60s Popeye: Bottom Gun, containing one (1) more Old West cartoon

So stop me if you’ve heard this one. It’s a 1960 Jack Kinney-produced cartoon, with a story by Raymond Jacobs. And it’s got Popeye and all in the Old West, Popeye facing down a gunslinger played by Brutus. You’re wrong. This is not Pest of the Pecos. This cartoon has animation direction by Rudy Larriva, instead of Harvey Toombs. Let’s see what a difference that makes. Here’s Bottom Gun.

My recent experience with Raymond Jacobs-penned shorts set me up to expect a sloppy cartoon. Not only that the story might not quite hang together. A lot of the King Features Popeye shorts lack story logic. I mean, like, the weird edits and scenes held a bit too long to make sense. Not so, though. This is much closer in spirit to Pest of the Pecos. So much closer it even copies the joke about Wimpy being the undertaker, and offering a lay-away plan.

This time around, Popeye isn’t the marshall. He’s a chicken farmer. And Brutus the Kid isn’t a particularly wanted desperado, although he is a notorious gunslinger. He’s also hitting on Olive Oyl, who hits back, with sacks of sugar. Popeye challenges him to a duel, but sets up a surprise. A cheat, if we’re honest: he pours enough molasses into Brutus’s holster that there’s no getting the gun out. Great credit to Popeye for thinking his way out of danger, This generates a lot of funny scenes, too, as Brutus fails to get his gun out. He eventually rips off his pants and gets himself knocked out.

Brutus looks to the camera, dazed and baffled. He’s pulled his pants off and stands with his long shirt draped over his stocking-clad legs.

Thing is, especially with Popeye shooting all the time, it gets to feeling unfair. It makes Brutus hapless, in much the way Marshall Popeye was in Pest of the Pecos. It’s hard not to sympathize with Brutus, who doesn’t get to look dangerous. (Granted, since Popeye takes about 800 shots without most of them even appearing on-screen, he’s not dangerous either.) When Brutus comes back, furious at his humiliation, it’s hard not to sympathize.

Sometimes I feel I write these looking for things to call “wrong”. Here’s a story that sets out a decent premise. It carries the story forward sensibly. It’s got a big center piece showdown with two solid joke setups. Popeye and Brutus stepping toward each other and then missing one another, with Popeye falling into a puddle, is great. The long sequence of Brutus trying every possible way to get his gun out is good too. And here I am sulking that the moral balance of the cartoon feels off. Still, Brutus deserves to be beaten, but he needs to be a bigger threat first.

My Excuse For Today, Which Is A Different Day

Again I’m sorry, and I should know better, and I think on some level I do kind of know better. But I’m just all upset about this week’s Inspector Danger’s Crime Quiz because once again Werner Wejp-Olsen has come up with a minute bit of crime detection that I just can’t buy and this is far more important than everything else on my plate right now, including whether I actually finish a project for work. And at the risk of bringing the productivity of all of you to a screeching, crashing halt, I want you to see the strip and agree with me strongly that this is just daft.

Werner Wejp-Olsen’s Inspector Danger’s Crime Quiz for the 12th of February, 2018. Watch, in five months Wejp-Olsen’s going to rerun this strip, only it’s going to turn out the guy is innocent because the second appearance is by the guy’s identical-except-for-being-lefthanded twin, trying to frame him, and somehow being lefthanded makes you put belts on the wrong way around. Which I’ve never noticed someone doing, but would be willing to accept as a thing that a human being might possibly do under some circumstance, unlike this.

And I’m sorry, no, I will not accept that somebody just happens to put his belt on the wrong way. No. That is not how belts work. I may have many legitimate questions about how belts can work, but this is not one that is in dispute. OK, they’re not legitimate questions I have; they’re more one little bit of nonsense that you could confuse a child with but not someone who’s looked at his or her pants.

(OK, here. Friction can’t make something cling vertically. But if someone’s standing up, their pants are clinging vertically to their body. And I majored in physics as an undergraduate and nobody addressed this nonsense contradiction, which is at least as big as the how-can-bumblebees-fly nonsense.)

In short, I do not see how anyone can be expected to get anything done when the comics are sharing lies about pants.

Why I’m Stuck Again At The Meijer’s Check-Out Lane

So there’s been some progress and I found some acceptable cargo pants at Meijer’s. And now I have to work out whether I had an “extremely” satisfying shopping experience. I have no conceptual theory for what makes an extremely satisfying pants-buying experience. I have some ideas of things that make for an unsatisfying pants-buying experience. I’m a little unhappy that I had to ask someone to unlock the dressing room, but that’s just because I don’t want to bother the person whose job it is to unlock the dressing room by asking for dressing-room-unlocking services.

But that’s not truly unsatisfying, the way I’d be unsatisfied if, say, a pair of test-fit pants turned out to have legs full of angry worms. I don’t know why the worms are there. Maybe they wanted to simulate the leg experience. Or if I took the pants off the rack and was immediately tackled by The Number 23-era Jim Carrey. Maybe if I went to buy them and got caught in a spotlight while buses full of everyone I knew in middle school came by to point and laugh at me.

But “extremely” satisfying has to be more than just “nothing unpleasant happens”. I need something more. I don’t know what. I’m stuck on what that would need. My attempts to think of an “extremely” satisfying pants-buying experience keep failing. Like, suppose I tried on a pair of pants and found a $20 in the pocket? Great, right? Except then I can’t just ignore the fact that some stranger wore these pants before me and they weren’t even washed or anything. Or else someone didn’t put these pants on and is just shoving money into the pockets of un-used pants. Why would someone do that? What’s their angle?

The people behind me in lane 14 are getting tired of my dithering. Please send help. Also, companies, please stop trying to be personal. It’s not working out like you want.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index rose five points as a high-pressure system moved out, which goes to support the hypothesis that people knew what they were doing yesterday when they blamed the five-point drop on the high-pressure system. It’s nice that something would work out like that.

120

Why I’m Still Stuck At The Meijer’s Check-Out Lane

The card reader wants to know if I had an extremely satisfying shopping experience? What would an extremely satisfying shopping experience be? I was just there to pick up a prescription and some toothpaste. I can imagine ways that this would be unsatisfying, like if I picked up a tube of Crest and it burst into fire, but that didn’t happen. Surely an extremely satisfying trip requires more than just toothpaste not combusting? Does toothpaste even catch on fire? If not, could you use it to put out a fire? Why? It would have to be an extremely small fire and in that case couldn’t you just spray, like, mouthwash on it instead? Would that work? How does that help me figure out whether I’m “extremely” satisfied? I guess I didn’t find a new pair of cargo pants, but then I didn’t figure I was going to either. I just checked in case they had some. I have a lot of stuff I can’t do without having in my pants, such as my legs, quarters for pinball, and my iPod Touch. Cargo pants are good ways to satisfy those needs, since there’s more pockets than there are things to put in them. But if I didn’t get something I didn’t really expect to get am I satisfied? Anyway, someone please go to the soup aisle, get a can of lentil, bring it to the microwave aisle, warm it up, and bring it to me at the checkout lane. Thank you.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose nearly nine points as investigators concluded that yes, all the clocks in the house are on the right time now and that yeah, the one in the guest bedroom did spend all winter on Daylight Saving Time after all and it didn’t bother anybody, just like Mike said it would.

136

Not A Put On

I understand the metaphorical value in talking about someone putting their pants on one leg at a time. I’m just not into that myself. I know how people work. If you put on pants one leg at a time they’re most often going to prefer one leg or the other. And that means there’s going to be one leg that gets pants put on first way more than the other leg does. The imbalance! No. No, can not have that and that’s why I say pants should be put on by sitting on some convenient surface and drawing them both up together at the same time. It’s the only rational way.

Thank you. This has been a message meant to surprise absolutely nobody who has ever met me, ever.

Still not reading about the history of socks.

Safety Pants

I bought a new pair of pants because … well, I’m not sure that actually needs justification. It seems like the fact of the purchase explains the reasoning behind it perfectly well: “I needed some new pants because somehow I don’t have quite enough to go a whole week without laundering them, even though I haven’t thrown any out or given any away and they’re all in good working order so I don’t know.”

Anyway, I bought a pair of the kinds of pants which are right for me, which is to say, cargo pants which come folded with such severely sharp creases they emphasize how much I dress like a Lego character. And I noticed one of the nearly four labels I had to remove (which isn’t an unreasonable number of labels, considering) before successfully wearing it in a non-test circumstance was a tag mentioning “Meets CPSC Safety Requirements”.

Of course like you I’m amused by the thought that someone checked that this pants design had proper safety railings and no unnecessarily exposed spinning metal blades, but what got me is this: somewhere out there is a person whose job is “overseeing cargo-pants safety guidelines”. And that person either grew up wanting to be a cargo-pants safety guideline overseer, or is someone whose career led there. Either way is a staggering thought.

Pants Check

Sometimes I even remember to check the “suspect” comments WordPress catches because they can’t figure whether it’s a legitimate comment or not and want me to approve it. Here’s one that delighted me:

they’re already imitation pants

You can see why WordPress’s software wasn’t sure about the comment, since I think we all have at least three people among our friends who’re here to warn us about their being imitation pants already, as opposed to when we had expected on the original time-table for their imitation pants status to be fully completed. And yet I’m sincerely grateful that WordPress didn’t just junk the comment on its own, because … well, goodness, who wouldn’t want to get that warning directly, even if it is just meant to sell me something which I assume to be a device which identifies what people around me are actually imitation pants.

Singing the Praises of Pants

I admire the work that the mighty Land’s End Catalogue Company has put into finding ways to sell me pants. It’s been mostly sending me catalogues showing that there are pants, leaving it to me to conclude that I could if I so wished buy them, but I admit I don’t have many better ideas. If they tried, say, chasing me down and holding pants up to me so I could kind of see how they’d look on me if I were flat, that wouldn’t entice me to buy more. This is why I’m not an important pants marketer. I presume they want me to wear them, but they should know that once I’ve bought them, the pants are wholly my concern and it’s none of their affair what I do with them.