POPEYE'S MOUNTAIN CLIMBING CARTOON

I thought I'd comment on the opening of another Popeye cartoon in the recent Warners DVD set: "I SKI-LOVE SKI-YOU SKI." It's not one of the better cartoons in the collection, but it manages to be professional, and the mistakes of pros working at this level are always worth studying.

The biggest mistake the film makes is in the writing: everything good in the story is at the beginning, when it's a musical. After that it's nothing but predictable mountain climbing gags.

Also, the story has a generic feel to it. Let's face it, this is a story that has no reason to exist, apart from a commercial one. You can't imagine that it came out of something funny one of the artists saw on the street, or out of someone's unique and funny view of the world.

The story has Popeye and Bluto each sing their own invitation to Olive to come out and climb the mountain. This is the part of the story that works. The dialogue and the animation are expertly paired with the music.

Nice layout (above), and a nice Bluto pose, too.

Bluto ends his song with a gesture to Popeye, as if to say "See if you can beat that." Acting this good might have saved the film if there had been more of it. Unfortunately it's only in the beginning.

Olive (above) chooses who she'll climb with using "Eeney, Meany, Miney, Moe." Done to a musical beat as it is here, the scene works fine. 

Popeye wins and the couple walk off leaving Bluto angry and wanting revenge.

 As I said earlier, most of the rest of the film (above) is mountain climbing gags done on long shots with minimal acting. This kind of thing looks fine in live action but almost never works in animation. Okay, there's a few exceptions like the Goofy sports cartoons, but only a few. In general, my advise is NEVER, EVER DO SPORTS CARTOONS.

Come to think of it, if you're a TV animation writer, never write about standard theme ideas like boxing, building construction, car racing, etc. Stories like that don't lend themselves to comedy or to comedic acting. They're a creative dead end. Write about the things that genuinely make you laugh and which spark the spontaneous enthusiasm of everybody you tell the idea to.

My favorite Popeyes tend to be the ones like "A Clean Shaven Man" where there's an earthy Seger influence, and where the Fleischer tradition of innovation still prevails. This after all, was the studio that did "Bimbo's Initiation" and Betty Boop's "Snow White."

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