We’re back with Jack Kinney studios this week. The story is again by Ed Nofziger. That usually signals some genial weirdness. The animation director is Ken Hultgren. Don’t have a large enough sample to say what to expect there. I was on edge when I saw the spelling of “dat”, but I suppose they were trying to approximate how Popeye would say “that”. The title’s referencing a poem and song — “Woodman, Spare that Tree!” — published by George Pope Morris in 1837. I only know it from the occasional cartoon that references it, and a song adaptation that Phil Harris did.
I believe I’ve adequately documented how I was a weird kid. I was in fact as many as three weird kids stacked on top of each other. I do remember something weird about this cartoon bothering me as a kid. It bothers me today.
The cartoon starts at Popeye’s Boring Suburb House. We’re saved from that by it being a Swee’Pea “tell me a story” frame. In this, a nature story, Popeye’s the forest ranger and protects two monarch trees, each five thousand years old. Brutus — a Brutus, the cartoon notes, as if it were an occupation — comes to chop down the trees. Eventually Popeye gets to eating some spinach … some wood spinach, that I guess is its wild counterpart(?) … and punches him to the state capitol, in Poland.
The trees are presented with faces, and voices, done by Jack Mercer and Mae Questel. It would be a cute riff on Popeye and Olive Oyl’s voices if I thought it was a choice. The cartoons only had three voice actors. And there is this strange dreamy circularity to their dialogue. Especially the Queen Tree’s asking the King if it hurts and the King answering variations of “only when I laugh”. Little exchanges, though, like the Queen Tree fussing about how cute Ranger Popeye is, share that light dreaminess. Also the Queen Tree telling the King to get back down here, once he’d been blown into the air, and his wearily agreeing to comply.
It’s a small thing but Ranger Popeye spends a lot of this cartoon squinting angrily. It’s a good look.
By the way I was surprised to see that Jack Mercer’s credited for the old male tree’s voice since I did not expect him to do that good a job sounding different. But then I remember he was tagged to do a lot of old-man voices for Paramount cartoons. Still, this tree put me in mind of Allen Swift’s portrayal of Simon Bar Sinister, which maybe better shows you how long it’s been since I watched Underdog.
What bothered me as a kid, and bothers me today, is after Brutus goes underground to cut the King Tree. (And that’s a good loophole-joke way around “no logging on these grounds”.) Brutus succeeds! He cuts the tree the whole way through. And I knew there was no coming back from that. I would accept the trees talking with Popeye and maybe Brutus. I accept unquestioningly Popeye’s spinach-induced super-strength. Also the tree trunk going a good eight feet underground instead of being roots. But that all the tree needs is to be set back in its hole?
Every story depends to some extent on suspending disbelief. Many of these are small things, like stories reaching a clear resolution. Or they’re things that we accept if we’re taking in the story at all, like how spinach makes Popeye even more super-strong for a while. Why was “the giant talking tree just needs to be set back in the ground again” too much ask of me? I don’t know.
I’m sure if Popeye had fed the tree spinach then I’d have accepted it. That would have made good sense.
This week’s is another Jack Kinney-produced cartoon. The story’s by Eddie Rehberg, who also did the direction. And layout. It suggests possibly a story that reflects an individual vision. Or a disaster as a writer is pressed to direct, or vice-versa. (Or, perhaps, a disaster but because a writer wanted the experience of directing.) Let’s see how Frozen Feuds works out.
Elzie Segar liked creating weird animals for Thimble Theatre. Two and a half of them stuck in the pop culture. The half is the Whiffle Hen, who’s mostly remembered by people who want to show off they remember what Popeye’s first line in the comic strip was. Eugene the Jeep is the big success. And the last is Alice the Goon. She got introduced as a terrifying minion to the Sea Hag, then defanged a good bit when it was revealed she was a guh guh guh girl. Goons got one appearance in the Fleischer-era cartoons, and somehow didn’t rate more mentions. Alice got her first animated treatment in the 60s cartoons and I’m curious now whether this was the first-produced cartoon with her.
It’s a fair introduction to her. Goons may be fearsome-looking creatures, and in Goonland they’re quite the menace. But Alice is gentle, even genial. It’s the kind of clash between appearance and personality that can really drive a story. Also about 80% of Harvey Comics protagonists. That said: does she need so much introduction? I don’t remember that she needed much setup in other appearances. She just was, and we accepted that she looked strange. On the other hand, if you have a good character why not give them a rollout?
(Yes, I remember Goon With The Wind, although that was produced by Gene Deitch. And it’s a different design for Goons. If any of them are Alice it doesn’t show.)
The story feels like it drifted between the original idea and completion. Starting out with a Vaguely Claghorn-like senator promising to rid Alaska of the critter ruining their tourist trade. If you accept the hypothesis that a strange humanoid cryptid would hurt the tourism industry. It’s an interesting premise, though: 1960 was just before the Bigfoot legend really caught on. But it was several years after the Abominable Snowman legend got big enough for, like, Sir Edmund Hillary to explore whether there might be a Yeti in the Himalayas.
Look, fine, if you want my DeviantArt account you can have my DeviantArt account, just stop creeping on my DeviantArt account.
Olive Oyl gets a good long earwormy song telling the legend too. It seems seems to make the Senator’s speech (to who?) unnecessary. But then we finally swing into action and get an Alice sighting. Popeye saying that’s just Wimpy, who ducked out after writing a stack of IOUs. Olive Oyl asking how come she’s turned white, then? So Popeye’s off to find Alice.
Which is then where we turn from a cartoon about a menace to a goof. Olive Oyl wants the Goon’s hat. Alice is smitten with Popeye and tries to get his attention. He misses her wholly, until she finally tosses a note tied around a rock at him. Oh, and now Popeye can understand Alice and arranges a trade, his picture for her hat. Olive Oyl’s thrilled with the hat. Popeye’s picture is actually pictures of him on TV. Alice sings us out of the cartoon. The Senator’s promise goes unresolved.
It’s an odd shift and I wonder what motivated it. A serious search for an exotic creature is fine. A goofball search for an exotic creatures is fine. Why patch them together? Did Rehberg start out writing one way and find there wasn’t enough story, then try the other? Really, if the Senator’s introduction were cut out the cartoon would flow with a reasonable if dreamy logic, and there’d be some more time for Alice flirting with Popeye. Was Rehberg just too fond of the Claghorne pastiche to cut that?
Once again I’d love to know more of how these cartoons were made.
Some nice animation bits I didn’t have a good place to mention: when Olive Oyl sings her song, she gets her foot caught in a spitoon and tromps around in that. She slides when she steps with that foot. It’s a touch you never see done in cheap made-for-tv cartoons like this. And later, when Olive Oyl tells of her horror at seeing the Goon, we see her head from front-on. Her head’s swinging clockwise and counterclockwise, while her mouth stays fixed. It’s eerie and unnatural and I believe that’s a deliberate creepy wrongness to it.
We’re back with Jack Kinney’s gang today. Shoot the Chutes, the name, refers to the golden-age-of-amusement-parks ride in which you in a big boat go down a sloped waterfall to a big splash. Many amusement parks today have revivals of this. So of course it’s a cartoon about parachute jumping, which is a correct pun. The story is by Ed Nofziger, and the direction by Volus Jones and Ed Friedman, the team we saw going Out oF the World last week. So here’s Shoot the Chutes.
Last week, I thought we had a great premise poorly used. Here, we have a more mundane premise, Popeye and Brutus at a parachute-jumping contest. I want to say it’s also poorly used, but something holds me back.
I will not try to convince anyone this is a good cartoon. It hasn’t got enough delightful moments to be good. And it’s got too much that’s annoying. Most annoying in this is Olive Oyl brattishly demanding that Popeye win her the parachuting trophy. But out of that come bits that seem smarter than that. Like, Olive Oyl’s cheerleading chants. “Trophy, trophy, rah rah rah! Gimme that trophy or I’ll sock you in the jaw!” does not make Olive Oyl seem like a pleasant person. But it is a silly chant for a ridiculous demand. Similarly, “Yakkety Yack! Snik snak! Win that trophy or get the axe!” is goofy. The same happens when Olive Oyl gets tired of waiting for Brutus and Popeye to finish falling and declares “hurry up with that trophy!” It’s a funny demand, and makes the stakes on this tournament ridiculous.
What doesn’t work is that even if a character is supposed to be ridiculously bratty, she’s still being bratty. Working a bit better is Popeye and Brutus quipping their whole way through the parachute drop. I like Brutus swinging the parachute upside-down and then declaring, “Hey! I’m losing!”
So the best interpretation I can put on this is that Nofziger spruced up a stock plot by the characters not taking it at all seriously. Done well, this is great. It depends on the audience knowing the characters well, and knowing the storyline well. But it turns the experience into something I’ve dubbed Cartoon Existentialism. People who know they’re doing these things because what else are they going to do? The Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the 50s and early 60s let this creep in quite well. See any short where, like, Snagglepuss wanders into the story of the Three Little Pigs or something.
Oh, yeah, I don’t know where this vulture is from, but I like them. Bringing a little spoof of Popeye’s walk is the kind of touch we need.
Here? It’s not so good. Olive Oyl being obnoxious ironically is still Olive Oyl being obnoxious. Popeye quipping his way through a perilous scenario is an inherent part of his character. It’s only a bit less so for Brutus. After The Ball Went Over, another Jack Kinney-produced cartoon, does this much better. The characters know they’re going through a scenario because they have to do something and if their hearts aren’t in it, they’re at least being weird.
Also, while I can credit Nofziger with sprucing up the stock plot, he also made the stock plot. They’d done flying cartoons before, albeit in the black-and-white era, like Pest Pilot and I Never Changes My Altitude. Why not use some of their plot ingenuity?
The animation’s basically fine. All those seconds with Brutus swinging his parachute side to side seems like it saved the budget. The music was made by hitting shuffle. I don’t know who contestants 1 through 11 were.
June 2020 was another recessional month around here, as most of my readership figures have it. The number of page views dropped about 250 from May, to 3,964. I’m still hanging on ahead of the twelve-month running average, of 3,842.8 page views, but it’s a closer thing. The number of unique visitors dropped about 150, to 2,336. This is again above the running average of 2,217.0, and a bit more comfortably above that.
The number of likes jumped nearly twenty, to 87 given in the month. The secular decline somehow continues, though. The running average is 105.0 likes in a month even though I haven’t seen that kind of number since January 2020. And to give you some idea how long ago January 2020 was: remember how long ago June 2020 was? January was twenty times that long ago.
The number of comments dropped seven, also, to 32 in the month. This still has it above the average of 21.0, though.
Couldn’t get a picture of the statistics at exactly the start of July, Universal Time, because we were going to a drive-in movie showing Ferris Bueller and The Breakfast Club as part of their “what the heck, let’s just be the 80s” program. This week: Ghostbusters 1984, the one with the toxic fandom.
The per-posting averages have almost an identical story. Since I have something posted every day that’s not much of a surprise. The views per posting and visitors per posting are almost exactly the twelve-month average: 127.9 visitors per posting, compared to an average 126.1; and 75.4 unique visitors per posting, compared to an average 72.8. 2.7 likes per posting, compared to the average 3.4. 1.0 comments per posting, better than the average 0.7. The per-posting averages are more useful on my mathematics blog, where I’ll let days go without a posting.
The most popular postings in June were, as often happens, not ones that were posted in June. One of them I totally understand, though, and it’s probably going to be a steadily inappropriately popular post in the months to come:
Thoughts which was the most popular thing that wasn’t recapping or reviewing some other pop culture piece.
We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files which was the most popular long-form essay of the month. It had the benefit of being the first thing published in the month; I suspect the face brick piece is going to have longer legs, though.
Altogether, 577 distinct pages, plus my home page, got at least one view in June. 330 pages, counting the home page, got at least two views. 78 pages got at least ten views. That’s right about the same as in May. Probably these figures can’t change much until someone goes and gets me some viral bundle of attention.
77 countries or things like countries sent me viewers in June, which is the same number as in May. 20 of them were a single view, which again is the same count as in May. Here’s what they all were:
Yes! Landed both Czech and Slovakia this month! Next month: everything that used to be part of the Federal Republic of Central America.
Country
Readers
United States
2,640
India
226
United Kingdom
177
Macedonia
163
Australia
123
Canada
118
Finland
60
Germany
37
Brazil
32
Italy
26
Philippines
26
South Africa
25
Netherlands
22
Sweden
21
Norway
20
Mexico
13
Spain
13
France
11
Indonesia
11
Denmark
10
Ireland
10
Malaysia
10
Peru
10
Kenya
9
Nigeria
9
Romania
9
Japan
8
Singapore
8
Hong Kong SAR China
7
New Zealand
7
Kuwait
6
Taiwan
6
Trinidad & Tobago
6
Belgium
5
Switzerland
5
Hungary
4
Slovenia
4
United Arab Emirates
4
Austria
3
Greece
3
Israel
3
Thailand
3
Zambia
3
Argentina
2
Bulgaria
2
Croatia
2
Egypt
2
Jamaica
2
Oman
2
Pakistan
2
Panama
2
Poland
2
Russia
2
Serbia
2
South Korea
2
Ukraine
2
Vietnam
2
Belize
1
British Virgin Islands
1
Brunei
1
Colombia
1
Costa Rica
1
Cyprus
1
Czech Republic
1
European Union
1
Kazakhstan
1
Lebanon
1 (****)
Myanmar (Burma)
1
Nepal
1
Paraguay
1
Portugal
1
Qatar
1
Slovakia
1 (*)
Sri Lanka
1
Tanzania
1
Turkey
1
Venezuela
1
Slovakia’s been a single-view country two months running now. Lebanon’s been one for five months now. Macedonia hadn’t sent me any readers in May so I’m wondering if there was maybe something miscommunicated to the Balkan nations regarding my content here. Again, I’m always glad to have readers, wherever they’re from. I just know how far short I am of discussing anything like universal truths regarding the human condition.
As of the start of July I’ve posted 2,707 things here. That all has drawn 175,391 page views from 98,598 unique visitors. There were a relatively slender 14,534 words published here in June, for a sleek average of 484.5 words per posting. I like that. For the year to date I’ve published 97,880 words, averaging 547 words per post. That average is down from the 556 at the start of June. This is doing well considering that every time I think I can cut a review of the 60s Popeye cartoons down to a couple well-chosen paragraphs they sprawl out to 1200 words.
I’m always glad to have more readers, either as subscribers or just stopping in for a while. You can subscribe through WordPress by clicking the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ button. You can use the RSS feed in whatever reader you like, which can include a Friends page on a free Dreamwidth or Livejournal account. New posts are announced to my Twitter account, @nebusj, although I only sometimes can actually post to it manually. Sorry. Nice to see you in any form, though.
First, I have to amend an earlier entry. While reviewing Invisible Popeye, with a better premise than execution, I wrote “it’s better than Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Brutus doing their usual routine in a Suburban Boring house that also has computer buttons. Which, you’ll trust me, they could do”. Perhaps they could. But I was thinking specifically of this cartoon, in which they do not. There’s no Brutus here. There’s just the disembodied voice of Jackson Beck. We do have Swee’Pea, though. And we have Suburban Boring, but in The Future. Invisible Popeye at least gets weird.
It’s another O G Wotasnozzle cartoon. And another where he uses his time machine to send Popeye to a novel setting. Eventually. This cartoon runs five minutes, 41 seconds not counting the closing credits, which King Features has chopped off here. One minute 43 seconds of that is credits and the generic footage of Wotasnozzle deciding to send Popeye somewhere in time. “What the heck,” the great inventor thinks, “he’s probably just sitting at home listening to his theme on the Dixieland station”. So that’s why Popeye’s sent to either the year 2500 or 2500 years into the future. The framing device almost explains why everybody’s in the future, and lets the cartoon be one-fifth stock footage.
Also Olive Oyl and Swee’Pea are in the future too? Or Popeye hangs with their Future counterparts? Wotasnozzle says he sends Popeye somewhere by pot luck, so how are Olive Oyl and Swee’pea there? Popeye doesn’t seem thrown by the strange world of The Future. There’s a bit where water flows to the ceiling and he complains about something going wrong with the gravity. But that makes equal sense for either 20th or 25th Century Popeye to observe.
This is a standard circa-1960s view of The Future. Flying cars. Flying lounge chairs. Tourist space rockets to the Moon. Skyscrapers built into helter-skelter slides. Swee’Pea is splitting atoms and getting neutrons all over the rug. The ambiguously defined family of Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Swee’Pea eat roast beef pills and soup-and-salad-crystals and all. It seems like they have to eat a lot of pills. Maybe they’re eating their trail mix?
Hey, it’s the John F Kennedy tower back in Troy, New York! I loved the look of that building. … Do you suppose anyone lives in that Grandma’s Weird 50s Table Lamp in the background?
And, yeah, you don’t watch cartoons like this for The Future. You watch them for The Present, spoofed by its placement in future trappings. And obviously a cartoon that has four minutes for all its business can’t compare to The Jetsons, still in the future when this was made. So we can look at what parts of The Present of 1960 the cartoon thought worth spoofing?
Well, the home. I read the place as suburban, but just because it seems boring. I guess it’s meant to be the City of Tomorrow. And then the road trip. Particularly the trip done by either bus or train. (I guess a five-minute rest stop is more a bus than a train thing, especially by 1960. I know train stops at eateries used to be a thing. I’ve been in the room while parts of The Harvey Girls were on TV.) It’s a fair premise, but there’s nothing done with it. Swee’Pea gathers asteroids. Why not go to a roadside attraction? You have a perfectly good chance to show, I don’t know, the largest robot cog this side of the asteroid belt and don’t use it?
Oh sure, you laugh. But you also laughed at that Segway guy when he said they were going to re-engineer whole cities to cope with how that gadget changed civilization and who’s laughing now?
Then we get the Moon as a quaint, rustic tourist destination. The Upper Peninsula to Earth’s Michigan. There’s a similar notion in Futurama, where the Moon is part backwater, part tacky tourist trap. Arthur C Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama has a line about how in the politics of the solar system, the Moon was a suburb of Earth and always would be. (I don’t remember it being clear what that meant exactly.) I am sure neither is responding to this cartoon. The idea is too sparsely entered.
We get a joke about the rustic moon offering old-fashioned stuff like the cars, gas stations, and airplanes of 1960. “Our present is, to the future, the past” isn’t a deep observation, but it is the sort of observation a kid in the target audience would appreciate.
So as seems to happen a lot, I like the characters, and I like the premise. I just don’t like that nothing happens, and that the premise isn’t used well. If I could wish any Popeye-related product into existence, though, a Popeye Of The future comic might be it.
… I’m a little surprised that wasn’t the actual title of this short. We’re back to Larry Harmon productions for the cartoon this week. It’s another short directed by Paul Fennell, with story by Charles Shows. Let’s take a moment to watch Track Meet Cheat. The moment takes about five and a half minutes, with credits.
So the cartoon is animated as I’d expect from the future Filmation team. The characters are angular; Brutus is almost a triangle. The movement well-defined or stiff, depending on how good a mood you’re in. The story is … now that’s interesting.
If you watch this when you’re seven years old, or if you watch it while distracted, the story makes good solid sense. Brutus is showing off at the extremely thin stadium. Popeye has enough of this, and challenges him to the track-and-field events. Popeye does great but Brutus cheats until Popeye has enough, spinach, fight, triumph, end.
The thing is that’s not quite what we see. Like, Brutus is showing off, yeah, but he’s also there to put on a show. If we take his ballyhoo in earnest, he is setting world records. And we don’t actually see Popeye challenge him, nor Brutus accept the challenge. If we didn’t know the series we could see this as a relentless heckler spoiling the show. Connective tissue is missing.
It’s not just skipped steps in setting up the story. There are anomalies in motivation all over. For example, in tossing the ball-and-chain, Brutus makes a good impressive throw. Then he runs out and catches it. It’s an impressive stunt, but it spoils the throw as an athletic performance. Popeye does a high jump by tying balloons to himself; how is that supposed to impress the judges? Brutus hands Popeye a bomb, which explodes, and then Brutus wonders where the guy he just blew up went. Why?
Brutus looks like he’s only now realizing the horror that setting a bomb in Popeye’s hand would actually be. That or he’s sorry he doesn’t have a Polaroid.
If you’re a kid watching this, there’s no trouble. These things just happen because it makes sense for the scene. You know Brutus and Popeye act like this because that’s what they’re doing. If you watch while distracted there’s no problem. You, having learned how narratives work, imagine a connective tissue that makes sense. There’s a hole that swallows up Popeye’s pole, when he tries to vault? Brutus probably dug that to sabotage his opponent.
So there’s a curious anomaly here. The cartoon makes perfect sense, unless you’re an adult paying attention to it.
I’m not saying it’s bad. The stunts are nice, many of the jokes work for me. I love any chance for Popeye to do that angry chimney-puffing on his pipe. Wimpy hawking spinach burgers is a more interesting way to get the spinach than just pulling out a can would be. Wimpy not wanting anyone to actually eat the spinach burgers makes his participation an existentialist absurdity. Or just painting a joke onto an already non-sequitur plot element. It’s just a cartoon that works better if you don’t scrutinize it.
This is framed, again, as a tell-me-a-story cartoon. Ed Nofziger did something similar with Little Olive Riding Hood and Hamburger Fishing. Why is there a frame, though? A frame lets you put the characters in a weird position without explaining why, but, is that needed? At least for Popeye? Do we get anything that wouldn’t be served by Jackson Beck narrating that “this story takes place in the time of the Ancient Greeks”? Do we need any explanation for the weirdness? Nofziger’s Swee’Pea Through The Looking Glass just let the action “really” happen, for example.
There is something having Popeye and Swee’Pea as frame offers, though. A bit of it was done in Hamburger Fishing. They can comment on the story. Several times over the action pauses so that Swee’Pea can snark about the action. I’m interested in the choice. It offers some story benefits. Popeye declaring “then, they went and — ” is as good a transition as you need to let anything happen. Stock footage of Popeye and Swee’Pea talking saves the animation budget, too.
So one of the fun things I did instead of useful stuff this week was look up historical interpretations of the Trojan Horse. It’s fascinating, really, that we stay interested in a story about people so foolish that they would invite death into their homes — strangling the person who correctly warns them of the danger — because it was so very pleasant to imagine that the destruction so imminent for so long had just … gone away. Also I love that the pose here so clearly reads as Brutus demanding the Horse quit that, and the Horse acting all innocent, like, “Quit what?”
Having the characters watch and snark on a story is part of a respectable enough tradition too. It runs loosely from the Greek Chorus through, like, that bit in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Hippolyta and all can not believe Nick Bottom’s play, to Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Muppet Show and their many influences. (Mystery Science Theater 3000 is near but just outside this lineage, for my purposes. I’m looking at texts that contain their own riffing. MST3K depends on adding jokes to something by a different writer.) When it’s done well, it adds to a story you were already interested in, often with commentary about the artifice of story and the demands of narrative logic. When it’s done badly, it’s any of those Pearls Before Swine strips that are seven panels filled wall-to-wall with text for a pun, followed by the characters insulting the cartoonist for writing that.
So a thing about Popeye is he’s always been kind of self-riffing. The definitive thing about the Fleischer Studios character is his mumbled, improvisational jokes about the story. This self-aware tradition faded, but never left the character. When Brutus asks “what is this?” and Spartan Popeye punches him, then says, “This horse is a gift, o Prince! … Never look a gift horse in the mouth!”, it’s not a strange moment. It’s completely in-character.
Does it add anything for Swee’pea to comment that “history was never like this”? I’m not sure. The Trojan Horse story does well at being absurd. But I try to remember what I thought as a kid, among the intended audience for this. Did I register that it was absurd for Trojan Brutus to be huddling up in a Generic Medieval Castle complete with moat and drawbridge? I think I registered it was weird there was a sawfish in the moat. Shouldn’t that be alligators or at least sharks? But a castle right out of my Fisher-Price Play Family Castle #993 set? I don’t remember that registering. Swee’Pea’s line may be more than just the writer worrying there’s a space for a joke here.
Additionally, I am delighted that Popeye got a pool toy from the Tuesday Morning store to swim him to Troy!
Given that we have a frame, though, it saw good use. Each of the cuts back to Popeye and Swee’Pea comes at a reasonable moment, and gets a decent joke. The main storyline goes along at a good pace. I like Popeye’s Trojan Horse being built with several modes including “buck”. All I wonder is why Spartan Popeye wanted his horse to look like Gumpy’s pal Pokey?
So how do my readership figures for May look? And how do they look compared to past months? And the short answer is that it’s down from April, because nobody cares about Easter egg dye colors anymore. But it’s still a comfortably large number. Not quite the figures I saw at the end of Apartment 3-G, but surprisingly close.
Specifically, there were 4,292 page views here in May 2020, spread across 2,505 unique visitors. That’s above the twelve-month running averages for these figures. The average was 3,769.6 page views from 2,179.8 unique visitors. The twelve-month running averages are increasing month-to-month too, but I’m not going to start tracking that because that’s getting daft.
By the way the default chart shows two years and five months’ worth of figures. I write this because every month I swear I’m going to remember just how much it shows, and then I forget, and I look at all the month tabs and I get lost and I guess it’s about two and a half years. Which it is, although why 29 months instead of 30 is another of those mysteries.
The disappointing figure in all this was the number of likes, which have been trending down forever now. There were 67 things liked in all of May, way below the running average of 109.5. More important than that, though, was that 39 comments came in over the month, well above the 19.8 average. That’s also three months in a row with more than thirty comments, which makes me feel so much better, really.
The per-post averages are all rather similar. There were on average 138.5 views per posting in May; the twelve-month average is 123.7. There were 80.8 unique visitors per posting in May; the average is 71.6. There were 2.2 likes per posting in May; the average was 3.6. There were 1.3 comments per posting; the average was 0.6.
There were 556 distinct postings that got at least one page view in May, up from April’s 514. 359 of them got more than one page view, up from 323. Only 72 pages got more than ten views, slightly down from April’s 76.
The most popular comic strips were a recurring mystery, and then a bunch of comic strip stuff:
I continue to have no idea why that months-in-reverse-alphabetical-order is popular, or why it’s staying popular. I feel like it must have got put on a list incorrectly. Or there’s just that many bots who got something wrong.
There were 77 countries, or things like countries, that sent me any readers in May. There’d been 78 in April and 73 in March, so that’s all normal enough. There were 20 single-view countries, just like in March, and basically like in April, when there were 19. Here’s the roster of what countries they were, and how many views each got:
I do kind of wish WordPress would use a different map projection, because every single month I give this the alt-text ‘Mercator-style map of the world’ and every single month I have to look up whether it’s ‘Mercator’ or ‘Mercatur’. And I’m the map freak here. Me! Anyway if they could do an equirectangular or maybe a Gall or Lambert I’d save myself that little bit of monthly embarrassment.
Country
Readers
United States
3,171
India
177
United Kingdom
135
Canada
128
Australia
65
Germany
59
Sweden
58
Brazil
46
Italy
35
South Korea
33
Philippines
28
Finland
24
France
20
Spain
19
Colombia
14
El Salvador
13
Ireland
13
Russia
13
Mexico
12
Portugal
12
Norway
11
Argentina
9
Indonesia
9
Malaysia
9
Vietnam
9
Kenya
8
Netherlands
8
New Zealand
8
South Africa
8
Serbia
7
Singapore
7
Taiwan
7
China
6
Denmark
6
Jamaica
6
Japan
6
Poland
6
Turkey
6
Hong Kong SAR China
5
Pakistan
5
United Arab Emirates
5
Belgium
4
Chile
4
Czech Republic
4
Peru
4
Croatia
3
European Union
3
Iceland
3
Israel
3
Romania
3
Venezuela
3
Barbados
2
Bolivia
2
Costa Rica
2
Ecuador
2
Morocco
2
Zambia
2
Bahamas
1
Bangladesh
1 (**)
Belarus
1
Bhutan
1
Egypt
1 (**)
Greece
1
Guam
1
Guatemala
1 (*)
Lebanon
1 (***)
Mauritius
1
Panama
1
Puerto Rico
1
Saudi Arabia
1 (*)
Slovakia
1
St. Lucia
1
Switzerland
1
Trinidad & Tobago
1
Tunisia
1
Uruguay
1 (*)
Zimbabwe
1
Guatemala, Saudi Arabia, and Uruguay were single-view countries last month too. Bangladesh and Egypt have been single-view countries three months in a row. Lebanon is on its fourth month so.
WordPress estimates that I published 15,458 words here in May, in 31 posts averaging just over 515 and a quarter words each. For the year to date I’ve published 83,346 words, over 150 posts, for an average 556 words per posting. This is running a bit under the pace for 2019, which I am fine with.
I’m always glad to have more regular readers. If you’re on WordPress you can become a regular reader by clicking the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on this page. Or you can add the RSS feed for articles to whatever reader you use. If you don’t have an RSS reader, good news: you can get a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal, and use their Friends page to look at any RSS feed you like. I also announce posts by automated service to my Twitter account of @Nebusj. But while I’d sort of like to be active there again, Twitter only sometimes lets Safari read it. I don’t know what its issue is, and I don’t have the energy to work it out. Sorry.
Fun fact: Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’s “Little Red Riding Hood” is my go-to song for karaoke night. This is because you can do an okay job on it if you can only hit one note, and that’s all I can do. There’s no guessing what note I will hit, but I can keep to it all right.
We start in Popeye’s Boring Suburban Home again. Telling Swee’Pea a story is the framing device. Sometimes Swee’Pea demands a story. This time, he’s happy Popeye is telling one.
The cartoon starts off well. Fairy tales are a pretty good starting point for a Popeye cartoon, especially one like this that has to be done quick and cheap. The audience knowing the fairy tale plot takes the burden of plotting a story off the cartoon. They can riff around scenes and still have something which makes sense. … And, yet, somehow, it all falls apart anyway.
So Olive Oyl is the Riding Hood, Wimpy her sick grandmother, the Sea Hag the wolf, and Popeye the brave woodchopper or whoever the other guy is in the Little Red Riding Hood story. It’s decent casting, although I wonder again why not Brutus. Maybe Kinney Studios wasn’t sure that Brutus was available? Or maybe they just felt BlutoBrutus was worn out. Or maybe too much physical menace for the cartoon.
There’s good stuff early on. Introducing the characters, for example. The Sea Hag crashing into Wimpy’s house and mourning she’s gotta get those brakes fixed. Wimpy sitting up at the table, knife and fork at the ready, licking his lips and wanting ham-[pause]-burgers. Or after this, the Sea Hag sitting up exactly in imitation of Wimpy’s pose, with his hat on her head. While Wimpy is off in the forest sitting on a tree stump.
But we get to Little Olive Riding Hood encountering the Sea Hag, and doing the-better-to-eat-hamburgers-with bit. The Sea Hag jumps on Olive Oyl, and … why? Because the narrative of the original fairy tale requires it, sure. But we don’t get a hint Olive Oyl wasn’t going to give her Wimpy’s hamburgers, not yet. We get a fight, or at least the camera shaking around and zooming in and out while the uptempo music plays. This brings Popeye back to Wimpy’s house to fight. This even though Popeye can’t hit a woman even if she is the Sea Hag. But since we never see him doing anything, we can’t say he’s hitting anybody either. Maybe he’s just punching the tree he dragged into the house a lot.
Thanks for coming out to support Thimble Theatre Improv Night everyone, it’s your support that keeps spontaneous comedy alive.
Wimpy joins in the off-camera action, and the bounciest picnic basket in the world goes out the house a couple times. Finally Popeye catches it and declares the hamburgers ain’t for free, and ain’t for no stealing witch. So sure the Sea Hag shouldn’t get the hamburgers, but why not Wimpy? Riding Olive said she was taking the burgers to a sick friend who was in Wimpy’s house. If Popeye saw through Wimpy’s scam shouldn’t he have said something about it so dumb Olds like me aren’t confused?
Wimpy’s promise to pay for the burgers later is implicitly turned down, and he and Sea Hag go off to try Roughhouse’s. This yet another mention of Roughhouse and his cafe without his appearance. The King Features animators are really sure we’re going to recognize and be interested in Roughhouse when he finally appears. I don’t want to deflate their hype but all he is just “a guy who hates Wimpy but falls for his scams”. He’s basically Geezil without the uncomfortable Jewish coding.
The notion of paying for the burgers comes up again, with Popeye offering to buy some, but not getting to. And Olive Oyl eats her burgers, declaring how she loves them especially when they are paid for. It’s the punch line for a joke not set up. With the coda, in the frame, of Swee’Pea now declaring he’s hungry and wants hamburgers. You know, the way it’s funny that someone who hears a story about a particular food might decide they’d like to eat that food.
It’s weird that I can’t say the ending is bad. Just that it doesn’t fit the start. It’s close to fitting, though. Add a line about Popeye figuring out that Wimpy isn’t really sick. Drop the talk about paying for burgers. Then, yeah, you’ve got a fairy-tale riff that hangs together. It seems like it’d be easier to not write the broken version of this. What happened?
There remain great mysteries in the making of these cartoons.
Better than I expected! Well, that covers that. See you next month, everyone.
Well, I have to talk a little more. My blog set a new readership record in April, topping — finally — the November 2015 spike when The AV Club noticed I wrote so much about how nothing was happening in Apartment 3-G. This can almost be explained by one thing: Easter. Particularly, Easter egg dying. I had taken pictures of what Paas-brand Easter egg dye tablets looked like, and what color they actually made eggs, and put that up on the web. And people were looking for exactly that. That page alone drew 1,057 views in April. This was even more than the home page for this blog, ordinarily the actual most-viewed page, drew. I figured that this would be a much-referred-to web site. I did not expect it to be that viewed.
Take away the 1,057 page views caused by the Paas corporation, though? And then … I … still have a record month for me. November 2015 saw 4,528 page views. April 2020 had 5,606 page views. That’s a gap of just more than 1,057 page views. It’s quite the spike. Some of that is probably spilloer from Paas-tablet-readers. But otherwise? Who’s reading and why? That’s what I look for here.
The really good thing is now I have a replacement abnormally-great-readership-spike to look back on, as the November 2015 spike fades so far into the past that even the longest-range bar charts soon won’t be showing it.
So, yeah, the numbers look good, if we take more to mean good. 5,606 page views, way above the twelve-month running average of 3,638.5. Even discounting the Paas page, 4,549 page views would be a new record. There were 3,356 unique visitors, again way above the running average of 2,101.6. The down beat was that there were only 70 things given likes in all April, below he average of 123.1. Comments, though? There were 48 of them, way above the average of 16.6, and my best commenting month since January 2019.
Per-post, the figures are just about the same: 186.9 views per posting, above the average of 119.3. 111.9 visitors per posting, above the 69.0 running average. 2.3 likes per posting, below the average 4.0. 1.6 comments per posting, way above the 0.5 average. I’d like to think this sort of viewing and commenting is a trend that’ll continue, but I understand how much of it is juiced by Paas.
So what was popular? Paas tablets and what else? The top posts in April were:
As you see, what people really want to know from me is why comic strips look weird today. Mallard Fillmore, that’s easy to say. Loren Fishman has taken over as “guest cartoonist” until Bruce Tinsley returns. Don’t care. I’m not reading Mallard Fillmore unless I hear it’s great from multiple independent lines of trusted references.
514 posts got at least one viewing in April, up from 484 in March. 323 got more than one view, up from 302 in March. 76 of them got at least ten views, which is basically tied with March’s 75.
78 countries sent me any viewers at all in April. That’s right about March’s 73 and February’s 71. 19 of these were single-view contries, basically the same as March’s 20 and February’s 18. And here’s what they were:
Hi, reader in Burkina Faso.
Country
Readers
United States
4,474
India
191
Canada
149
United Kingdom
125
Australia
90
Germany
57
Italy
42
Sweden
33
Mexico
28
South Africa
26
Philippines
24
Brazil
21
Colombia
21
France
19
Netherlands
18
Ireland
16
New Zealand
15
Kenya
14
Spain
14
Finland
13
Pakistan
12
China
10
Indonesia
10
Norway
10
Peru
10
Russia
10
Singapore
9
Belgium
8
Portugal
8
Turkey
8
United Arab Emirates
8
El Salvador
7
Malaysia
6
Poland
6
Switzerland
6
Ecuador
5
Hungary
5
Thailand
5
Argentina
4
Romania
4
Taiwan
4
Bulgaria
3
Chile
3
Israel
3
Laos
3
Moldova
3
Nigeria
3
American Samoa
2
Bahrain
2
Costa Rica
2
Czech Republic
2
Denmark
2
Estonia
2
Hong Kong SAR China
2
Jamaica
2
Serbia
2
Sri Lanka
2
Ukraine
2
Zambia
2
Austria
1
Bangladesh
1 (*)
Burkina Faso
1
Croatia
1
Egypt
1 (*)
European Union
1
Guadeloupe
1
Guatemala
1
Japan
1
Lebanon
1 (**)
Mauritania
1
Nepal
1
Oman
1
Saudi Arabia
1
South Korea
1
Suriname
1
Uruguay
1
Venezuela
1
Vietnam
1
Bangladesh and Egypt wee single-view countries in March too. Lebanon is on a three-month streak of single views. Also … really, wow? Only one page view from Japan? I know I write a painfully parochial blog, but Japan also has like 750 million people who can read English in it. I’d think just by accident it would have to out-draw, like, Suriname. Which again is nothing against Suriname; I just think of what I write and totally get nobody in Suriname caring.
This is always subject to change in the event of fast-breaking story comic news or my deciding I want to do something different.
As WordPress counts things I posted 19,010 words in April, for an average post length of 633.7 words. This is quite up from March’s 17,019 words and 549 words per posting. So, yes, I’m getting longwinded again. For the year through the start of May I had published 67,888 words in 119 postings. This averages 571 words per posting.
The start of May saw me posting 2,646 things, viewed a total of 167,135 times by 93,757 unique visitors.
If reading a bunch of numbers about posts has encouraged you to read me regularly, all right, that’s a valid choice. You can follow this blog in your WordPress reader by clicking the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button. Or you can add my RSS feed to whatever reader you use. If you don’t have an RSS reader, sign up for a free account with Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Their Friends pages let you add RSS feeds from anywhere. And you can catch announcements of these posts on my no-longer-inaccessible Twitter account, @nebusj. Thank you for reading, if that is what you’re doing here. Take care, please.
A bit of fun business ahead of things. Fred Grandinetti was kind enough to let me know about an essay he wrote regarding the King Features Syndicate Popeye cartoons. Grandinetti offers some information about the technical aspects of production, things like budgets and how the cartoons were received. Received by audiences, that is; they always attracted negligible interest from critics. Grandinetti also discusses the six studios which got the work, and reviews their characteristic styles. It’s a much higher-level view than what I’m doing here, but the person out there who is interested in the 60s Popeye cartoons is likely to enjoy that.
Now to the regular stuff. It’s another Famous Studios-animated Popeye cartoon this week. Once again Seymour Kneitel is credited for story and for direction. My expectation was that the cartoon would be professionally made, with everybody on model and the movement reasonably smooth, even if the story was a bit dull. So how foiled were my expectations? Let’s watch.
We start with Popeye in the desert again. He spends a lot of time in the desert for a sailor. But he and Olive Oyl are taking over the Puddleburg Splash, newspaper for the laziest town in the world. The cartoon’s set in the Old West, although the era is only vaguely set. Mostly that Popeye writes with a quill pen. We never find out why he wants to run a newspaper, or why he picks a newspaper in a town he knows nothing about. I’m all right with that, though. I think there’s even a Segar storyline where Popeye takes ove a small western town newspaper for vague reasons. Popeye can just do that.
We get a couple jokes about how lazy the townspeople are. Best is probably Olive Oyl having to point different directions, with the local telling her when she’s pointing in the right direction. It’s also got a slick little bit of animation, when Olive Oyl points at the camera. It’s a rare break from the standard police-lineup pose. Also a nice bit of animation is the sheriff lifting his eyebrow to raise his hat. This is all accompanied by some nice languid music. I suppose it’s something from the Famous Studios music library. It’s nice getting some different stock music.
There’s more social commentary than I expect from these cartoons. The first is Popeye working out that he has to open a school, to teach people to read, so there’s demand for his newspaper. It’s a benign example of marketing into existence demand for the thing you want to supply. The second is the revelation that the people in Puddleburg aren’t unable to read out of laziness. The school Popeye builds is demolished by the Bruiser Boys, local thugs who figure an ignorant population is easier to control through terror. It’s a method of control, yeah. And it diffuses some of the conflation of laziness and stupidity that’s been in the cartoon.
Curiously, the Bruiser Boys are not Brutus. Why have original cast for this? In Dead-Eye Popeye, which I once mentioned without reviewing, Brutus and two identical Brutus-oids terrorize the western town. I’m curious if this resulted from the confusion about whether Bluto was a King Features or a Paramount-owned character.
There is an odd moment where newspaper-editor Popeye hires a cartoonist, B Looney Bologna. His panel is the chicken-crossing-the-road gag, used for generations now as the symbol for tired old humor. (I’m persuaded that it’s an anti-joke, myself.) I suppose it builds the direness of Popeye’s plight, that he can’t even use the funny pages to get an audience. Mostly it takes a spot of time for a joke about a bad joke.
Why are there arithmetic problems on the board if Olive Oyl hasn’t been able to teach anyone yet? Was she practicing?
In the climax Popeye decides that the townspeople have to learn the Bruiser Boys aren’t that tough. All right. He decides to show them that even a woman can stand up to them. … Why? I suppose they’re a bit more humiliated if a granny in a wheelchair beats them up than if the newspaper editor does it. But it’s not like they won’t be beaten up anyway. If it is important it be a woman, why not have Olive Oyl take her spinach power-up? It stands out to me that Popeye doesn’t eat any spinach this cartoon. I’m curious if Kneitel had some rationale here that got lost in editing. Or if the cartoon started out as an independent thing, or a story meant for another character, that got imperfectly rewritten for Popeye.
Altogether, it’s a decently-made cartoon. The starting point might be odd, but it follows all well enough from there. It’s still odd that Popeye and Olive Oyl would be printing up rooms full of newspapers when nobody was buying them, though. Maybe he was misled about important things by whoever owned the paper before him.
Popeye never reports a specific piece of news in this short.
This cartoon lets me reveal something that every one of you, deep down, already knew about me. As a young kid watching Popeye on the local stations I wondered: how many cartoons are there? How many do they have? Do they run the cartoons in a set order, or is it random? There was no way to know, of course, except to keep logs. So I would think it should be easy to write down titles of cartoons as they came up.
This would be foiled, over and over, by the ability of an under-ten-year-old to keep a sheet of paper and a pencil near the TV day after day. Also to pay attention when he heard the sailor’s hornpipe starting up, so I could have a title to write. (It did not occur to me that I could leave a blank line for a missed title.) But this cartoon, Voo-Doo To You Too, with its punchy, rhyming, easy-to-remember title? It was always the scolding reminder that I should re-start my list.
Happily, I am today an adult. I can consult lists of cartoons on the Internet. And we don’t have to worry about Popeye running on the local stations on TV. Or about there being local TV stations either. I can content myself to writing 800 words about every one of them.
This cartoon was by Famous Studios, the ones that until recently had been the only ones drawing Popeye. Direction and story are both by Seymour Kneitel. I think he was at least nominally the director for everything Famous Studios ever did with Popeye.
The cartoon depends on a thing it calls voodoo magic. It’s portrayed with the research into Haitian and Creole spirituality that you expect from a hastily-made kids cartoon of 1960. If you don’t need that, you’re right. I have a punch line to my little story that appears right after the embedded video, and after that we can catch up again next week. For those of us willing to watch what an East Coast cartoon studio called “Voodoo” in 1960, let’s watch.
So the punch line is that however well I remembered the title, I mis-remembered which cartoon it attached to.
One good thing about the King Features Popeye cartoons is that they opened up the cast. The Famous Studios cartoons shrank the Thimble Theatre universe until it was Popeye, Bluto, Olive Oyl, sometimes Wimpy. I think even Swee’Pea vanished, his roles taken up by the two of Popeye’s Nephews who survived. King Features’s run was not so stingy. This cartoon stars the Sea Hag, who never appeared before the 60s run somehow. And Eugene the Jeep, who had vanished after Popeye cartoons stopped being black-and-white somehow. There’s smaller characters too. The Sea Hag’s pet vulture — Bernard, though he’s not named here — appears in a good supporting role. There’s even, in the first scene, a look at Rough House’s Cafe (Special To-Day: Spinach Burgers). Rough House never appeared before the 60s cartoons and I’m not sure that he ever did again, except in the Robert Altman movie.
We also get the Sea Hag as an actual character. Like, a real and imposing menace. Coming ashore, she picks a nice-looking house, and decides to enslave the owner to serve her. The owner is Olive Oyl. What are the odds? Popeye overhears this and does not leap right in to punch something. He remembers that he’s vulnerable to magic, and unwilling to hit a woman even if she is the Sea Hag. Instead he jumps into the bedroom and tries to persuade Olive Oyl out of her magical enslavement. She knows he’s in there anyway. Maybe the Sea Hag knows how these cartoons go.
So for those wondering why the Sea Hag never tried this trick again: magic doll wax is so expensive that there’s no sense getting it until Michaels sends you one of those coupons for at least 60% off your entire basket, special items included, and they don’t send those coupons out often.
Sea Hag shapes a candle into a voodoo doll of Popeye, and then binds it with an enchanted hair: Popeye’s arms are stuck to his side and there’s no moving them. It’s a great additional menace, taking away Popeye’s secondary superpower. (His primary superpower is standing up for what’s right, even if it hurts him.) And I do remember, as a kid, being frightened of a magic spell that would lock my arms to my sides. It’s rare to get actual nightmare material out of these cartoons.
She tosses the candle in a chest, and locks it, and sends Bernard to lose it in the wilds. Popeye searches for help with the chest, and who turns out to be in the cartoon but Eugene the Jeep? Luckily, Eugene’s magical powers include his knowing what the plot is. So Popeye doesn’t have to recap the situation right after he’s explained it to the audience. We get a slice of Popeye-following-Eugene, including a joke where Eugene walks through a tree that Popeye can’t. That’s a joke done in the Fleischer studios’ Popeye the Sailor With The Jeep, though since it had been 22 years we can forgive the reuse. Eugene can find the chest easily enough, and open it, but he’s helpless to untie the hair.
So, finally — and later than I would have tried — we turn to spinach. It does nothing to get Popeye’s arms free, and that’s where the cartoon really gets frightening. More powerful than spinach-charged Popeye? There’s genies who aren’t more powerful than spinach-charged Popeyes. Ah, but Eugene knows the rules of sympathetic magic: he feeds the doll some spinach, and doll-Popeye breaks his bonds. This leaves Popeye free. This also leaves under-ten-year-old me wondering, well, aren’t his arms stuck up in that triumphant pose now? Why not? And, like, is there anything they can do with the doll so it can’t be used against him again? If they melt it what happens to Popeye? So you can see that even as a kid, I was doomed to be like this.
Wh — what the — wh — Eugene, you’re making this magic-bondage/mind-controlled-zombie cartoon all weird.
Popeye runs back to Olive Oyl’s house, and gets a good fight in with Bernard, since he can’t hit the Sea Hag. This smashes up the house, but does send Sea Hag and Bernard flying away. Olive Oyl, freed from her trance, remembers none of this, but demands Popeye clean up the mess. Popeye protests he didn’t make the mess, which is wrong. He’s not to blame for the mess, but he totally did make it. Popeye closes on a rhyming couplet, not something he always does this series, complaining about how he finds women confusing. It’s a weak moment; what about any woman’s behavior here has been confusing, and why?
Never mind the weakness. This is one of my favorite King Features cartoons, even if I somehow let the title detach from it. It’s a good solid storyline. It’s got a rare menace for Popeye cartoons at all, never mind for cartoons of this era. It’s even pretty well animated, considering Famous Studios’ limitations. Anybody’s walk cycle is boring, but it’s pretty smooth and on-model. And we get a lot of scenes from interesting perspectives. The Sea Hag’s shown at three-quarters profile to cast her zombie spell on Olive Oyl, at about 6:47, and again at about 7:29 readying to fix that swab Popeye, and again explaining the rules of the voodoo doll at about 7:59. One may suspect important elements of the animation are being reused in all three appearances, but that’s good budgeting. Popeye’s conversation with Eugene the Jeep, starting about 8:46, is done from above Popeye’s and Eugene’s shoulders. They’re both interesting perspectives. We get some of that again when Eugene can’t untie the magical hair, or feeds the wax doll its spinach.
If more of the King Features cartoons were of this quality then the series would be fondly remembered.
As per D D Degg’s article in The Daily Cartoonist, the comic strip Heart of the City has a new cartoonist. Christina Stewart takes over the strip starting the 27th of April. She’s the creator of a fantasy graphic novel, Archival Quality, which I haven’t read but do see good things about. Her art blog, on tumblr, also looks quite good. She doesn’t intend to draw the strip the way its originator, Mark Tatulli, has.
This week’s King Features Popeye cartoon is, it happens, directed by Gene Deitch, and produced by William L Snyder. There’s no story credit to it. Matinée Idol Popeye, another in the microgenre of cartoons where Popeye makes a movie.
Though I’ve called it a microgenre, there really aren’t many cartoons where Popeye is making a movie. At least one of the times he is, it’s a clip cartoon recycling one of the two-reelers. The benefit of doing a let’s-make-a-movie cartoon is you can put Popeye in any scenario without needing any setup or resolution. But, then, when have we ever needed a reason that Popeye should be in Ancient Egypt? It’s old-style cartoon characters. They could just do that.
The setup is Popeye and Olive Oyl making some Anthony-and-Cleopatra film. Brutus is director, sensibly enough. I’d wondered if this was a riff on the infamous Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton Cleopatra, and it seems … unclear. That movie, released 1963, had started production in 1958. So a 1960 cartoon could riff on it. But apart from its five-million-dollar budget what would stand out, in 1960, about the project? Probably it’s more generically a riff on that era of epic-style filmmaking.
We get early on some nice visual jokes. Popeye turning into a ham when Brutus accuses him of being one, that sort of thing. It reflects one of the good lessons of limited animation: if you can’t show complicated action, at least show a bunch of funny pictures. Brutus tries to woo Olive Oyl, taking out of his pocket a heap of flowers bigger than he is; that’s better than anything which would make physical sense.
The premise of the cartoon becomes that Brutus wants Popeye out of the way, but can’t fire him, so he has to get Popeye to quit or die. Bit gruesome, but, makes sense. We get the gag of Popeye’s head caught in a lion’s mouth, and him puffing his pipe to make the lion release him. That’s been done before; in the Famous Studios Tops in The Big Top Bluto even puts a slab of meat on Popeye’s head to ensure the lion tries to eat him. Here it’s just luck for Brutus that the plan starts to work. It’s a missed chance to make Brutus more villainous, but on the other hand, do we want Brutus to be that mean?
Popeye: “Why does this keep happening to me? … All right, it’s only happened maybe three times? But when you consider how often this happens to anyone else that’s still a lot.”
Brutus chuckles “that’ll be good for the end title” when a vulture rests on Popeye’s head. It is, and it’s a missed resolution that the end of the short doesn’t have the vulture on Brutus’s head. We get some nice and really exciting music as the elephant comes in. It raises questions about what the filming schedule for this film was supposed to look like. I wouldn’t want to try to shoot a lion and an elephant and a crocodile scene on the same day. Obviously Brutus is throwing stuff together in the opes of getting Popeye to quit, but he does seem to be filming all this. Without giving Popeye direction of what he should accomplish in the scene, though. If this were an actual film it would be a heck of an avant-garde piece. It’d have some weird verite-like style anyway. Brutus is optimistic to think this will win an Academy Award, but it will have a good shot at being a cult classic.
Brutus finally turns to just grabbing Olive Oyl, because he has not learned how people work yet. Popeye does a slick bit of crushing his can open by dropping a beam of wood on it; that gets us to the fight climax. More time’s spent on Popeye making a sphinx of himself than the actual fight. I’m curious whether they were trying to limit the violence or whether Deitch (or storywriter) thought that punching was the least interesting thing Popeye did. Before we know it, Brutus is harnessed and hauling Popeye’s chariot. This seems like it should violate a Directors Guild rule, but we have reason to think the production is outside proper channels, what with how there’s no other crew.
This isn’t a lushly animated cartoon and after the initial business with the ham it doesn’t get too fanciful either. It does well with what animation there is. And it avoids having too many scenes that look like police lineups. We get a lot of close pictures of characters’s faces, or from chest up. Not so many of them standing in a line viewed from afar. I regret that it doesn’t show off the experimental energies I was talking so much about yesterday. But sometimes a cartoon’s just executed successfully after all.
Gene Deitch has died. Not, his family reports, from Covid-19. There are a number of good obituaries about the animator, including at Cartoon Research, at Cartoon Brew and, for a particularly detailed look at his career, Lambiek’s Comiclopedia. Many of these obituaries are written by people who met the man and knew him some. I am not among them.
I knew Gene Deitch through his work, like many of my generation. And, I think like many of my generation, from knowing that every now and then there would be a really weird installment of a favorite cartoon. Tom and Jerry, most often. Popeye, some. Maybe something from the second-tier studios, like Terry Toons, which still got some syndication time when I was a kid. They would consistently look weird. I adopted that word because, as an undiscerning child who just loved cartoons, I didn’t grasp that they were also quite cheap.
There is no way for me to say this without sounding like a hipster. But I always liked the peculiar weirdness of Gene Deitch cartoons. Especially the Tom and Jerry run, which stood out from the Hanna-Barbera cartoons before and the Chuck Jones cartoons made after. There is now a conventional wisdom that, sure, the average cartoon-viewer sees the Deitch Tom and Jerry cartoons as the worst but there were interesting visual and story experiments going on. I am happy people are agreeing and appreciating them more.
Part of us wants to believe in cartoons as coming from somebody. They can’t. They’re an even more necessarily collaborative process than filmmaking ordinarily is. (There are animated cartoons made wholly, or substantially, by one person. There are happily more being made as computer tools are able to support animators. But, outside discussions of the origins of animation, they’re still a small influence in the art form.) This is what I like in the Deitch-made cartoons I’ve seen. Much like Chuck Jones he has this personality that comes through the filmmaking. It’s not usually as approachable as Chuck Jones’s work. It’s usually a bit weird. Deitch worked with UPA and was a true believer in its experiments in giving up photorealism for expressive exaggeration. Any studio he worked in he tried to make more experimental. It’s easy to love the results of successful experimentation. To get to success, though, you need to go through some weirdness.
Some of this experimentation was forced on Deitch. His Prague studio, for example, was staffed by animators (Deitch included) who had seen no or very few Tom and Jerry cartoons to start with. The budget for each cartoon was whatever loose change Deitch found in the airplane seats flying to Czechoslovakia. But some of this experimentation was his desire to draw something different. It’s amazing that he was able to work so long and so faithfully to that goal.
I’ve been reviewing Gene Deitch-produced cartoons as they come up here. But I have some older pieces maybe harder to find. If you don’t mind reviews built around YouTube links that have rotted, here’s some thoughts about Swee’Pea Soup, and then here’s some for the 60s Krazy Kat cartoon Housewarming, made under similar circumstances.
I complained that last week’s 60s Popeye was a competent cartoon. Every piece of it made sense, followed from the premise, and came out pretty bland. These are not faults for this week. It’s another Jack Kinney joint, this one with story by Noel Tucker and animation direction by Hugh Fraser. Noel Tucker is a name unrecorded by me, so far. Hugh Fraser we’ve seen having Popeye build a robot and being a Hawai’i tour guide. Both of those times I noted the animation was loose, or if you’re not feeling generous, sloppy. What does this imply for Popeye and the Giant? Let’s watch.
The title gives me expectations: that it’ll be another Jack-and-the-Beanstalk take starring Popeye. They’ve done this before, during World War II and again later in the Famous Studios run. They also did it in the 60s run of cartoons. They’d do it again for the 70s run. But sometimes it’s possible that a Popeye cartoon might reuse a premise of another Popeye cartoon. I know, shocking. But, no; the cartoon decides to go in weird directions instead.
And it keeps going weird. Weird to the point I am more curious than usual about its writing. It feels to me like Tucker had a couple ideas, found they were developing in curious ways, couldn’t fit them together, and went with what he had. The cartoon shifts direction several times over. The narrative doesn’t quite make sense. But it’s a good weird. It’s an unpredictable weird, at least.
Follow the narrative. We start with Popeye carrying flowers, I assume to Olive Oyl. He’s not aware that he’s in footage recycled from another short. Wimpy appears, in a pocket universe, offering his usual pay-you-Tuesday-for-a-hamburger-today deal. Popeye ignores him and walks out of the cartoon. Jump to Brutus, who learns the carnival wants a giant. He guesses his plant-growth pills will work on Wimpy, so feeds him a pile of burgers so large Wimpy’s eyes poke out, the first of many body-horror moments. It has an effect: the camera waves around and loses focus, a rare moment of cinematography for these shorts.
I give them a pass on having Wimpy’s clothes gigantify along with him, and will allow Wimpy’s hat and tie not quite growing to fit as a way of demonstrating his bulk. But: we’re looking at Wimpy’s left hand here. How is that attached to his shoulder? So there’s one more moment of body horror for you.
And it works, as Brutus declares, before we actually see anything happen. He jumps outside his house to laugh, a move that doesn’t look at all like they’re recycling footage from another short. Wimpy’s body bulges out and expands in a way that does look painful, an expressive bit for the animation limitations here. Brutus demands Wimpy sign a contract; Wimpy demands food, first.
Here, I think, the premise got away from Tucker. Wimpy is a clever, gluttonous, and slothful character. Add to that physical power, though? That’s dangerous in a novel way. Unfortunately we fall back from that. Brutus agrees to feed Wimpy first, delivering a bunch of burgers on a conveyor belt, saying, “I can’t supply the demand”. It’s a curious line because it’s got the placement and cadence of a joke, but is a literal statement of fact. Was this a placeholder line, meant to be replaced with something funny?
The carnival can’t use Wimpy, observing that he’s impossible show or feed. Good observations. So Brutus turns to the Sea Hag, who’s set herself up as Shyster At Law. I’m sure this is a sly allusion to the Marx Brothers’ nearly-lost radio program, Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel. Good approach and it’s not a bad role for the Sea Hag either. The Sea Hag forgets her weird crush on Wimpy and declares this is a chance to mess with Popeye, who hasn’t been seen since the story actually started.
Her plan: abandon Wimpy as a foundling child on Popeye’s doorstep. Here again I think the premise got out of Tucker’s control. Like, Brutus needed help to have the idea “make Popeye deal with this nonsense”? When Giant Wimpy’s first seen by Popeye, he’s sobbing like a baby. Why? A spell of the Sea Hag’s? That explains having the Sea Hag involved at all. But then Popeye has no doubt that he’s dealing with a giant Wimpy.
I once again protest King Features animating my DeviantArt account without my permission.
Told, by note, that the antidote is unknown, Popeye tries to find an antidote. He goes right to spinach — er, essence of spinach — showing that he’s aware of the rules of the universe he’s in. This makes Giant Wimpy bigger, animated by having the camera slide down a little. So instead he tries “essence of hamburger”, which looks to the untrained eye like a hamburger. Sure, we already saw him eat dozens of burgers that Brutus made, and again dozens more at the carnival. But this time? It’s a burger that shrinks him back to normal.
Wimpy thanks Popeye, while Popeye can’t help mouthing along to Wimpy’s lines. And Wimpy’s hungry again, and that’s our laugh line to the finish.
So, yeah, it’s all low-key bonkers. I mean this affectionately. Someone seeing only Brutus reading about this carnival offer would not guess it would have Popeye deal with a giant “baby” Wimpy. After watching the cartoon a couple times I guess I follow the threads, more or less, but it’s a weird path getting there. There’s two good premises — Wimpy as a demanding giant, and Popeye dealing with a giant baby — brought up and immediately forgotten. The story needed another draft or two to be a coherent whole, but I’m not sure that would be better. As it is, it’s all weird jagged edges.
Most interesting about the animation is that Giant Wimpy is not Wimpy drawn larger. His proportions are all off. This is a good way of establishing that Wimpy is truly gigantic. It does mean they can’t use stock footage of Wimpy for all this time that he’s the center of attention. Having to do that is probably why they had to reuse footage from other shorts. It’s a worthwhile trade.
This is a cartoon I’m going to have specific memories of next week.
They say that in times of crisis, keeping up routines is a good thing. That’s why I’ve moved the What’s Going On In series from posting late Sunday to posting late Tuesday: I don’t know what I’m doing. Also this lets me handle the Sunday-only strips more gracefully. Still, I do want to look at what kinds of things get read around here, and how much, and this is my first really good chance for that. So here’s a quick review of what my readership was like, according to WordPress, which I keep going ahead and trusting even when I don’t like the results. This is known as integrity or being too lazy to do something else.
Yeah so I was at home at 8 pm Eastern Time on the 31st of March so I could take this snapshot at exactly the moment to have April not appear. Frankly, I would rather have been out messing around playing pinball at the hipster bar two blocks over.
So, three months of a slump seems to have passed. There were 3,963 page views in March, comfortably above even the twelve-month running average of 3,605.3 views per month. These came from a logged 2,385 unique visitors, which is also a fair bit high of the 2,083.3 running average. That’s all looking good from my perspective. The number of likes was flat, though, the same 75 as in February. This is a fair bit below the average of 131.5. This suggests a great fall-off in reader engagement. But then the number of comments rose to 30, its greatest number in over a year, and well above the twelve-month average of 16.1.
Pro-rating things per post gives a similar story. There were 127.8 views per posting for March, above the average 118.3. There were 76.9 unique visitors per posting, up from 68.4 as an average. Only 2.4 likes per posting, below the twelve-month average of 4.3. But 1.0 comments per posting, way above the 0.5 average. April is already looking nicely chatty, too. Now that I’ve said that I can watch comments shrivel up and die, apart from people upset about Mark Trail.
I am, as ever, not joking about Mark Trail. The most popular five essays last month were:
What Is Going On With Mark Trail? which was my very first plot recap, from way back in 2016 — remember 2016? — and has accumulated search rank relevance by simple age.
My most popular long-form essay last month was In Which I Am Very Petty About This Covid-19 Business, the first of what’s turning out to be a series of me rambling about my minor neuroses. It implies that I’ve finally figured out my niche, and it’s complaining about myself.
These are subject to change in case of breaking news or something that demands my attention or whatever other chaos breaks out in the world.
484 posts got at least one page view in March, well up from February’s 401. 302 of them got more than one view, up from 245. 75 of them got at least ten views, compared to 56 in February.
Someday I will get a reader in Greenland and I won’t know what to do with it. … Hi, Greenland! I’m sure you have someone where who could read me!
73 countries sent me any viewers in March, right about February’s 71. 20 of them were single-view countries, close enough to February’s 18. Herees the full roster:
Country
Readers
United States
3,030
India
161
Canada
121
United Kingdom
90
Philippines
68
Germany
50
Australia
38
South Africa
35
Brazil
34
Sweden
24
Spain
23
Papua New Guinea
21
France
17
Thailand
15
Finland
14
Switzerland
14
Italy
13
Portugal
13
New Zealand
11
Argentina
10
Netherlands
10
Romania
10
Denmark
9
Ireland
9
Norway
8
Pakistan
8
China
7
European Union
6
Singapore
5
Taiwan
5
Belgium
4
El Salvador
4
Japan
4
Kenya
4
Colombia
3
Croatia
3
Dominican Republic
3
Hong Kong SAR China
3
Indonesia
3
Malaysia
3
Poland
3
Russia
3
South Korea
3
Ukraine
3
American Samoa
2
Austria
2
Greece
2
Honduras
2
Jamaica
2
Mexico
2
Saudi Arabia
2
Sri Lanka
2
Zambia
2
Bangladesh
1
Belize
1
Chile
1
Ecuador
1
Egypt
1
Estonia
1
Iceland
1
Israel
1
Jordan
1
Kuwait
1 (*)
Lebanon
1 (*)
Nigeria
1
Peru
1 (*)
Puerto Rico
1
Serbia
1
Somalia
1
Trinidad & Tobago
1 (**)
Turkey
1
United Arab Emirates
1 (*)
Zimbabwe
1
Kuwait, Lebanon, Peru, and the United Arab Emirates were single-view countries in February also. Trinidad & Tobago has been on a single-view streak for three months now.
WordPress figures in March I posted 17,019 words. That’s 549 words per posting exactly, a rare decimal-free appearance for that figure. It’s my most verbose of 2020 so far, though. For the year to date I’ve posted 48,878 words, in 90 posts, for an average of 543.09 words per posting. The start of April saw me complete 2,616 posts altogether, drawing 161,530 views from 90,399 unique visitors.
And you could be among them! If you’re reading this, you already are. Unless you’re reading by way of RSS reader, in which case I’ll never know unless you say something to me. But you can also follow by clicking the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on this page. Or follow me on Twitter as @nebusj, if you’d like. Thank you, however it is you’re doing things.
There’s familiar names in the credits for this week’s 60s Popeye cartoon. The story’s credited to Carl Meyer and Jack Mercer. Jack Mercer was the voice of Popeye, with a handful of interruptions, from 1935 through to the Robert Altman movie. He’d also written Popeye cartoons, and others, going back to 1942. The director’s Seymore Kneitel, who again had directed Popeye cartoons going back to Paramount’s taking over the Fleischer Studios. Basically, these are old pros. They could have done Dog Catcher Popeye in their sleep. Did they?
There’s something a bit telling in the credit and title cards. They’re tightly organized, neatly lettered. Smoothly professional enough to be a little boring. This is an era where, yes, a lot of awful cartoons were being made under the Popeye brand identity. Often the most interesting thing about them is the title card, with some mid-century modern abstraction and the title painted in some way that’s maybe even hard to read. Not this; this is neatly stenciled letters. There’s no question what you’re seeing.
And that’s the cartoon. This is a smoothly made production. There’s a clear storyline. A poor tormented dog catches Popeye’s attention; he rescues it. It wants to follow him; he tries to escape. Brutus the actual dog catcher notices the dog; Popeye saves the dog. At no point is there question what characters are doing, or trying to do, or why. All the action is clear and well-rendered. There’s even stuff, like the park entrance or the dog catcher’s truck, drawn in one-point perspective. It’s all well-crafted.
Also boring. There’s not any personality in the cartoon. No weirdness. The only interesting shot is a couple moments seen from the dog’s point of view, where Popeye explains why he can’t adopt the dog. There’s a bit of novelty in the story from Brutus not really being out to get Popeye. Or even being in the wrong.
It’s petty to complain about a cartoon being done with so much professional competence that I can’t even sneer at it. But I also know that I saw this cartoon about 480,000 times growing up, and I’ve watched it three times over the past week, and in two days I’m not going to remember even writing an essay about it. This weekend I also watched an episode of the Emergency +4 cartoon that existed for absolutely no decent reason. And that was fascinating for how it took a whole Mark Trail plot’s worth of dangers in the desert and made it all lifeless and dull. But its incompetence at establishing stakes for the characters? And the bizarreness of its choice to exist at all? Its bold choice to use the temporary music track for the opening and closing credits? I’m going to remember and think about that again.
Today’s King Features Popeye cartoon is an interesting one. It’s one I like without having to apologize for its limitations. And there’s a mystery behind it.
Take It Easel is a Gerald Ray-produced cartoon. There’s no story or writing credit. The Internet Movie Database credits Bob Bemiller as director and Milt Schaffer as writer, on what basis I don’t know. Well, director I know; it’s there on the title card. It’s got a nice roster of eight credited animators, though, promising that as with most of the Gerald Ray cartoons, there’ll at least be a bunch of good pictures to look at even if they don’t move much. So here’s 1960’s Take It Easel.
This is a well-crafted Popeye cartoon. Popeye and Brutus are art students. There’s a contest in the art magazine, a thousand dollars for the best flower painting. Popeye and Brutus become rivals for the prize, and they set out to the desert. They find a lovely purple-petaled flower growing alone in the sand, and spend the rest of the short trying to paint the picture and undermine the other. Finally it all gets serious enough that Popeye has to eat his spinach. He smashes Brutus and the flower together in a canvas and presents that to the art world, which admires his bold work and lifelike nature.
There is a lot of good stuff this cartoon. Not just in the storyline but in the jokes. Some of them are throwaway bits: the letter carrier whacking Popeye in the head twice with deliveries. Or Popeye leaping from the loft window right into his car, and Brutus leaping from the same window to … right where Popeye’s car was. Some of them are fourth-wall-breaking experiences, which was always a way to make the young me love your cartoon. But they seem to echo the artists-at-work theme of the cartoon. Brutus correcting his off-center painting by grabbing the thumb in it and sliding the thing over. Popeye’s painting of a flower wilting in the heat. Brutus painting a swimming pool. In setting up the climax, Brutus painting train tracks and the rope to tie Popeye. Popeye painting his can of spinach.
Brutus knew the flower was going to get run over by the train too, right? He just didn’t care at that point?
And there’s a lot of good back-and-forth dialogue, Brutus and Popeye sassing the other. Which allows for a deft bit of plotting. Brutus’s undoing is always letting Popeye get spinach. Why give Popeye a paintbrush, when experience indicates that any tool will let Popeye summon spinach from the misty void? Well, because he’s sassing Popeye back. It is a really well-crafted cartoon throughout. There’s even a bonus bit of Popeye signing his rhyming couplet, about people calling him Van Gouher when he paints a flower. It’s just another nice small bit of business.
The cartoon is also a remake. In November 1956 the Walter Lantz studios released the Woody Woodpecker cartoon Arts and Flowers. The director was Paul J Smith, and the story’s credited to Homer Brightman and Frank J Goldberg. Smith directed roughly a hundred billion Woody Woodpecker theatrical cartoons. Brightman wrote about a billion of them. Goldberg is credited with this short alone. I don’t know whether this reflects him usually being credited under a variant name or whether this reflects “Frank J Goldberg” being a pseudonym summoned just for this one short. It stands out to me that Milt Schaffer was still getting story credits for Walt Disney shorts through 1956, then got a couple story credits for Woody Woodpecker, before going and joining Gerald Ray’s team.
To me, this matters. If Frank J Goldberg was Milt Schaffer, then there’s no real harm done. It’s no crime to plagiarize yourself. If he wasn’t, though, then someone deserves a surely-posthumous-by-now scolding.
I don’t know of an official YouTube channel for the Walter Lantz studios. I can share links which have Arts And Flowers, but there’s no reason to think they’re going to stay stable. So, let me know if the link rots and I’ll do my best to find a replacement. But Here’s one YouTube source for the cartoon, and here’s the cartoon from a web site I never heard of before looking this short up.
There are important differences. The animation in the Woody Woodpecker cartoon is better. Walter Lantz’s studio was a second-tier theatrical place, but second-tier theatrical was still way ahead of even ex-Disney-animator television. Woody Woodpecker isn’t established as an artist or art student right away; he seems to get interested just by peeking at his neighbor’s mail. The art contest is more narrowly defined as being for a “desert flower”. And it promises only a big prize, rather than a thousand dollars, which turns out to be a picture of a bag of money. Artful Art — I never knew this name, but Wikipedia seems to have settled on it — and Woody Woodpecker sabotage each other right away, even before they’ve reached the desert.
We get some of the same jokes, like Woody and Artful shoving their easels in front of the other. Here, it carries on until Artful falls off a cliff; on TV, Brutus is just baffled to find the flower no longer in front of him. I’m not sure which is the better joke. The Popeye version lets the cartoon move faster to the next beat.
The Woody Woodpecker cartoon has a joke dropped from the remake, in which Artful gets distracted by a laughing hyena. The joke’s better off dropped. It’s funny enough, allowing that the idea of a crying hyena is of course a sufficient joke. It’s that the story is Woody versus Artful. Why throw in a distraction character? Put this in the short where Woody is trying to paint and nature conspires against him instead.
The joke where Artful kicks Woody out of the scene, opens up his easel, and Woody’s in there is lost too. That’s a good joke but there’s no way to make that work with Brutus and Popeye. The joke of the desert daffodil shrinking into the ground and reappearing could have gone in the remake, though, and I’m curious why it didn’t. We get an undermining joke in which Brutus digs beneath Popeye and he sinks into the ground instead. Although come to it, we don’t actually see the moving flower is Woody’s doing, or how he does it. I’d just assumed, since, what else makes sense?
So who wore it better? I have to credit Woody for drawing train tracks that are much more realistically train tracks, even showcasing the complicated structure of the rails. But Brutus did think to draw enough track that the train could be coming from over the horizon, which is putting a lot of effort into killing your rival artist. Anyway, I think Woody Woodpecker comes out ahead, because he had more lines, which is the official ISO-approved measure of how good a drawing is.
Most interesting, though, are two bits. In one, Woody paints an oasis. As is traditional for stuff cartoons paint on rocks, he can swim in it and Artful can’t. In the other, and most important difference, it’s Woody that paints the railroad tracks and railroad into existence. In the remake, these are tasks assigned to Brutus. To the villain. Woody Woodpecker was always a difficult protagonist. He’s supposed to be this zany agent of chaos. I think it’s telling that the stuff the audience is expected to root for in 1956 is so naturally slid over to the antagonist in 1960. I still like Woody Woodpecker, but appreciate more that he can only work if he’s harassing somebody who deserves it. Put him up against a well-meaning vague shape of protagonist dough, like Andy Panda, and Woody Woodpecker is awful.
In the Woody Woodpecker cartoon, the ability to paint things like the train into reality is set up early. Woody paints a cactus that jabs Artful. Woody paints a woman holding a vase, who hits Artful with the vase. Woody paints a bulldog into existence to bite Artful’s tuckus. But is setting that up necessary? I didn’t have trouble believing that Brutus could paint a train into existence, and given that, Popeye painting spinach into the world is fine.
So. Let me put forth the hypothesis that “Frank J Goldberg” was a one-off pseudonym used by Milt Schaffer. That Schaffer was working at Disney through 1956 suggests that maybe he had a foot in the door at Lantz, but didn’t want his name noticed before he had left Disney. This seems plausible enough. The Woody Woodpecker cartoon Niagara Fools came out the 22nd of October, 1956, with Schaffer’s name on it. This is before the release of Arts and Flowers, on the 19th of November, with I assume Schaffer’s name hidden. But that doesn’t say much about when production on the shorts got started or what whimsies of fate might have pushed Arts and Flowers to later in the year. It suggests that production of Niagara Fools started after Schaffer had left Disney, at least.
Having done all this detective work, I’m just assuming there’s an article on Cartoon Brew or Mark Evanier’s page that describes all the various pseudonyms that Schaffer used and why he used them, and that I’m twelve years late to the party. That’s all right. That is closer than I normally ever am.
I believe this is the first time, since I started doing these cartoons systematically, that I’ve looked at a Gerald Ray-produced 60s Popeye cartoon. The director’s listed as Bob Bemiller. The credits, done with this nice split of typefaces that makes me think of a mid-century bowling alley, don’t list a writer. On the other hand, we’re promised eight animators worked on drawing this one. It’s 1960’s Popeye’s Junior Headache. Spoiler: it does not feature Popeye Junior.
The plot is just that an exhausted Popeye’s roped into babysitting Olive Oyl’s niece Diesel, and she’s your traditional hellion. The obvious plot is how bad she can get before Popeye grabs his spinach and Does Something about all this. The short does that plot; the question is how good it is at that.
The first shot is promising, though. It’s a view of Popeye slumped over in bed answering the phone. The view’s from a ceiling corner of the room, an angle harder to draw than the scene strictly needed. His room’s got a full bed, chest, curtains, a rug with an anchor on it, a ship’s-wheel clock. The scene would read as well as a side shot of Popeye sitting in a bed, with the wall and floor suggested by a pair of flat colors. That the animators put some personality into a boring scene bodes well.
Gerald Ray was, among other things in a long career, one of the directors for Rocky and Bullwinkle and Other Titles. Bullwinkle was never a lavishly animated show. But it used a good trick: a lot of short scenes moving between funny pictures. Ray imported that to here. It’s really cheap to animate, as they do at about 19:20, Popeye talking by having the book covering his face move. It’s also no effort to put Diesel Oyl standing there with a magnifying glass on the book. But together this makes a funny scene. I mean at least funny in intent. You might not like the joke, but you know what’s supposed to be funny there and why it’s supposed to be funny.
An example of this style: Popeye finally has enough and gets to the kitchen. It’s not actually my childhood kitchen but boy did it give me warm nostalgic feelings. Anyway, he eats a can of Something That’s Not Spinach. He gets his power-up music; his pipe falls apart. If you aren’t watching you might miss that, or even think it’s an animation error. But having his spinach power-up go wrong like that is a good joke. It wasn’t necessary; watch the cartoon with the sound off and the story goes as well. But it makes things more fun to watch.
Deisel Oyl — The Popeye wiki says Deezil, on what grounds I don’t know — is a creation of the cartoons. I don’t know whether she appeared outside the 60s cartoons specifically. She’s voiced by Mae Questel, who’s using basically the voice she has for Swee’Pea. I can’t say this first appearance has made me fond of her. But you can also see where Swee’Pea couldn’t work for the story. Popeye’s Nephews might work, although I’m sure King Features figured they had no right to use those characters. Remember, these cartoons have “Brutus” rather than “Bluto” because they weren’t sure whether Bluto was created from the comic strip (which they owned) or the Fleischer Cartoons (which they didn’t).
So this is a basic cartoon, but executed well in that there’s plenty of funny pictures to watch as the action carries on. I suspect had Gerald Ray done more of the King Features Popeyes the series might be remembered more fondly.
I like taking some time near the start of any month to look at what my readership is like. I would have liked to get to it earlier this month but I haven’t had the time to think, much less write. I’d also like to know why I like doing this. Well, I know why I usually like it. Usually the statistics tell me that I’m quite popular with a select group of people and that’s nice to see. December 2019, though? … well, not so much.
It’s an exaggeration to say this was a plummet. But there were “only” 3,064 page views around here in December. That’s about three-quarters what there were in November. It’s a fair bit below the twelve-month running average of 3,545.7 views per month. Looking at the number of views per posting seems less dire, even though there were more posts in December than in November. There were 98.8 views per posting in December, below the running average of 116.5 views per posting. This seems less dire because there are more decimal points in it.
Boy, the end of Apartment 3-G was a long time ago, wasn’t it?
There was a roughly identical drop in the number of unique visitors. There were 1,760 logged unique visitors in December 2019, below the twelve-month running average of 2,034.3. Per post, that’s 56.8 unique visitors, below the average of 66.8. If there’s any bright spots to this it’s in the things that measure engagement. There were 104 things liked in December, a rise from November’s total of 92, and getting closer to the running average of 145.7. This is 3.4 likes per posting, still fairly below the 4.8 likes per posting average. The number of comments was up, though, with 21 received in December. That’s the greatest number since June, and is not that far below the twelve-month running average of 25.0. It’s also an average of 0.7 comments per posting, below but near the average of 0.8.
There were 420 posts, besides my home page, that got any views at all in December. That’s down from November’s 446. 159 of these pages got only a single view, which basically matches November’s 150 and October’s 162. The most popular pieces were nothing posted this December, it happens:
Those last three make me think I need to do something optimizing about my comic strip plot recap posts. My most popular long-form essay for the month was also a new one, Some Books You Can Get Me For Christmas. I’m quite happy about this because I really, really liked this piece and I’m glad other people do.
65 countries or country-like entities sent me views in December. That’s down from November’s 74 and October’s 76. I thought last month I had found a level, and see where that’s got me. There were 13 single-view countries, down from November’s 15 and October’s 23. Here’s the full list of them:
Yeah but seriously, is there anybody in Greenland? If you know anybody who’s going to Greenland could you ask them to send me just one page view so I know the system is working? Thank you.
Country
Readers
United States
2,206
India
118
Canada
103
European Union
98
Philippines
91
Australia
62
United Kingdom
47
Sweden
44
France
26
Germany
25
Finland
21
Spain
17
Malaysia
14
Turkey
14
Brazil
13
South Africa
12
Netherlands
11
Italy
8
Denmark
7
Poland
7
Greece
6
Singapore
6
Taiwan
6
Ukraine
6
Croatia
5
New Zealand
5
Portugal
5
Russia
5
Colombia
4
Israel
4
Japan
4
Argentina
3
Czech Republic
3
Hong Kong SAR China
3
Ireland
3
Mexico
3
Romania
3
Serbia
3
Slovenia
3
United Arab Emirates
3
Angola
2
Austria
2
Bangladesh
2
Ecuador
2
Hungary
2
Norway
2
Pakistan
2
South Korea
2
Switzerland
2
Thailand
2
Vietnam
2
Zambia
2
Belgium
1
Cayman Islands
1
Chile
1
Iceland
1
Indonesia
1
Jamaica
1
Kazakhstan
1
Kenya
1
Lebanon
1 (*)
Macedonia
1 (**)
Nigeria
1 (*)
Peru
1
Slovakia
1
Lebanon and Nigeria were single-view countries in November. Macedonia’s been a single-view country three months running now.
I figure to do a review of all 2019 sometime later, most likely in 2020. But I can share some things. In December I posted 16,820 words altogether, for an average of 542.6 words per posting. That’s below the 2019 year’s average of 563 words per post. From the start of this blog to the start of 2020 I’d had 2,526 postings, which got altogether 151,278 views from 84,297 unique visitors.
I’m happy to have you as a regular reader. You can add https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed/ to your RSS reader. If you don’t have an RSS reader you can create one by using the Reading/Friends page on a free Dreamwidth or Livejournal account. Or if you’d like to show up in my statistics you can use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button that’s on this page too. And I have an account on Twitter as @Nebusj which posts announcements of new pieces, although I haven’t got around to getting back into the account. For whatever reason Safari stopped letting me read Twitter and I haven’t had energy to protest this anywhere useful. But thanks for reading this here, at a minimum.
I enjoy taking the start of the month to look over my readership figures from the past month. Really, I like looking at bunches of numbers. Most of the video games I enjoy feature some kind of ledger that I can just watch data roll in on. If someone ever makes Multiple Entry Accounting Simulator they’re going to get all my Steam credits. I kid. I only load Steam on rare occasions, at which point the computer tells me I need to spend an hour waiting for Steam to finish its updates, after which I don’t have time to play anything anymore. So what did readership here at Another Blog, Meanwhile look like in June 2019?
It’s dropped for the third month running. I somehow expected that. It’s not as though I changed posting habits or anything, but somehow, June felt off. Maybe something in my writing came through. There were 3,140 page views from 1,813 unique visitors in June. In May there were 3,414 page views from 2,058 unique visitors. Busy April had 4,033 page views and 2,418 unique visitors. The number of views is strikingly close to the twelve-month running average before June, of 3,143.8 views. The number of unique visitors is slightly higher than the twelve-month running average of 1780. Not enough to matter.
And hey, good news: I haven’t forgotten how to make the bar chart of my readership go back way more than the like 30 months it does by default. And hey, can you find the spot where Apartment 3-G finally died and I got a mention from someone I knew who was writing for The AV Club?
The number of ‘likes’ fell, technically, to 130 from May’s 133. And April’s 233. This is an appreciable bit below the twelve-month running average, which was 169.3 likes per month. But at least I make up for that in comments? Which were 22 for June, compared to … 24 in May. And 10 in April. This doesn’t look too bad, relatively, until you consider the twelve-month running average was 45.2 comments per month. So 22 in June is noticeably down.
I am not sure the diagnosis here. What I make of this, and my own feelings, is that the blog is stagnating. That I need to invite in new readers, and that I need to find new kinds of things to write about. This is all quite easy to say I need to do. The problem is to find a fresh approach, and to find fresh readers for it.
Grant that the readers were here. What were they reading? 401 separate pages got at least one viewer, besides the Home Page which, naturally, drew the greatest number. (There were 377 pieces that got at least one page view in May.) 154 pages got a single reader in June. But the particular pages which drew the greatest number of views in June were:
And that is another clean sweep in favor of comic strip explanations around here. My most popular thing that was my own attempt to be funny came in a three-way tie for 20th most popular post, Statistics Saturday: Things That Non-Vegetarians Think The Rest Of Us Need To Hear. I’m glad to have that piece thought of. I had fun writing it. My most popular long-form piece was down in 31st place, Everything There Is To Say About The History Of Gas Prices. And that … really? Huh. Not disputing anyone who enjoyed reading it. It felt to me like a piece that should have been better than it was. Maybe I accidentally search-engine-optimized the headline or first paragraph.
It all indicates, though, that very many people would like the deal with Edward’s Dog explained. Also that they feel superior to the characters in Mary Worth, which, I mean, I guess, take your self-esteem where you can get it?
So that’s what people read. Where did they read from? There were 69 countries sending me readers in June. There had been 75 in May, and 66 in April. This is the full roster:
I continue to be baffled by the number of page views I got from Scandinavian countries, but I’m not looking to chase anyone off or anything. Also a mystery: why so many Peruvian readers? I feel like I must have said something about guinea pigs that people made too much of? Is that possible?
Country
Readers
United States
2,268
India
177
Canada
100
Peru
71
Sweden
65
United Kingdom
61
Australia
49
Hong Kong SAR China
47
Spain
29
France
23
Brazil
18
Italy
17
Germany
15
Philippines
15
United Arab Emirates
11
Finland
10
Mexico
8
Netherlands
8
Turkey
8
El Salvador
7
Portugal
7
Indonesia
6
Japan
6
Romania
6
Singapore
6
Ireland
5
New Zealand
5
Norway
5
Russia
5
South Africa
5
Austria
4
Colombia
4
Denmark
4
Malaysia
4
Nepal
4
Switzerland
4
Taiwan
4
American Samoa
3
Egypt
3
European Union
3
Argentina
2
Belgium
2
Cyprus
2
Ecuador
2
Guatemala
2
Jamaica
2
Panama
2
Serbia
2
South Korea
2
Sri Lanka
2
Venezuela
2
Algeria
1
Bermuda
1
Bolivia
1
Greece
1 (*)
Hungary
1
Iceland
1
Iraq
1
Kazakhstan
1
Kenya
1
Kuwait
1
Libya
1
Luxembourg
1
Qatar
1 (*)
Réunion
1 (*)
Saudi Arabia
1
Trinidad & Tobago
1
Vietnam
1
Zambia
1
Greece, Qatar, and Réunion were single-reader countries in May. There were 19 single-reader countries in May and 18 single-reader countries in June.
So that is what people have been reading and where they’ve been reading from. What can they expect to read in the next couple weeks? I’m trying as ever to do a long-form comic piece once a week, posted Thursday evening, Eastern Time. And a Statistics Saturday post, every Saturday evening, Eastern Time. Sunday evenings I try to post plot recaps for the story strips. My schedule for that for July is:
Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead for the 19th of August, 2002. I’m seriously considering using the last panel of this as my icon for What’s Going On In Mary Worth essays. There’s a similar, though less great, panel for Judge Parker and a fair one for Mark Trail. The one for Apartment 3-G would be great but that strip exists only in Vintage form anymore.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp and how the phrase “too cool for school” turned a high school into an even more terrible, vicious, clique-ridden viper pit, plus what this did to one teenage girl’s volleyball scholarship.
From the start of 2019 through the start of July 2019 I’ve published 179 posts, for a total of 106,178 words. This was a surprisingly few 13,906 words in June. And that’s a mere 463.5 words per post, on average. My year-to-date average post has had 593 words, down from 614 at the start of May. Those little Wednesday bits are really helping. That and having a couple things that were just photos I could post.
There were 239 comments through the start of July, an average of 1.3 comments per posting. At the start of June the average had been 1.4 comments per posting. There’ve been an average 5.3 likes per post this year, through the start of July. Through the start of June the average had been 5.5. See what I mean, above, about having maybe stagnated and needing to find new audiences?
July started with my having made 2,341 total posts. They’ve attracted 128,455 page views from 71,471 unique visitors. 401 pages got at least one view, up from May’s 377, down from April’s 565. I don’t know yet what the normal range of fluctuations should be.
This one was going about having an afternoon snack at the Fantasy Island amusement park near Buffalo, New York. It was a very rainy day, part of a very rainy weekend, in a very rainy week, of a very rainy month. We got on all the roller coasters.
Deep down, I knew I wouldn’t repeat April’s four-thousand-plus page views. Not that my readership doesn’t seem to have risen to a new plateau since Roy Kassinger discovered me. (I don’t see a reason they should be connected, but the correlation is there.) Just that April saw a couple weird spikes of readership that I think were freak events.
There were 3,414 page views in May 2019. That’s down from the 4,033 of April and 3,565 of March. It’s still a bit above the twelve-month running average, though. (That was 3128.2 page views, for the curious, which will be ‘me in one month’.) There were 2,058 unique visitors, down from April’s 2,418 and March’s 2,165. It’s above the twelve-month running average of 1781.6, anyway.
I had been feeling all good that I grabbed a snapshot of my statistics just as June started, so that there wasn’t this embarrassing final column with a couple of page views on it. And then two days later remembered I could fiddle with the date range so as to show four and a half years of statistics, which gives so much a better sense of change over time. So, here you have it, with that embarrassing final column.
The number of likes resumed its dwindle; there were 133 things liked around here in all of May. There’d been 233 likes in April, and 176 likes in march. And that’s certainly below the twelve-month running average, which I won’t name here because every other month had more likes. It was 172.8. Which sees odd since I had at least one piece that really hit a nostalgic sweet spot, according to the comments I got about it. Comments were a bit more common, 24 in May. There were 10 in April and 24 in March. The twelve-month running average (this is going to become a new obsession, isn’t it?) was 47.7.
In all, 377 of my posts got some view in May. (The Home Page also drew views, but that’s not counted as any specific post.) The most popular posts were about what I would have guessed:
I expect comic strip plot recaps to be my most popular thing. And something posted near the kalends of a month has the best chance to get readership counts. But I am surprised people didn’t just get the joke with Edward’s Dog of un-depictable ugliness. Maybe I’ve been better-primed to expect that joke.
And while it wouldn’t make the top five, one of my long-form essays was finally reached the top ten. Everything There Is To Say About Programming A Computer In The 80s was really well-liked, and I’m glad. It may not actually have a specific big laugh, but I think it has got that sort of humor that comes from knowing someone actually thinks like this.
I realize that it’s just one viewer who possibly didn’t even know what they were looking for but, wow, someone from Mauritania looked at something I wrote this past month? How did that come about?
75 countries, or country-like polities, sent me readers at all in May. That’s up from April’s 66 and March’s 69. That feels nice to see. 18 of them were single-reader countries. That’s more than April’s 16 and March’s 14. Here’s the full roster:
Country
Readers
United States
2,607
Canada
119
India
103
United Kingdom
90
Sweden
55
Brazil
46
Australia
43
Japan
35
Hong Kong SAR China
24
Netherlands
19
Malaysia
18
France
17
Germany
17
Mexico
15
Philippines
13
Romania
9
Denmark
8
Indonesia
8
Ireland
7
Finland
6
Hungary
6
Italy
6
Peru
6
Spain
6
Turkey
6
Colombia
5
New Zealand
5
Nigeria
5
Portugal
5
Singapore
5
United Arab Emirates
5
Uruguay
5
American Samoa
4
Argentina
4
Kenya
4
Russia
4
South Africa
4
South Korea
4
Switzerland
4
Taiwan
4
Bangladesh
3
El Salvador
3
Kuwait
3
Norway
3
Serbia
3
Thailand
3
Venezuela
3
Austria
2
Israel
2
Jordan
2
Kazakhstan
2
Liberia
2
Nepal
2
Poland
2
Sri Lanka
2
Ukraine
2
Albania
1
Belgium
1
British Virgin Islands
1
Bulgaria
1
China
1
Ecuador
1
Greece
1
Guam
1
Iraq
1
Jamaica
1
Macedonia
1
Mauritania
1
Moldova
1
Myanmar (Burma)
1
Paraguay
1
Puerto Rico
1
Qatar
1
Réunion
1
Uganda
1
This is a complete turnover in single-reader countries: none of those sent me exactly one reader in April. This is my first complete single-reader turnover in a long while. Possibly since I started paying attention to these things. And, of course, I am happy that anyone might read and, I dearly hope, enjoy what I write. I’m just curious why I should have so many readers in Sweden, Brazil, or India. Again, I’m happy to have you. I just feel like … really? I say anything relevant to you? I’d like to know what it is.
So my story strip recaps. All the story strip recaps should appear at this link. I do have a plan for the next several Sundays, if nothing happens that shakes up the orderly world of the twelve threads I follow. My plans are for:
Between the start of 2019 and the start of June 2019 I’ve published 149 pieces for a total of 92,272 words. 19,030 of these words were published in May. So, that’s 614 words per post on average in May — April had been 644 — and, year to date, an average of 619 words per post. At the start of May it had been 610 words. I told you those Wednesday little things weren’t working.
There’ve been 204 comments overall on the year, for an average of 1.4 comments per posting. That’s the same average as at the start of May, at least. 820 total likes, for an average of 5.5 likes per posting in 2019. At the start of May this average had been 5.7. But at the start of April the average was 5.5 again. Hm.
June began with my having made 2,311 posts. They’ve gathered 125,314 views from 69,657 unique visitors. And as mentioned, 377 posts got at least one view in May. 565 posts got some view in April, and 420 in March. I have no idea what these fluctuations signify. Most likely nothing. If I’m actually interested in how much of my archive is being read any month, I should probably look at, say, the number of posts that get at least five page views. Or some threshold that suggests it wasn’t just a mistake.
If you don’t think reading me is a mistake, thank you. You can be a regular reader by adding the Another Blog, Meanwhile feed to your RSS reader. Or you can use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button in the upper right corner of the WordPress page. I’m on Twitter as @Nebusj, but I won’t feel jealous if you follow other people too.
I did figure to spend a week or two reviewing non-Popeye’s-Island-Adventure cartoons. This to build some buffer in my writing schedule. Once again it was easier to not. But this time for sure I’ll get my writing onto a more sustainable, less exhausting schedule.
Olive’s Vacation is listed as the 20th of these Popeye’s Island Adventure shorts. As has become the standard it’s followed by four more shorts, padding the production up to eleven and a half minutes, the better to support Google advertising. I had it pop up that panel asking me questions about other advertisements or companies I’ve heard about recently. If you encounter this, remember, you should lie to them.
The short starts with a decent idea. Olive Oyl’s going on vacation, so Popeye and Swee’Pea house-sit. It’s a stock premise, but I don’t mind stock premises. They can build reliable stories, ones that don’t screw things up. This premise, it’s all in how the chaos builds, and how hard Popeye has to work to prevent Olive Oyl from discovering the disaster.
The moment Popeye’s back is turned, Eugene and Swee’Pea split open a watermelon, using a hammer. I like Eugene as this agent of chaos. The Jeep brushes up against the fairy-world. Such creatures should operate without regard for grown-up human interests. Popeye runs after the mess, accidentally opening Olive Oyl’s Murphy-like bed and spilling all that stuff over the house. This was a bit I didn’t understand until I rewatched the short. I didn’t know what to make of the contents hidden behind the cabinet. The sort running time of these shorts — here, two minutes, 11 seconds — sometimes damages its clarity.
Popeye thinks to use his spinach to clean the place up. He then tries rubbing his can of spinach on a puddle of watermelon juice. It’s dumb. I laughed. Bluto appears, offering his help in exchange for a can of spinach. A distraught Popeye pays the price. Bluto shows how to hide stuff under the carpet and runs off, cackling gleefully. Gleeful Bluto might be my favorite part of this series of cartoons. It’s so endearing.
Olive Oyl stops back in for her forgotten hat. She gets there just after Popeye’s hidden everything away, and just before everything explodes out of the Murphy-ish bed. In the explosion, Olive’s flower-planter boot flies way off to Bluto’s swamp, knocking his hard-earned spinach into the marsh. That’s by the way the flower-planter boot she made way back in episode 13, Commotion in the Ocean. I don’t expect continuity beats in two-minute Popeye flash cartoons.
Anyway now Popeye thinks, what if he ate his spinach? He squirts a blob of that out of his backup spinach can, at the same time he squirts a blob of detergent into a pail of water. This had me so nervous I’m not even being funny. This week’s spinach-induced transformative body horror is a mop-hand, but that cleans up everything within five seconds. Olive Oyl sets out again. In the punch line, Eugene has another watermelon.
Like I said, it’s a good idea for a short. I don’t like how it came out, though. There’s a couple promising ideas here. Popeye trying to contain a mess and only making it worse would be good. Bluto scamming Popeye with fake cleaning advice would be good. Popeye trying to distract Olive Oyl away from a mess would be good. Even just Popeye trying to house-sit and that going all wrong would be good. The pieces are all introduced, but there’s no time for any of them to build, or to bounce off one another. There’s spot jokes that work well enough. There’s not any build in tension, though, or pacing. It’s an amiable short, but it just sort of putters along.
Also, Olive Oyl’s vacation dream was her lounging on the beach. She lives on the beach. Is that a joke? Is it the observation that nobody’s ever happy where they are? I’ll credit it as a joke. Part of me thinks they used “going to the beach” to signify a vacation and didn’t think about whether that would actually be a change of activity for Olive. That isn’t important, no, except in how I think it reflects the short not developing its storyline enough.
The most-read month I ever had around here was November 2015. This was at the height of the Apocalypse 3-G, when I was doing weekly updates on how nothing was happening in the comic, and even the Onion AV Club noticed, although not enough to mention my name. I got 4,528 page views from 2,308 people, many of whom just trusted the AV Club that I had something to read. I figured, well, that’s great. That’ll never happen again, though.
I’ve still not drawn the attention of AV Club, or any other significant blog reviewer. But I’m starting to believe I might someday reach that popularity peak on my own right. Or, at least, my own right with the assist of Roy Kassinger, who I think single-handedly added a thousand page views a month around here.
So that all brings me to the readership report for April 2019. Things had been on an uptick: February saw a weirdly low, for these days, 2,428 page views from 1,429 unique visitors. March saw a more normal-for-now 3,565 page views from 2,165 unique visitors. April?
So it turns out those little arrows on the far left and right of ‘Stats for April 2019’ will let you move the month under focus, including off to the left from the leftmost of the months. This is how I learned to get the larger ranges like I’m showing here.
That was 4,033 unique views — the first time I’ve been above four thousand page views — in a month since the AV Club mention. And from 2,418 unique visitors, beating the Apocalypse 3-G high. That’s astounding. That’s … the doing of Apartment 3-G, once again. A message board I never heard of before got to reminiscing about the comic strip, and how bad it got, and so I got mentioned. I’m never so successful as when comic strips are failing.
So that was popular. An average of 134 pages viewed per day, the greatest number since November 2015’s average of 151, only this with a smaller variance.
There were 233 things liked around here in April, up from March’s 176 and February’s 156. I think I was also helped by someone mentioning the Popeye pinball game fiasco, over in one of the big pinball web forums. But the number of comments fell: there were only ten around here all April. There had been 24 in March, and 34 in February. 10 is the fewest comments in a month here since May of 2017. And that’s weird. It’s hard for me to imagine, but the statistics pages are there: in December 2014 I got 138 comments in the month. I know sometimes WordPress has counted pingbacks, links from one blog entry to another, as comments. But still. I don’t link to myself that much, and nobody links to or reblogs me. (And not because I don’t like it. I love the attention! I think I just have the sort of writing that people don’t care to reblog.)
And for popular articles? Well, my conversion into a full-time chat-about-comic-strips blog may as well be complete. If I ever need some time off — and I’ve been thinking about it — I may just set everything but the weekly story comic update on repeat. But the things people wanted to read most:
For non-comic-strip stuff my most popular thing in April was Which Color Paas Tablet Is Purple? Which is Red? Which is Pink?. I knew this would be popular. I did not know Paas had changed the formula so you could put tablets into vinegar or not as you like so it doesn’t matter which is which so much.
So this map makes me wonder, what is my personal Pole of Inaccessibility, the point on the planet Earth farthest from any country that sent even a single reader to my blog in April? And this is why I am a humor blogger rather than a popular humor blogger.
66 countries sent me readers in April, down from March’s 69, and up from February’s 65. 16 of them were single-reader countries, compared to 14 in March and 15 in February. Here’s the full roster:
Country
Readers
United States
2,981
India
341
Canada
116
United Kingdom
87
Australia
67
Sweden
43
Brazil
34
Germany
29
France
22
Hong Kong SAR China
22
Italy
21
South Korea
21
Norway
15
Philippines
14
Spain
14
Netherlands
13
Denmark
12
Finland
12
Malaysia
12
Portugal
10
Singapore
10
Chile
9
Russia
9
United Arab Emirates
9
South Africa
8
Japan
7
Pakistan
7
Thailand
6
Ireland
5
Israel
5
Belgium
4
Indonesia
4
Mexico
4
New Zealand
4
South Sudan
4
Taiwan
4
Trinidad & Tobago
4
European Union
3
Nepal
3
Austria
2
Bangladesh
2
Colombia
2
Greece
2
Hungary
2
Jamaica
2
Jordan
2
Kenya
2
Montenegro
2
Poland
2
Turkey
2
Argentina
1
Bahrain
1
Bulgaria
1
Cameroon
1
Egypt
1
El Salvador
1
Estonia
1
Ghana
1
Isle of Man
1
Latvia
1
Mongolia
1
Nigeria
1
Romania
1
Saudi Arabia
1 (*)
Serbia
1 (***)
Sint Maarten
1
I’m happy to have readers from anywhere. I do feel like, for how much all my writing reeks of generic American white guy, it’s weird that I had so many readers from India and from Sweden this month. Finland, Norway, and Denmark too. Not intending any offense but is it possible the Scandinavian countries have mistaken me for someone else?
Saudi Arabia was a single-reader country in March. Serbia has been a single-reader country four months in a row now. Nowhere else has a streak like that going, though.
My plan for story strip recaps for the coming month — subject as ever to change for breaking news — is this:
All story strip recaps should appear at this link. If one doesn’t, it’s because I messed up a tag. Let me know and I’ll fix something.
From the start of the year through the start of May I’ve posted 120 things around here. That’s made for a total of 73,242 words. This implies I published 19,339 words in April, a bit more than the 18,577 of March. Hm. That’s slightly over 644 words per post, so that to date my average post is 610 words. That’s up from the start of April’s average of 599. So I need to work harder on those dumb little bits of wordplay for Wednesdays. Maybe I need to post more pictures alone.
I’ve gotten 166 total comments on the year, for an average 1.4 comments per posting. At the start of April it had been an average 1.6 comments per posting. 689 total likes, as of the start of May, for an average of 5.7 likes per posting. At the start of April it had been an average 5.5 likes per posting. Hm.
I start the month with a total of 2,280 posts, and 121,901 views from a supposed 67,592 unique visitors. 565 posts got at least one viewer at all in April. This seems like a large number, but I’ve only got the March 2019 data to compare it to. That month had 420 pages viewed by somebody.
And with all that said, I’d be glad to have you as a regular reader. You can do that by reading things off the RSS feed. Or if you want me to get data that I fail to analyze about what you read, use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button in the upper right corner of the page. And I’m also on Twitter as @Nebusj. If you’re not sure about that, I try to start each month with a pair of pictures of rabbits, eg:
Last week’s Popeye’s Island Adventures video included four more cartoons after the new one’s end. This week’s does too. I have a dreadful feeling that I’ve figured out why they do that. This week’s video had two advertisements prefixed to it. Short ones, the kinds that they promise end in six seconds, but still. Maybe a ten-minute video attracts advertising dollars that a two-minute, ten-second one can’t.
Well. I figure, as threatened before, to take next week to review an old Popeye cartoon, so that I have more than a day to watch and think about these shorts in future. For today, though, it’s Sports Day. This is surely not a tie-in to my anticipated recap of what’s going on in Gil Thorp, due Sunday.
I like this cartoon. It reuses the setup of A Kraken Good Race, Eugene setting up a contest to get Bluto and Popeye to stop bothering him. It’s a good setup, though, even if it does require the odd state that Eugene has to be the grown-up in the room. But having the animal be the responsible one has a nice comic logic, as long as Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Bluto are vaguely kids.
We start with Popeye and Olive Oyl playing basketball, and getting some good bounces against that sand. Eugene pours a can of spinach onto his plate, and then re-seals the can with confetti inside. That’s an interesting choice. It serves the storyline. It startles and even frightens Popeye after he opens the can. It leaves the spinach where Swee’Pea can get it for his innings. But why did Eugene do that? Had he already figured he would have to set up a Popeye-Bluto contest, and was readying a bit of chaos for that? The Jeep is a four-dimensional animal; it’s why he can answer questions about the future. But if he is using his foreknowledge, it’s underplayed to the point maybe nobody would know that’s what happened. Still, he has this sly look on his face when he does it. I guess he at least knew whatever happened would be funny.
Popeye and Bluto get into a basketball-throwing contest. When a stray basketball hits Eugene, he whips up an obstacle course. Bluto goes first, with some fun physical comedy. The soccer ball hits the goal, bounces off his head, and rolls through the net. Counts as a goal. He falls over the hurdles, over and over. He whacks himself with the putter, somehow knocking the golf ball in. He does put together a jigsaw puzzle of his crocodile friend. It gives another moment of that strange delight crocodiles give Young Bluto. I love that every time. And he runs back to the finish line.
Popeye’s turn, after he grabs the tampered spinach can. (And I notice Swee’Pea reading a pop-up book with a sea monster. That’s probably not a thematic reference to A Kraken Good Race. But I like sea monsters.) He kicks the soccer ball into the sea. He twirls around the hurdles. He hits the golf ball against a palm tree and back again to make a simple shot way more complicated. It’s honestly kind of bragging. Solving his jigsaw puzzle — a can of spinach — by slamming the backboard down is more fun. And then he opens his spinach for that burst of energy to run back to the finish line? Anyway, it’s confetti, that frightens him, and he runs back to beat Bluto’s time.
Swee’Pea insists on his own turn, and eats the plate of spinach for it. And that gets bigger, sillier stunts. Hitting the soccer ball hard enough to knock out the sun, a bit of exaggeration that wouldn’t be out of place in a Fleischer-era Popeye. He flies through the hurdles. He hits the golf ball hard enough it rebounds off an eagle before landing in the hole. And his jigsaw puzzle is of a pacifier. He vastly beats everyone’s time.
The cartoon’s structure is simple, which isn’t a bad thing. The build of absurd overachievement works. It should drain Bluto of menace that everything he does is so incompetent. But he’s also a kid in this series. It’s all right if he’s not a serious menace.
I liked the animation more this time around. It feels less rigid than usual. I trust it’s all being rendered by computer, but the unknown-to-us animators were better able to get characters to stretch and distort themselves, and move in funnier ways. Look at the way Popeye’s golf ball slides down the flagpole at about 1:33; there’s thought that went in to making that.
Eugene’s tail gets a lot of things to do, particularly serving as a starter pistol. I’m not sure how I feel about that. There’s something unsettling me in having the tip of his tail fly off and release a ‘BANG!’ flag. But that’s my hang-up, not something the cartoon has to answer for. I suppose it wouldn’t be Popeye’s Island Adventures without at least some touch of body horror.
This week’s Popeye’s Island Adventure has the title Plumbing Problems. It set my expectations high. Plumbing has been a really good theme for cartoons. Plumbing Is The Pipe, from 1938, was another of the masterful Fleischer-era Popeye cartoons. Famous Studios did one as Floor Flusher, in 1954, and that was pretty solid despite the layer of general boredom that settled on Popeye cartoons of that era. When King Features cranked out 286,000 shorts in twelve minutes in the early 60s, one of them was Plumbers Pipe Dream and while I can’t call that one good, it is certainly deeply weird and unpredictable and thus interesting. I may do a separate review of just that carton because it is so … so … very much itself.
So how was Plumbing Problems?
I didn’t like this one. I mean, not so much as I liked Popeye the Painter. Nor some of the other plumbing cartoons. The storyline seems too scattershot for me. What I think gives most plumbing cartoons their comic energy is how they normally have this nice, built-in ratcheting of comic tension. Water is coming, and then more water is coming, and everything done to stop the water makes the problem worse, until things get truly dire. I don’t insist that all jokes can be explained as releases of tension. But there are many jokes which do work that way, so this is a good platform to build on.
It’s a competent start: Olive Oyl tries to make tea, but there’s no water. Leaks appear all over her house. Popeye tries plugging them up, first with an umbrella. I liked the umbrella handle spewing water; that’s a good bit. Olive Oyl and Popeye take miscellaneous objects, a lot of them clam shells, to stuff into the leaks, which works for the moment that comic timing requires. The sink becomes a geyser, and Olive tries to make emergency repairs. This fits in line with her Island Adventures characterization as a tinkerer.
Popeye hands Olive Oyl a heap of miscellaneous things. After stuffing them all in the drain, the leak’s stopped for a moment. It doesn’t last, which says exciting things about Olive Oyl’s water pressure. The geyser returns, shooting all this kitchen stuff into the air.
And here — 59 seconds in — Bluto finally enters the short. He’s minding his own business, a nice change of pace for the villain. He’s startled by the fork landing in front of him, and cringes when he sees Olive Oyl’s kitchen flying toward him. The dining table, chairs, plates, and candlestick land in perfect shape, another good bit of business. And that’s ended well with Olive’s flower-in-a-shoe landing in Bluto’s face. And Bluto gets an idea.
So Bluto presents himself as a plumber. His fee: a can of spinach. This fits a long history of Bluto being smart enough to understand the importance of spinach, but not smart enough to just buy it himself. (Although since we’ve seen Popeye canning his own spinach maybe there isn’t an island grocery.) And this gives Popeye the idea of trying to use spinach to fix the leaks. This fits a long history of Popeye not just eating spinach early enough to head off his problems. Stuffing some spinach into the drain, for a wonder, doesn’t work. But it does give Bluto the chance to swipe the rest of Popeye’s spinach. I credit the cartoon for subverting my expectations. But: is this all that funny? It makes sense Bluto would use an opportunity like this to make mischief. It makes sense Bluto would try stealing spinach. But this means he’s skipping out on the main plot tension of the water in order to swipe spinach. I don’t think the short has enough time — two minutes, fifteen seconds — to make that change of plot focus work.
Popeye and Olive Oyl realize Bluto’s trick. Popeye eats his remaining can of spinach and turns into … I’m not sure. He looks a little like your classic Von Braun Man-Will-Conquer-Space-Soon style rocket. Or maybe an anchor? Neither quite makes sense, since he uses the geyser from the sink to launch into the air. Popeye grabs a windsock, and wraps up Bluto before he’s gotten all that far. Seems like Popeye could probably have caught him by running, too, although then where would the windsock have come from? The water floods out of Olive’s house, and Popeye has the idea to replace all the leaking pipes with empty spinach cans. This works right up until Olive Oyl tests it, when instead of water, spinach pours out of the faucets. This is what happens when you pay attention to your own needs more than those of the friend you’re doing the work for.
So none of these are bad ideas. But the short feels episodic, a bunch of good starting points for jokes. The storyline felt scattershot, as if the writer couldn’t think of a funny thing to do with Olive’s house leaking. Or a funny reason for it to have started leaking. It’s among the weaker of these cartoons.
I like starting months with a look at how popular my humor blog is, since I like to think it is. And I like sharing that with my readers, as part of my plan to keep myself from being too popular. I joke, which is a good sign. As best I can tell, these review posts are at least as popular as everything else I write. I’ll have to just make up a “monthly” review like this sometime when I’m out of ideas.
If you do like my writings, I’m glad to have you as a reader. You can get these pieces to appear in your WordPress reader by using the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button in the upper right corner of the page. Or you can use the RSS feed to get all the page’s content without being tracked. I’m also on Twitter as @Nebusj, for those of you who like being tracked. Now on to how many of you did get tracked in March.
So it turns out if I hack the URL for the statistics page, changing the ‘startDate’ parameter, I can get an equivalent chart like this for like four and a half years’ worth of months in one page view. Now I’ll need a new excuse for not remembering how to do this a month from now.
It was a well-read month. I credit this to all of March’s comic strip news. People have found I know more about Gasoline Alley than normal mortals do. But here we go. There were 3,565 page views in March 2019. That’s far more than in February, when only 2,428 pages got attention here. And it’s even better than January, when 3,343 pages got viewed. March had my greatest number of page views since April of 2018.
The unique visitor count was astounding, though. There were 2,165 unique visitors, says WordPress. That’s well above February’s 1,429, or January’s 1,830. Indeed, it’s more than any single month in 2018. That is not quite at my all-time record high — the 2,308 unique visitors from November 2015, the final collapse of Apartment 3-G. Also this month I figured out how to get visual representation of more than the last two years’ worth of readership statistics. I might even remember for the start of next month.
There were 176 likes given to various pages here in March. That’s better than February’s 156, in line with January’s 183, and really back to the 165-to-180 range that I was in most of 2018. So that all seems good. Where things did drop was in comments. There were 24 comments given around here in march, down from February’s 34 and January’s 70. It was the slowest month for chatting around here since October 2017. Hm.
I always say that what people want around here is comic strip news. Here’s the five most popular articles from March. They are so much comic strip news. If I were smart, I’d just do comic strip talk, but I keep going on trying to do at least some original writing too. It’s hard resisting what your audience is making clear are your strengths, but I’ll do it. The top articles in March:
What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird? I’m surprised seeing this. It’s been almost a year now, and the new Nancy has become the darling of an enthusiastic set of Internet comic strip readers. I would’ve thought the word had gotten out
What’s Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? Which was my first-ever plot recap for this comic strip. It goes back to when Peter Parker was facing down Ronan the Accuser and Rocket Raccoon.
Of stuff that isn’t just me writing about other things? The most popular piece I had was Statistics Saturday: The Months Of The Year In Reverse Alphabetical Order. I don’t know. It’s always the weird little trifles that get to be long-lasting. I have the fear someone’s taking this list seriously. I mean, it’s correct, if you figured out the joke, but I don’t say what the joke is so are people understanding that the order is not what any normal person would mean by “reverse alphabetical order”? It was my most popular non-comic-strip piece last month too.
The most popular long-form piece that I wrote and that wasn’t about other people’s work was Everything There Is To Say About Grinding Coffee Beans. I’m glad to offer something of use into the world. We have gotten a replacement for our broken coffee grinder. I hope this settles the rampant speculation about why I had this essay to share.
Also if WordPress has this right, there were 420 separate pages that got at least a single view this month. Huh. I never thought to look at this figure before, so I don’t know whether it’s representative. I’ve had 2,250 posts in total, as of the start of April, for what that’s worth.
There were — all right, a certain number of you are going to think I’m making this up. There were 69 countries sending me page views in March. There, yes. I swear I didn’t make up these numbers and I’ll share the raw data with anyone who wants to look them over. I admit to telling hack jokes sometimes, but not like that.
Again, I don’t find it mysterious that Africa for the most part doesn’t care what I’m writing about Mary Worth. I’m honestly more curious that Nigeria shows any interest in my writing. And, like, Bangladesh? I worry that whatever my Bangladesh readers were looking for, they got to this page by accident. I hope it wasn’t anything important they wanted.
Anyway, here’s the countries roster.
Country
Readers
United States
2,646
India
147
Canada
100
United Kingdom
98
Australia
85
Brazil
42
Hong Kong SAR China
41
Spain
38
Philippines
35
Norway
32
Germany
25
Sweden
20
Italy
18
Mexico
15
Belgium
14
Turkey
14
France
12
Denmark
11
Argentina
9
Finland
9
South Africa
8
Japan
7
United Arab Emirates
7
American Samoa
6
Ireland
6
Malaysia
6
New Zealand
6
Peru
6
Taiwan
6
Trinidad & Tobago
6
Netherlands
5
South Korea
5
Indonesia
4
Portugal
4
Singapore
4
Switzerland
4
Thailand
4
Dominican Republic
3
Guatemala
3
Iraq
3
Jamaica
3
Nepal
3
Nigeria
3
Puerto Rico
3
Romania
3
Russia
3
Ukraine
3
Bangladesh
2
Greece
2
Israel
2
Mongolia
2
Pakistan
2
Poland
2
Uruguay
2
Vietnam
2
Bermuda
1
Bolivia
1
Bulgaria
1
Colombia
1
Cyprus
1
Czech Republic
1
European Union
1
Honduras
1
Hungary
1 (*)
Lebanon
1
Lithuania
1
Saudi Arabia
1
Serbia
1 (**)
Slovenia
1 (*)
Anyway there were 65 countries sending readers in February and 68 in January. There were 19 single-reader countries in January, 15 in February, and 14 in March. Hungary and Slovenia were single-reader countries last month, and Serbia has been one for three months running now.
I should share my story strip plot recap schedule. This is subject to change if a comic strip has some big event, and I realize I need to hurry up writing about it while people still want to know anything about, say, Judge Parker. But my planned schedule is:
And all my story strip plot recaps should appear at this link. If one’s missing, it’s because I tagged something wrong.
In all I posted 18,577 words here in March. This brought me, as mentioned, to a total of 2,250 posts. There were 117,868 page views from a total 65,179 unique visitors as of the start of April. There’ve been 141 total comments, for an average of 1.6 comments per post, in 2019. That’s holding at the start of March’s average. There’ve been 491 likes in total, for an average of 5.5 likes per posting. That, too, is the same as the start of March’s average. I’ve posted a total of 90 things in 2019 up to this post, and 53,903 words in total. That’s an average of 599 words per post, which is exactly what my average words-per-post was at the start of March. So it’s lucky I posted that thing meant to bring my average-words-per-post count down. Also but goodness six hundred words is a lot to write on the average day. I should be more careful. 1,423 words.
I admit I don’t have strong memories of the comic. I remember encountering it in the 90s. It was one of the many comics printed in Strips, a weekly newspaper featuring just what you’d think. The newspaper was great, in those days, for finding comic strips that just weren’t in any local newspaper, like Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack and Safe Havens, or Bobby London’s Popeye, or even the Pogo revival. And Ryan’s Tumbleweeds was there. It stood out mostly for typography: it had computer-lettered word balloons. It would stand out today still, when many comic strips use computer lettering. Instead of a typeface that looked like hand-lettering, Ryan used … well, I thought it was Monaco, but looking at examples on the official Tumbleweeds web site indicate he used different typefaces at different times. And, early on, hand-lettered things. I don’t know when the shift, or why, although the advantages of typing your word balloons are obvious.
But I don’t have strong memories of the characters or the jokes or such. It was one of your situation strips, of a kind with B.C., The Wizard of Id, and Hagar the Horrible. Here the setting was the Old West, with the characters the hapless Army post, the hapless Poohawk tribe, the hapless cowboys, the hapless townsfolk. There weren’t running storylines, as far as I could tell, just jokes between the spoof-of-Western-tropes characters. The strip began in 1965, and ran until the end of 2007. According to Wikipedia, Filmation tried to animate it for their Fabulous Funnies series, and after the first episode aired learned they didn’t have the rights to the comic. It got adapted into a Las Vegas stage show at some point, apparently, and also made into a musical comedy for high school drama programs in need of such, by the same company that made the Luann musical. And, famously, Jim Davis worked as an assistant for several years, before realizing his own comic strip might get picked up if he dropped the gnat and worked with a cat character instead.
In honesty, I get the comic strip mixed up in my head with Gordon Bess’s Redeye, another spoof-Western comic strip that itself started in 1967 and ran until the middle of 2008. Comics Kingdom is rerunning that, under their Vintage strips feature. If asked to choose I’d prefer Redeye. But it’s not a fair comparison. Nearly all the Tumbleweeds strips I’ve seen are from the last decade of its run. A gag-a-day strip like that tends to wear out its best material a few years after its last successful new character joins the cast. The Redeye that I’ve seen is a new comic strip in its exploratory phase.
So, allowing that I would call Tumbleweeds a comic strip that, at most, exists, why mention Ryan’s passing at all? In part, I guess, because it’s amazing anyone ever gets a comic strip made, much less one that runs four decades. And I have a friend who absolutely loves the comic strip, and takes offense when I admit I mix it up with the inferior(?) Redeye. The friend asked me, before the news of Ryan’s death came out, if I knew why the comics on the charmingly 1998-styled official web site weren’t being updated. So, well, it’s not my thing, but I’m glad there are people who had this thing, while it lasted.
So, something the Popeye’s Island Adventure people declared when the series started and that hasn’t come up before. It’s part of their declaration about how this series is different from earlier Popeye cartoons.
The show combines the original squash and stretch animation style with a fresh update on the original characters and storyline. The new Popeye has a youthful appearance and more eco-friendly position, growing spinach on the roof of his dieselpunk style houseboat and collecting rain water in barrels.
I do not know what deiselpunk is but I can confidently say no, Popeye is not deiselpunk. I can say I am more deiselpunk, and please consider, I spent much of yesterday rewinding and listening again more carefully to a podcast explaining the historical reasons, connected to pronunciation shifts, regarding why the letter ‘c’ is used to represent both the soft-s and hard-k sounds. The claim that this is a more eco-friendly Popeye, though? That … hasn’t really played into any of the cartoons. And then came this week’s cartoon, Commotion in the Ocean.
So. This, yes, has almost nothing discernable to do with Python Anghelo’s incredible and bonkers concept document for the Popeye pinball game of the 1990s. It starts with Bluto surrounded by mounds of garbage. I’m not sure why Bluto is always assumed to be a garbage lord like this. I suppose it’s the thought that you have to be a bad person to litter, so therefore a really bad person is surrounded by a lot of garbage. Which is all right until you consider what signal that sends people who aren’t able to clean as much as they “ought”. We mock the messy and the cluttered and the hoarders; is that decent?
Anyway, Bluto’s sick of the mess in his submarine, and gets to cleaning it. His preferred method: shooting it out his gun barrel. Silly; he should be doing this responsibly, by putting it in a landfill, which is a societally-approved heap of garbage we put on top of the wetlands that would otherwise be keeping the planet alive. Bluto gets away with it until he lands a heap of trash on Popeye and Olive Oyl’s boat. Popeye was pulling some traditional fishing garbage — a metal bin, a funnel — out of the water before that. I’m not clear whether that was supposed to be from earlier Bluto trash bombs, or just Popeye’s bad luck. I’m also surprised he didn’t pull up a boot or old inner tube. But pulling up a funnel and a metal box was probably necessary. It foreshadows the end of the cartoon.
Popeye and Olive Oyl are able to track down who’s responsible for the trash by looking at some of the underwear in it. It’s got Bluto’s face on it. There are several questions this raises. First is why Popeye and Olive Oyl had to wait until we, the audience, could see Bluto’s face-underwear before reacting to it. They’d seen it when the under-face was looking at them, away from us. Also, granted, these shorts are trying to be language-neutral. Is this plot point best established by face-underwear? Also, so, when Bluto wears his face-underwear, which way is his face looking? I feel like these questions are a little unfair, but would the target audience for this cartoon ask different questions?
They spot the source fast enough anyway, with a cute throwaway joke of Popeye looking through a Pringles tube. After a couple more loads of garbage Popeye sees a corked bottle, giving him an idea: try eating spinach. This week the amazing transformation is to fuse his legs together to cork up Bluto’s gun barrel. This change doesn’t seem weird the way the sponge thing last week did. Blocking a gun barrel by jamming yourself in it seems like a common enough cartoon logic, so this feels justified to me. Olive Oyl holding up a judge’s ’10’ sign at Popeye’s hopping around is a cute bit too.
Olive Oyl remembers the funnel from earlier, and they set up … I guess the destroyed gun barrel? … as funnel into Bluto’s submarine, tossing trash back into that. Bluto shrugs and starts sorting out his recyclables. Which is fine for his glass and metal cans and all. I don’t know what recycling bin heaps of brownish-green goop go in.
All these cartoons feel abbreviated. This one particularly so, though. The premise is fine enough. It’s just there’s no real conflict. Bluto throws garbage into the lagoon, Popeye throws it back on him. Couldn’t there be at least one change of fortune along the way? But then I want contradictory things, too. This short avoided the frantic pace that the series has fallen prey to so often. Scenes were well-established, and there was plenty of time to see and understand the action. And the short does well showing off something that inspires a character’s specific ideas. Bluto smashing against the porthole after his first stoppered gun-blast is well-delivered, too.
![[ Back to GRIFFY, on his quest --- he enters the MARY WORTH strip! ] Jeff, on the phone: 'What should I do? There's this oddly drawn guy here, looking for a missing girl!' Griffy: 'I need so see Mary!' [ Soon ] Griffy: 'Morning, Ms worth! I'm from th' Zippy comic! Can we talk?' Mary Worth: 'Young man, you need help, all right. Th'kind only a MENTAL HEALTH professional can provide!' (Griffy, thinking) 'Uh-oh! I'm frozen in place and unable to speak under th'withering gaze of Mary Worth!!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/bill-griffith_zippy-the-pinhead_19-august-2018.gif)
