I Yam What I Yam

Max Fleischer’s first years animating Elzie Segar’s Popeye

I just watched the first 2 disks of the Popeye cartoon collection. These are all B&W and made between 1933 and 1935 and they are great.

Volume. There is a ‘volume’ in the linework of the main characters that is spellbinding to me. Somehow the way that Bluto Popeye and Olive are drawn, they seem to be 3 dimensions. I think it relates to the thickness of the outlines, and the beautiful character design, use of blacks and gray tones in their outfits, as well as lots of wrinkle-lines around eyes for example.

(In a tribute on Jack Mercer, Popeye’s voice from 1935-1980 or so, they show clips from a 3d cgi Popeye adventure, Mercer’s last outing as the sailor. The ‘poppin’ fresh’ versions were utterly horrible... The grayscale line and wash drawings beat heck out of the cgi. I was amazed to see that Futurama had to invent processes to make cgi animation look like traditional line animation, I had thought that would be the simplest way, just get the computer to do all the in-betweening. It seems there’s a lot more to it than I had imagined.)

Voice Talent. Mae (My?) Questel was both Olive and Betty Boop? She had an amazing voice and an amazing control over it. I love hearing her Olive. I never appreciated her so much when I was a kid. In fact I didn’t pay much attention to Olive. The commentaries are really helping me to see and re-see what is in these cartoons.

Silent, then Radio? Fleischer production method amazed me: The toons are done MOS. Then when the toons were finished, all the sound people — voice actors, effects wizards, and musicians, got together in one room and they did the soundtrack all live, all together, all at once. There was something like the ‘follow the bouncing ball’ done for the pre-written dialogue, then Questel and the other voice actors were encouraged to ad-lib various mumbles. The weirdness of hearing these ‘spoken out loud thoughts’ as they described it, adds to the charm.

Operetta. I never liked the Disney insistence on music, but when I see something like ‘Barnicle Bill’ (which is said to be an almost shot-for-shot remake of a Betty Boop toon the Fleischers had done on the same song) I revise my opinion. ‘Barnicle Bill’ is my favorite indeed of all these toons so far. Using popular songs and writing new lyrics, and having the characters sing pivotal dialogues, transforms the toon. Similarly ‘You’ve Got to be a Football Hero,’ another toon based on a currently popular song, uplifts and transforms everything. Music makes for fantasy which somehow helps me to enter into the nonsense.

New York. Many of the commentators mention that the Fleischers, based in new york, created an urban world for Popeye, that was tougher, and more interesting, than the more bucolic world Walt Disney and other west coast animators were doing.

Funny animals. In the earliest of these toons, Popeye, Olive and Bluto are the only humans, the rest of the world populated by animals. This is weirdly interesting and I kind of miss it when they went to all-people extras. But that’s probably because there were more surreal, gratuitous sight gags in those early toons.

More realism = less fun!

Grayscale. I love the grayscale. Of course when I was a kid and watched all these, endlessly — Popeye was always one of my favorites, probably because I loved a good punch-out brawl, and these were the greatest — my TV was B&W and I had no way of seeing the difference between anything shot in color and that shot in B&W except, of course, that color often translates poorly when it’s only a question of values and not hues, and what was shot in B&W, toons and live action alike, got the values right.

Man these were wonderful.