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Yesterday we showed scenes from Popeye’s first screen appearance — today we’ve zoomed ahead to screen a slick 1950’s incarnation of you know who in “Private Eye Popeye.” Seymour Kneitel directs, and everything just keeps moving along at such a fast clip, before the cartoon is half over we’ve covered something like three continents! One memorable running gag has to do with introducing a limited color pallet (no, really!) and another bit features, far and away, Popeye’s most successful episode of cross dressing!

It’s Popeye-a-thon Week all over here at ReFrederator.

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Dave Kirwan

Our pal Joel Schlosberg thought we should have some public domain music to go with our All Popeye Week. In the audio collection of Archive.org, he dug up this nifty 1931 jazz piece by All Dollar and his Ten Cent Band, “Popeye, the Sailor Man” — it predates the cartoon theme music by almost two years! Go here to hear it. Thanks, Joel!

For your free subscription to ReFrederator, click
here, or visit iTunes!

Dave Kirwan

We proudly initiate our week long tribute to one of America’s beloved comic icons with, umm, a cheater. Paramount immediately rushed “Let’s Sing with Popeye” into theaters when the first animated appearance of the one eyed mariner kicked off a craze that swept the country faster than small pox. This curious little novelty offers us footage from the very first Popeye cartoon, and saves you the trouble of googling all the lyrics to our hero’s deathless theme music.

All of which raises two extremely important questions. First — how did the Max Fleischer Studio get so much so right so early in the game? I mean the song, the voice, the spinach to the rescue dynamic (largely an invention of the animated films, not Elzie Segar’s comic strip original) — everything was there from the start! Few classic cartoon stars were so fully developed for their movie debuts.

Oh, and secondly — what [Read more…]

Last chapter in our Book Report Week — Frank Tashlin’s “Have You Got Any Castles”, one of those great ‘inanimate-things-come-to-life-late-at-night’ Warner Brothers cartoons. In this case, appropriately enough, it’s books in a library, and, baby, we’re talkin’ puns bigtime. Cringe inducing, groan inspiring, eye roll encouraging puns. Lots of ‘em. I fully expect the air to reverberate with the sound of foreheads flattened by the palms of ReFrederator regulars going “Bulldog Drummin’? Cheesh!”

Pretty funny stuff if you can catch all the reference points — lots of great music too. But since this cartoon is crammed to its sprocket holes with improper ethnic caricatures, it has traditionally shown up in heavily edited versions of any number of lengths. We’re presenting it today in all of it’s politically incorrect splendor (fair warning!)

If you yam, in fact, what you yam, you may well enjoy next week’s ReFrederator theme — five days of Purely Popeye. Grab [Read more…]

More literary license is taken today with another scrambled classic from Ub Iwerks. “Don Quixote” is a very loose adaptation of Cervantes’ 17th century masterwork, and when I say “loose” you know I mean “upside-down-mixed-up-with-a-lot-of-booby-hatch-jokes-thrown-in”. In this edition, the would be knight is an escaped mental patient whose delusions, truth be told, are not a lot loonier than the gooney reality in which he lives. He thinks windmills are humanoid giants with four arms, when, in fact, they are living beings with big frowny faces and, when necessary, knees (on which to spank their enemies!) As if to prove the point that our hero is not that all that nuts, we end on the spectacle of Quixote and his keeper fleeing the clutches of Iwerks’ ever present homely old maid (did he make ANY cartoons without the banana nosed spinster character?)

Technically, this is one of the most impressive ComiColor entries. The use [Read more…]

Chuck Jones, very much in his Walt Disney wannabe mode, cooked up today’s goodie, “Robin Hood Makes Good.” And like a lot of the late thirties Silly Symphonies , this elaborate Merrie Melody takes a story aimed squarely at very young children and turns it into a visually appealing, subtly ‘acted’ affair practically any audience can enjoy. Three little squirrels play Robin Hood and run afoul a hungry fox —that’s pretty much the whole deal, but I’m thinkin’ if you saw this one when you were a tiny little kid, you probably still remember it.

Much of the punch in the group dynamics of the squirrel brothers is thanks to some superb character animation, and the vocal talents of Bernice Hansen. Ms. Hansen, who does the voices for the two younger rodents, was the unofficial Queen of Cute around this time, and spent hours in the recording studio impersonating Andy Panda, Petunia Pig and others [Read more…]

The target for Tuesday’s literary assault is “The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner: who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an uninhabited Island on the coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pirates. Written by Himself.” No, really. That’s the original title. Almost as long as today’s cartoon, “Molly Moo Cow and Robinson Crusoe”, and, all things considered, probably a little bit funnier.

Okay, okay — this Burt Gillett toon really isn’t too bad. Has all the expected ingredients; palm trees, pounding surf, singing castaway, politically incorrect cannibals and, of course, our bovine star Molly — whom nobody on the island seems to identify as a potential food source. Funny that. I mean, [Read more…]

The theme around here is Book Report Week, so excuse us as we peruse some library shelves for musty dusty classics that have been transmogrified into jolly, vintage cartoons.

First off is the 1934 version of “The Headless Horseman”, an Ub Iwerks’ ComiColor interpretation of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” — released a full 15 years before Walt Disney got around to the same subject matter. This trip out, the whole story has been squished down into eight and a half minutes, focusing on the love triangle of Ichabod, Bram and Katrina, with just enough time for a new twist ending! The Carl Stallings music track is lively, but notice how the Iwerks team is still doing all their storytelling through pantomime (these guys just plain didn’t like dialogue!) I kinda dig the way Katrina is designed, not as a standard issue flapper, but plump and pretty just like Washington Irving’s pus sized [Read more…]