I Want You… to watch this toon.
As a small child living on a daily diet of after-school cartoons (and Jets, the Cereal Made Just for Boys) I wasn’t bothered much by Popeye’s chronic job hopping. Window Washer? Sure! Cowboy? Why not? Private Eye? Sounds fun! But today’s film, “I’m in the Army Now” always threw me. I mean, he’s Popeye the SAILOR man — and here he wants to be a soldier? Very traumatizing. My tiny, unformed brain recognized the whole affair as profoundly… unnatural.
Turns out it was totally natural for the Max Fleischer Studio to grab any premise, no matter how odd, if it afforded the opportunity for them to make a cheater — a ‘new’ film that had great hunks of old footage Gorilla Glued into the middle. We see scenes from one of Popeye’s earliest efforts (”Blow Me Down”) and one of his very best (”King of the Mardi Gras”) among other sundry clips.
This is where I make a really bad pun about monkey business or some such, since next week’s theme is all about apes. Swing on in on Monday!
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