Wideo Wednesday: Well, Blow Me Down

“These cartoons are products of their time and may depict ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today; the cartoons are presented as originally created to avoid claiming these prejudices never existed.”

So yesterday I was looking at my YouTube shuffle and saw that this came up, Top 10 Darkest and Adult Popeye Episodes That Aren’t Just For Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQCpcYQ7qcY

I don’t know that they were particularly ‘adult’; they seemed more in poor taste, and certainly racially offensive, full of once-popular stereotypes and World War II propaganda.  Perhaps they meant only adult minds could deal with them without being tainted, and that impressionable children should not be exposed to them without someone to put them in context.

It certainly reminded me of two Popeye cartoons I hadn’t seen for at least 50 years.  They were Pop-Pie a la Mode and Popeye’s Pappy. I don’t remember them as awakening or feeding any prejudices.

What I remembered mostly from Pop-Pie a la Mode (1945) was food being poured down Popeye’s throat (I've always been a sucker for animated food), a bathtub being pulled apart to reveal a huge stewpot, and being somewhat tempted by the enormous floppy steak Popeye was flattened into. It didn’t move me to prejudice, just mild cannibalism.

What I remembered from the 1958 Popeye’s Pappy (a remake of the 1938 Goonland) was stuff about Popeye’s family: his mother, his Pappy with a black beard, and Popeye as a baby. The makers of this cartoon, set on a tropical island, seemed to assume all ‘natives’ were cannibals, and vaguely black. They were a menace, but not evil, even attractive. The real ‘villain’ was ‘King’ Pappy, who was hedonistic and unfeeling at first, and something of a tyrant before his family affection reawakens.

The only place I could find these cartoons in full form were as reviews on Brandon Reacts TV on YouTube. I can’t say he is the most informative commentator, but he did allow me to satisfy my curiosity about these elderly memories.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsEqvjrtObA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABlAFguPIl8

I can see why they are not rerun broadcast for general consumption.

Action Figures to Be Noted: Childhood

 

Notes:

Though not necessarily my childhood. The Frosty the Snowman looks more like the animated version and less like the stop-motion version (Christmas in July) that I already have. But put a top hat on an action figure and you have my immediate attention. The Goosebumps villains belong mostly to my nephew's childhood; Mr. Hooper from Sesame Street would make a good 'civilian' in any action figure adventure story. That odd-looking Popeye is how he first appeared in the Thimble Theatre comic strip (which he later took over and it became simply Popeye), and he originally got his great life-preserving luck by rubbing the head of Bernice the Whiffle Hen before spinach assumed a role in his life. That's Castor Oyl, Olive's brother, not a short Wimpy, in that Popeye line up: he was the original owner of the Whiffle Bird and the 'hero' of Thimble Theatre. That figure of Snoopy merely confirms that he is terrible 'from a design point of view', at least for translation into three dimensions. Sweetums and Robin both first publicly premiered in 1971 in Jim Henson's The Frog Prince (we watched the original broadcast). Oh, and there are several other Richard Scarry characters besides Huckle the Cat and Lowly Worm, a meager handful from his cast of thousands.

Action Figures to Be Noted

 

Speak of the devil and his horns will pop up. After just saying things seemed to be slowing down, these Disney Mirrorverse toys and Classic Popeye figures come to my attention. While Sinbad (looks a lot like Bluto, don't he?) comes from the classic color cartoon, the others were characters from the 1930's comic strip.