival programmer, I met with staffers from King Features' publicity department several years back about putting together a touring program to honor Popeye's seventy-fifth anniversary. In 1929, the unassuming sailor made his debut with a bit part in E.C. Segar's "Thimble Theater" [Begin Page 60] comic strip and quickly became its star. My model for a retrospective was Betty Boop Confidential, a feature-length program of another Fleischer series that toured movie houses in the mid-1990s before appearing on home video. Though initially enthusiastic about the idea, King Features became indifferent after negotiations with Warner Brothers proved slow, and other priorities took precedence. Meanwhile, I took my curiosity about withdrawn works into my moving image archiving studies.

Rather than support an official revival of classic Fleischer works for Popeye's seventy-fifth anniversary, King Features instead released a new CGI Popeye special, "Popeye's Voyage: The Quest for Pappy," as their commemorative publicity. The most bewildering aspect of this entirely regrettable project came in the token "making-of" documentary, where the new animators spoke of inspiration from the Fleischer design and humor . . . as images of the made-for-television quickies from the 1960s appeared on screen as illustrative examples!

Grumblings...