FRED Entertainment

One of the major event in cartoon art in 2007 is Warner Home Video’s release of Popeye the Sailor 1933-1938, a DVD set collecting the first sixty Popeye cartoons produced by the Max Fleischer Studios. This is everything that a DVD set of vintage animation should be.

First there is the handsome artwork on the case, depicting Popeye in the style of the Fleischers’ 1930s cartoons, adapted from the design by the character’s creator, comic strip artist E. C. Segar. The artwork, and even the simple orange color of the box, impart a wonderful vintage feel to the collection, as if this is what a DVD set would be like if it was produced seventy years ago. Picking my set up at a local Best Buy, I received an exclusive bonus: the chain sells its Popeye sets in a tin case bearing Popeye’s likeness, further reinforcing the appealing retro look.

Inside, the Popeye cartoons have been remastered, giving them sharp, clear image, enabling viewers to marvel at the beauty of their painted backgrounds, something to which I’d never paid attention when watching the shorts on television or even in theaters. Something I had noticed in the past was the Fleischers’ use of actual three-dimensional sets in some scenes, against which the animated characters would be filmed. Watching these DVDs I found myself thinking that these sets convey more of a sense of three-dimensional depth than even today’s computer animation can achieve (at least without making viewers wear 3-D glasses). After decades of seeing these cartoons start out with the logo of Associated Artists Productions (A.A.P.), which was their first television distributor, it is refreshing to see their original openings, with Paramount’s mountain logo, restored. Between the Paramount logos and the clarity of the restored prints, you can imagine that you are seeing these cartoons the way that they looked when they were first released during the Great Depression.

Then there are all the special features! The producers of this DVD cover Popeye’s history, in the comics, in animation, and even in Robert Altman’s 1980 live action film: its screenwriter, Jules Feiffer, and actor Paul Dooley, who played Wimpy, turn up in the set’s mini-documentaries.

What may be even more surprising is that the producers even feature material that has nothing to do with Popeye but which will be of interest to aficionados of early animation that led up to the Fleischers’ Popeye series. One of the documentary features on the set is “Forging the Frame: The Roots of Animation 1900-1920,” co-produced by Greg Ford, the curator of Lincoln Center’s retrospective of cartoon musicals, which I covered at such great length in this column starting with “Comics in Context” #100. This documentary goes all the way back to J. Stuart Blackton’s pioneering Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, made in 1906. (Hey, that means that last year was the hundredth anniversary of the animation medium. Shouldn’t there have been a major celebration in museums, revival film theaters, and comics conventions?) The documentary spotlights Winsor McCay, the first truly great creative figure in American comics and in animation, and offers excerpts from four of his landmark films, Little Nemo (1911); How a Mosquito Operates (1912), pointing out how it inaugurates animation that depicts a character’s personality; Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), in which McCay created the first great success in personality animation; and The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), rightly characterizing it as a documentary in animated form. “Forging the Frame” provides excerpts from several other remarkable early cartoons, featuring such characters as Mutt and Jeff, Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse (adhering recognizably to George Herriman’s original versions), and the early Felix the Cat, and then you can watch the entire cartoons elsewhere in this amazing DVD set. My only complaint about these silent cartoons in the set is that, since silent films were originally shown with musical accompaniment, I wish that Warner Home Video had provided them with musical scores. Maybe there wasn’t enough money in the budget, but a simple piano accompaniment would do, and there are talented silent film pianists who regularly perform their own scores at New York’s Film Forum and Museum of Modern Art.

Two weeks ago I was disparaging special features on DVDs that provide no more than the most basic information that the animation buffs who buy the collection will already know, or will figure out for themselves on watching the cartoons. The “Popeye Popumentaries” and commentary tracks on this Popeye set do their job right. There is a wide array of experts on comics and animation history represented, including historians Jerry Beck (who played a major role in producing this set), Greg Ford, Michael Barrier and Leonard Maltin; animation professionals including Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi, former Disney director Eric Goldberg, omnipresent cartoon and comics authority Mark Evanier, and Quick Stop contributor Paul Dini; comic strip giants Mort Walker, Jules Feiffer and Mutts creator Patrick McDonnell, who get to speak about Segar; and the current voice of Popeye, Billy West, who provides an amazing on-screen demonstration of the difference between Popeye’s usual gravelly low voice and the higher voice that the great voice actor Jack Mercer used for improvising Popeye’s asides to the audience.

Throughout this four disc collection the commentators continually bring subjects to my attention that I hadn’t considered before: that the Fleischer Popeyes are mostly set in New York City, where their studio was located; the characters’ seedy apartments, reflecting Depression-era living conditions; the Fleischer studio’s skill at depicting the volume and solidity of their characters, and its prowess (which astonishes the present day animation pros) at animating characters in perspective, as in the great cartoon A Dream Walking (1934), in which Popeye, Olive and Bluto sleepwalk along the girders of a skyscraper under construction.

One major surprise in the commentaries is the reaction of Mexican-born animators Jorge Gutierrez and Sandra Equihua to the early Popeye cartoon Blow Me Down! (1933). Whereas a cautious, politically correct sort like myself would think that the Mexican stereotypes in this cartoon are offensive, Gutierrez and Equihua think they’re funny and happily reminisce about their delight as children in seeing Popeye visit their homeland.

Another big surprise comes in the featurette about “The Voices of Popeye,” which shows an excerpt from a wartime cartoon in which Mae Questel, the voice of Olive Oyl, substituted for Jack Mercer as Popeye. You have to hear it to believe it: it’s a good rendition of Popeye, yet it’s still believable that a woman managed to do it.

There are many cartoons in this set that I must have seen as a child but simply do not remember. Daniel Goldmark, an authority on the use of music in classic cartoons, provides the commentary on The Spinach Overture (1935), a cartoon I only vaguely recall seeing before. But I’m sure glad it’s here, since it features Popeye and Bluto as rival conductors, and fits a theme I’ve explored in several past columns: the use of the conductor as a figure of power, and symbol of the creative artist, in animated cartoons, as in Walt Disney’s The Band Concert (1935) (see “Comics in Context” #110) and Chuck Jones’s Long-Haired Hare (1949) (see “Comics in Context” #101).

I want to focus on two Popeye cartoons in this collection: the two-reel color featurettes Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936) and Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves (1937). I’ve been wanting to write about them since I saw them on the big screen during the aforementioned Film Society of Lincoln Center retrospective on cartoon musicals. I’m used to seeing these two cartoons in faded prints, but the restoration on these two-reelers in this set seems miraculous. Again, the familiar A. A. P. logos have been banished: Warner Home Video has located and restored the gorgeous original opening credits for both featurettes. The colors in the cartoons are now vividly bright. What is most astonishing is the way the 3-D sets now look, such as the intricately detailed outside of a cave in Sindbad and the seemingly infinite desert sands in Ali Baba. The interior of the Forty Thieves’ cave now has an extraordinary sense of reality, as does the solid-looking treasure chest, filled with gems, at the cartoon’s end. And as a commentator points out, somehow the colorful 3-D sets and the animated backgrounds blend together rather than looking entirely different!

These two color two-reelers, each twice as long as a typical Popeye black and white short, are based on stories from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, popularly known as The Arabian Nights. Later, the Fleischers did another color Popeye featurette based in an Arabian Nights tale: Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (1939).

I wonder why the Fleischers decided on this Arabian theme. Did they decide to pit Popeye against another famous sailor, Sindbad, and since that was a success, continued with other famous Arabian Nights tales? Or were the Fleischers responding to the fact that Walt Disney was making an animated feature film of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? (Disney’s Snow White was released in 1937, but had began production three years earlier.) Since Disney had chosen a well known story from the Brothers Grimm’s collected fairy tales, did the Fleischers think that that they should build their Popeye featurettes around similarly famous tales, and picked The Arabian Nights?

The Fleischers’ Popeye featurettes are comedic examples of Orientalism, in the sense of the Western perception of the cultures of the Near East to the Far East. Obviously, events such as the September 11 attacks have altered the popular American conception of the Muslim nations of the Near and Middle East, but American versions of Arabian Nights fantasies persisted long enough to serve as the basis for Disney’s own animated Aladdin (1992). The Woody Woodpecker and Friends DVD set contains two inventive Swing Symphonies cartoons set in this imaginary Arabian Nights world: director James Culhane’s Abu Ben Boogie and The Greatest Man in Siam (both 1944). (Siam is actually an old name for Thailand, yet The Greatest Man in Siam is clearly set in an Arab country. Perhaps this serves as an example of just how accurate Western fantasies about Arab culture can be.)

Differing sharply from its two predecessors, the Fleischers’ Aladdin has a metafictional framing device in which Olive Oyl is writing a screenplay about Aladdin, and imagines Popeye playing the role: the main part of the two reeler is therefore the movie that Olive envisions. (This reminds me of Chuck Jones’ 1950 animated short The Scarlet Pumpernickle, which similarly has a framing device in which Daffy Duck has written a screenplay, and the rest of the cartoon is Daffy’s imagined movie, with himself in the title role.)

In contrast, in the Fleischers’ Sindbad and Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves, Popeye actually meets these legendary characters. Then again, Sindbad has opening cast credits, as if Popeye, Olive and company were actors playing parts in a movie, and certainly we are expected to recognize Bluto as “playing” Sindbad and the leader of the Forty Thieves. There’s an ambiguity here, in keeping with the Fleischers’ characteristic reminders to the audience not to suspend disbelief entirely and that they are watching a cartoon.

The main point is that Aladdin casts Popeye as an Arabian Nights character, whereas in Sindbad and Ali Baba, Popeye is presented as himself. One of the DVD commentators suggests that in Sindbad and Ali Baba Popeye has been displaced back to the time of the stories. I think not. Popeye, Olive and Wimpy wear their standard 1930s costumes in the two featurettes, and Ali Baba clearly establishes that Popeye sails a Coast Guard ship to Arabia. Somehow Popeye and friends, representing modern times, co-exist with the legendary Arabia of The One Thousand and One Nights.

To my mind it is fitting that Popeye should meet Sindbad and the Forty Thieves, because, whether or not the Fleischers consciously realized it, by 1936 the super-strong Popeye had become a modern American counterpart of the mythic figures of The Arabian Nights. It’s become a commonplace that the superhero genre embodies a modern mythology, and that superheroes are modern pop culture counterparts to heroes like Hercules and Samson. Popeye isn’t technically a superhero, but he is an iconic hero with superhuman abilities who also qualifies as a contemporary mythic figure.

On the commentary track for Sindbad, when the climactic battle between Popeye and Sindbad is about to begin, John Kricfalusi jokes that these cartoons represent what America is all about. The Fleischers did appear to regard Popeye as an iconic American figure. In Sindbad, as in many Fleischer Popeye cartoons, Popeye’s triumphant climactic battle is accompanied by the patriotic music of John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever. The Fleischers obviously saw something particularly American in Popeye’s heroic battles against the bad guys.

The Fleischers’ Sindbad and Ali Baba pit Popeye, as American iconic hero, against iconic figures from The Arabian Nights, who are cast as villains. (In The Arabian Nights, Sindbad, whose name is usually spelled “Sinbad,” is a hero.) These highly entertaining but decidedly chauvinistic featurettes assert that Popeye–the pop culture hero of a relatively new nation–is not only merely the equal of the mythic figures of older, alien cultures (as opposed to Europe), but their superior. Does this parallel a patriotic sentiment in America in its new role as a world power between the two World Wars: the idea that America is superior to foreign powers and can best them if need be? I leave it to you readers to judge what connection these two cartoons pitting Popeye against Arab foes may have to current American attitudes towards the Muslim nations of the Middle East.

Whereas in these Fleischer featurettes Popeye conquers figures from mythic Arabic culture, Abu Ben Boogie and The Greatest Man in Siam take a different approach. These two cartoons anachronistically set 1940s swing music into an Arabian Nights-style setting, thereby recasting the Arabian fantasy world into a then-contemporary American mode. In these cartoons American culture doesn’t conquer traditional Arabian mythology, but coopts it.

Walter Lantz’s Swing Symphonies series demonstrates how different pop culture was in the 1940s than it is now. Would any major cartoon studio today do a series of cartoons built around, say, hiphop music, for a general audience? And the Fleischer Popeye featurettes leave me with yet another question: why didn’t producer Max Fleischer and director Dave Fleischer adapt one of Segar’s own Popeye stories from the comics as a two-reeler?

INTO THE INKWELL

I am especially happy that this Popeye DVD set includes ten episodes of one of my favorite animated series, the Fleischers’ silent Out of the Inkwell, most of which I had never seen before.

Like the Fleischers’ Popeye and Superman cartoons, the Inkwell shorts usually present variations on a basic formula. A cartoonist, who is almost always played by Max Fleischer himself in live action footage, uses pen and ink to draw a clown–who was eventually given the name Koko–who comes to life within the cartoon “world” on the paper on the drawing board. Hence, Koko has emerged “out of the inkwell.” (That an animator is more likely to draw a character in pencil goes unmentioned. As for Koko’s name, which some cartoons spell “Ko-Ko,” I wonder if it is a reference to Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner and principal comedy character in Gilbert and Sullivan’s most celebrated operetta, The Mikado.) After going through various escapades in the cartoon world, Koko emerges from the drawing board into the real world, often to get even with Max, who is both his creator and his tormentor. In the typical ending to these shorts, Koko enters the ink bottle, which Max then seals with its cap.

Over the last few weeks I have referred to the traditional pairing of a “white clown,” who represents order and authority, with an “Auguste,” a clown who rebels against authority and rules. The Out of the Inkwell cartoons magnify to an extreme the gap in power between its counterparts to the white clown and Auguste. Koko is explicitly presented as a clown: he is the Auguste. Max takes the role of the white clown, or might better be compared to the ringmaster. Max is not only in charge, but he is literally the creator of Koko and his animated world. Koko, even when he escapes into the real world (with his animated figure juxtaposed atop live action film), ordinarily remains the same size as he is on the drawing board; hence, Max towers over him as if he were a giant–or as an adult does over a small child. Max is the artist who created Koko and who attempts to control his creation. Max is also like a father and Koko like his son, whom he attempts to dominate. Ultimately, Max is to Koko as God is to us. Max created both Koko and the world in the animated sections of the shorts. Max stands outside Koko’s “reality” and dominates both it and him.

The usual formula of the Inkwell films has Max creating Koko out of nothingness with pen and ink. The films work different variations on Koko’s creation: in Modeling (1921), for example, Max draws a mass of small circles which, before our eyes, merge and form into Koko. In Trapped (1923) Koko emerges from Max’s hand, in a perfect image of the animator as godlike creator. (All of the Koko shorts that I mention in this week’s column can be found in the Popeye DVD set.)

Normally at the end of an Inkwell short Koko seeks refuge within the ink bottle. This leads to the question of whether Koko continues to exist “alive” within the ink bottle or whether he returns to being merely ink. At the end of Modeling, when Koko hides in the ink bottle, the angry Max pours the ink out onto the table in a tiny puddle. This strikes me as a macabre image of Koko having entered oblivion. If human beings’ lives proverbially go from “ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” Koko’s life goes from ink in the ink bottle back to ink. Of course, since Inkwell is a series, the audience knows that Koko will return to life in the next short, so, whether or not the Fleischers realized it, the Inkwell series represents a repeating cycle of “death” and resurrection.

The ending of Modeling, with Max pouring Koko’s inky “remains” onto the table, demonstrates that if Max is Koko’s “god,” he can be a cruel deity. In Invisible Ink (1921) no sooner has Max created Koko than he imprisons him by drawing chains and cuffs to bind him, as if he were in a dungeon. Then Max, like a bully teasing a child, forces Koko to hunt for his hat. (Koko seems to have a particular attachment to his hat, perhaps because his clothes are really his sole possessions.) In Jumping Beans (1922) Max unleashes Mexican jumping beans on Koko, initially frightening him. In Bed Time (1923) Max strands Koko on top of a cartoon mountain in order to get him out of the animator’s way. In Trapped Max draws a man-sized spider with a human head who pursues Koko, imprisons him in his webbing, and even tries to serve him as dinner to his family of similar creatures. (So would they be the first “spider-men” in cartoon art?) And in A Trip to Mars (1924) Max forces the unwilling Koko to ride a cartoon rocket to a cartoon version of the Red Planet.

Not only does Max expose Koko to danger in Trapped, but he also sets a mousetrap to catch a live action mouse in the same short. Koko and the live action mouse are roughly the same size, and the short seems to be drawing a parallel between then: both are Max’s potential victims.

Even though the shorts portray Max Fleischer himself as the animator, they are designed so that the audience will side with Koko against him. The payoff in the Inkwell shorts comes when Koko turns the tables on his creator, like a son striking back at his father, or a mortal taking revenge on God for his suffering in life. When Koko invades the real world in Modeling to play pranks, it seems to be merely out of a sense of mischief. But in other cartoons, such as Jumping Beans, Koko explicitly vows vengeance on Max.

What I find especially interesting in the Inkwell shorts selected for this DVD is that Koko himself turns “artist” in order to fight back against Max. In Modeling Max shares a studio with a sculptor, who is making a bust of a rather ugly man with a big nose. Perhaps Koko, a creation of one form of art, cartooning, is jealous that Max and the other people in the studio are paying more attention to the bust, the creation in a more highly regarded form of art, sculpture. It’s a sort of sibling rivalry, with a subtext of popular art versus fine art, and the Fleischers stack the deck by making Koko far more appealing than the rather repellent sculpture of the equally repellent client. Or perhaps the real rivalry is between Koko and the real life artists.

Max had outfitted Koko with skates and drawn a frozen pond for him to skate on. First Koko creates his own portrait of the sculptor’s grotesque subject by skating in such a way as to carve the impression of his face into the ice. Then Koko makes a gigantic snowball and molds it into a bust of the sculptor’s client, imitating what the sculptor did with clay. Max, the sculptor and his client are unimpressed, so Koko emerges from of the animated world–that is to say, the sheet of paper on which Max drew him and the frozen pond–and into the real world. Unnoticed, Koko crawls into the statue, causing it to move as if it were alive. This startles the three humans. In actuality, the Fleischers were using stop motion animation to cause the bust to seem to move on film. But in terms of the story, it is Koko who is moving the statue from within: Koko has thus become an animator himself. No wonder Max gets angry when he discovers what is happening: his own creation has become a rival animator.

As noted earlier, Max chains up Koko in Invisible Ink and subsequently taunts him. This time Koko as clearly seeking revenge, and he more explicitly becomes an animator. Having escaped from the drawing board into reality, Koko imitates a trick that Max played on him earlier: he leaves a message that if Max wants to find him, he should follow this line. The line leads Max on a long trail inside and outside his studio. Meanwhile Koko creates duplicate images of himself in many different poses. The line finally leads Max into a room filled with Kokos, among which the real Koko hides. However, Max casts aside the alternate Kokos, which do not move.

Obviously, Koko needs to improve on his plan of multiplying himself, and does so in the later cartoon, Jumping Beans. Again vowing revenge for Max’s mistreatment of him, this time using a stamp to create duplicates of himself which move, and which line up in formation, as if they were Koko’s private army. So Koko as artist has created his own image over and over, and as animator has brought them to life. The legion of Kokos attack and overwhelm Max, binding and tying him to the floor, as the Lilliputians did to Gulliver. So, yes, this image anticipates the animated feature film of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels which the Fleischers made over a decade and a half later. Luckily for Max, he is carrying a small blade which he uses to cut himself free, and the Kokos flee into the ink bottle.

As noted, Max is a giant in comparison to Koko, so it may be significant that in two of the cartoons in the Popeye DVD set Koko encounters menacing cartoon giants. In Jumping Beans a giant beanstalk sprouts, and Koko climbs up the stalk far into outer space, past the moon and sun, until he arrives in the land of the giant of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” who turns out to be an immense head atop a comparatively tiny body. Upon escaping–and falling– back to Earth, Koko vows vengeance on Max for exposing him to such danger. In Bed Time Max traps Koko atop a mountain where he is pursued by another giant, this one with more normal bodily proportions. Yet again Koko vows revenge on Max. After all Max is the “giant” who is Koko’s true nemesis.

That revenge takes an appropriate form in Bed Time. Koko again invades the real world and enters Max’s bedroom. As Max watches in horror, Koko grows bigger, achieving human size, and then continuing to grow further. Max escapes the building, but Koko has become a true giant, and we watch him stalk through New York City, towering over buildings, hunting for Max.

And then Max wakes up. Perhaps, even in an animated/live action short in which one might assume that anything can happen, the Fleischers drew the line at Koko turning into a giant. Another possibility is that the Fleischers were insistent that Koko could not be allowed to overturn the order of the real world; that’s why the shorts usually end with Koko returning to the inkwell, ending his disruptions of order, like Superman’s foe Mr. Mxyzptlk saying his name backwards and returning to his home dimension. Koko as a giant would be unstoppable. Therefore the short establishes that Koko only became a giant in Max’s nightmare; Max awakes and sees Koko safely immobile on his drawing board. It’s as if Out of the Inkwell had suddenly turned into Winsor McCay’s Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, which may well have been a partial inspiration for Bed Time.

The strangest of the Inkwell cartoons in this DVD set is A Trip to Mars, in which Max forces Koko to be the unwilling passenger on a rocket heading to the fourth planet. Before blasting off, Koko plants dynamite underneath Max’s chair. The rocket takes off with Koko aboard, and the dynamite explodes, catapulting Max into outer space as well (as the short shows a live action Max against an animation background). The Mars on which Koko lands seems like an anticipation of Bob Clampett’s Warners cartoon Porky in Wackyland (1938): a mad, surreal world where any impossible gag could happen. Koko’s Mars also looks as if it might be an absurd version of New York: Koko spends part of the cartoon in Mars’s subway. Meanwhile Max continues to hurtle through space. The cartoon ends with both Max and Koko landing on the rings of Saturn and running along the rings as if they were a treadmill. Finally both Koko and Max are removed from Saturn and dropped into an ink bottle, and a hand comes from offscreen and places the lid on the ink bottle, sealing them in.

This raises an obvious question: just whose hand is that? The finale of A Trip to Mars presents both Koko and Max as the pawns of a more powerful manipulator. Perhaps the hand represents Max Fleischer the filmmaker, as opposed to Max the character in the film.

Now I wonder if director Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese were consciously reworking the Out of the Inkwell premise when they created their celebrated cartoon Duck Amuck (1953). The She-Hulk’s annoyed comments directed at her unseen cartoonist, John Byrne, likewise seem to echo Inkwell, intentionally or not.

The Out of the Inkwell series is founded on drawing a line between the real world and the world of animation and watching Koko cross it. Commentators on the Popeye DVD make the point that while Walt Disney kept striving for greater realism in his animated cartoons through the 1930s, the Fleischers simultaneously reveled in the blatant “cartooniness” of their animated films. Popeye and his castmates don’t look like real people, and even in a later Fleischer cartoon like Sindbad inanimate objects will still occasionally come to life.

Some of the early cartoons on the DVD also acknowledge their own artificiality. In Bobby Bumps Puts a Beaner on the Bum (1918) the title character sits on the animator’s hand as he draws. In the first Felix the Cat cartoon, Feline Follies (1919), Felix (here called Tom) plucks musical notes out of the air and turns them into parts for carts he and his girlfriend ride.

So we can see two traditions in animation history. The Disney tradition moved towards greater realism. But the rival tradition, celebrating the “cartooniness” of the medium, is even older, and continued through the Fleischers’ body of work until they attempted to move towards Disneyesque realism in Gulliver’s Travels (1939) and a more successful heightened realism in their Superman series. Tex Avery’s MGM cartoons further explored how cartoons can bend and break and twist the laws of reality. From the late 1940s into the 1960s, the UPA animation studio rebelled against Disney realism in its own way, through emphasizing stylized designs in characters and backgrounds. The result again was to emphasize the artificial nature of animation rather than use it to imitate reality.

Today the “cartooniness” tradition is carried on by The Simpsons and South Park and, yes, SpongeBob. However, the “realism” tradition has triumphed through the dominance of computer animated films, which have nearly entirely displaced hand drawn animated films in early 21st century movie theaters. (When I was watching Ratatouille I found myself thinking that the backgrounds looked just like photographs of the real Paris.) Anime seems to me to be a mix of the two traditions, with simplified, stylized figures often juxtaposed against realistic backgrounds, as in Hayao Miyazaki’s films. It’s rather like the Fleischers filming Popeye and Olive against those actual 3-D sets.

Should you want to learn more about the Popeye and Woody Woodpecker DVD sets, listen to one of the people behind both sets, animation historian Jerry Beck of the Cartoon Brew blog (www.cartoonbrew.com), on Stu’s Show on Shokus Internet Radio (http://www.shokusradio.com/), live from 4 to 6 PM Pacific time (7 to 9 PM EST) on Wednesday, August 22.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson