Almost as a regressive follow-up to the last post about Boomerang posting all of the Famous Studios Popeye cartoons, I’m posting this: “Partial Post”, one of the King Features TV Popeye cartoons subcontracted to Gene Deitch. In it, Popeye battles a mailbox from outer space. I wish it lived up to the insanity promised by that descriptive sentence, but unfortunately it just lives up to the substandard of all the ’60s King Features TV cartoons.
Still, it’s been a perverted favorite of Popeye animation expert Bob Jaques, who’s had a black-and-white 16mm print for years. I was able to nab a low-fade color 16mm print for free recently because—why not? As Bob notes, a lot of the Popeye heads herein are copied straight off Johnny Gent’s classic model. Perhaps one day we’ll see all of the King Features Popeye cartoons dumped to DVD, but I’ll admit I haven’t even looked at my copy of the Warner Archive collection of all the cartoons subcontracted to Paramount. Can you blame me?
(Thanks to Tommy Stathes for the transfer.)
At least 85 random KFS TV Popeye cartoons are on a 75th Anniversary DVD set, and all of the Popeye TV cartoons from 1960-87 have been “dumped” on Amazon Prime.
Oh, wow, thanks for letting me know, Debbie. I just looked at “Partial Post” there and have to say… the quality between this on-the-fly transfer and they one uploaded is negligible. Oh well. Time to look up the other Deitch titles.
“The feeling is mucilage” was pretty funny Popeye line.
I kept expecting a one-legged captain to be clomping around muttering about Dicky Moe.
“Blog Not Found.”
Bob – where are you?
D’oh! Typo. Fixed the link. Thanks, Craig.
Great! Now all we need are some new posts…
(Hi, Bob!)
Deitch liked the E.C. Segar characters, even if he wasn’t enamored with how Famous Studios had treated them (his former staffer Jules Feiffer wasn’t even all that pleased with what the Fleischers had done with the core characters). And you can tell that in his KFS cartoons, compared to the Tom & Jerry efforts William Snyder was able to secure from MGM. The animation’s never all that good in any of them at the budgets involved, but there’s not the disdain for the characters here than you can feel Deitch had in the T&J efforts, especially the early ones he tried to make as painful for the audience as possible.
One of the interesting things about Gene’s Popeye efforts is to look at how many different animators worked with his layouts and drawings — KFS farmed the 200-plus shorts out all over the place, but just with Gene’s efforts, not only did the animators in Prague handle them, but Halas and Batchelor did some in England, and there were even four done in Italy and two by the Zagreb animators (none of those six have made it to DVD yet, but Fred Grandinetti stuck a few of them on his Facebook page).
If you ever want to see Popeye fighting a mailbox, this is your film. It’s actually kind of funny in a “What the heck am I watching?” way.
Dig that crazy dialogue, man. “It’s gone!” “Yeah, Olive, it’s real nice.”
Not related but just wanted to say I have “What About Thad?” on 16mm, it’s one of my favorites! Got it at the Deseret Industries thrift store with a bunch of other Mormon films.