You can argue that I’m vamping on starting my next project here. But I’m also using this gathering of links to all my 60s Popeye cartoon reviews as a chance to better-organize my tags on them, and to discover where I missed a cartoon in my reviewing. I may come back around to them.
So here are the Larry Harmon-produced Popeye cartoons. If you’re curious why this list is in this order, it’s because I’m using the order given at the Popeye Wikia. Why they have that order I don’t know. Maybe production order or production code corder? Maybe original airing order? Maybe in order of when they discovered one of these cartoons? I have no way of knowing. It is going to take me forever to do the Jack Kinney and the Paramount cartoons.
- Muskels Shmuskels — Popeye has to not fight. King Features took the original video of this one off and I haven’t got around to finding a replacement, sorry.
- Hoppy Jalopy — the racecar cartoon, one of the last ones of my project here.
- Dead-Eye Popeye — not reviewed! I had complained of this as too boring to review, back then, and I can’t imagine that stopping me from having thoughts about it now.
- Mueller’s Mad Monster — it’s got a cuteish robot and a bunch of Cartoon Existentialism.
- Caveman Capers — yes, this is the one with a dinosaur.
- Bullfighter Bully — it’s the one where Popeye gets kissed by a calf.
- Ace of Space — for once, aliens abduct Olive Oyl, instead of Popeye. He seems offended.
- College of Hard Knocks — where I couldn’t figure out if Brutus was a legitimate teacher.
- Abdominal Snowman — an Abominable Snowman cartoon, with Olive’s mysterious uncle Sylvan Oyl. What pun is his name about? (There was a Sylvan Oil company in Oklahoma through the 1950s; was that it?)
- Ski-Jump Chump — starring Brutus as Gorgeous Pierre and Jackson Beck doing his French Accent Character.
- Irate Pirate — another one where the video has gone dark. I’ll see if I can do anything about that, until I forget.
- Foola-Foola Bird — turns out to be on Foola-Foola Island, raising the question of why it was so hard for everyone but Popeye to find.
- Uranium on the Cranium — which, of course, has Brutus dress up in a gorilla costume so he can get the uranium mine.
- Two-Faced Paleface — yeah, this one I skipped for the racist depiction of Native American characters.
- Childhood Daze — another Fountain-of-Youth cartoon, this time with Popeye getting youngified.
- Sheepish Sheep-Herder — one more with a missing video. Sorry.
- Track Meet Cheat — a fine enough idea for a cartoon foiled by not really being sure if Brutus is the problem here.
- Crystal Ball Brawl — Wimpy gets a way to foretell the future! Other than asking Eugene the Jeep!
And finally for now, here’s my similar list for the Gerald Ray-produced cartoons.
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The Larry Harmon cartoons got better, in terms of animation, as they went along but the character designs were very simplistic. Caveman Capers, with Popeye telling Olive, how he started his spinach diet, is cute. The bobbing heads can get annoying and they have that “Bozo the Clown” feel. Of course, Harmon, also produced that series.
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I don’t know the production order well enough to feel confident saying anything about how the cartoons changed over time; all I have is the copyright date. It’d be great to know what is known, to better understand how the cartoons progressed.
Harmons’ Popeye cartoons do seem to be structured well enough, and while the character designs and movement are very simplified they are also figures the studio could animate well enough. There may not be very deft moments but I can’t think of any case where the animation had an error or any moment so weird as to disrupt the cartoon. Nothing wrong in staying in comfortable limits.
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