What’s Going On In Olive and Popeye? Who’s the guy capturing Popeye in a bubble? September – December 2023

Don’t know yet. Popeye and his gang arrived on an island, in search of Plaidfoot’s Treasure. The party’s arrival was noticed by the robots serving some mysterious, not-yet-seen figure. We haven’t seen their face or an obvious gimmick. It’s not just my lack here; from the comments others haven’t reached a consensus. The Grand Archivist is the only guess people have and this doesn’t feel like his vibe to me. And, we’ve seen, Randy Milholland is willing to draw on the entire roster of every Popeye villain ever in the comic strip, cartoons, or old time radio for his appearances. We’ll see.

So this should catch you up to early December 2023 in Emi Burdge and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye. If you’re reading this after March 2024 there’s likely a more up-to-date plot recap here. You’ll also find all my recaps of the various Olive And Popeye strips there, as I try to become the world’s premiere Popeye blogger against maybe competition? Enjoy, please.

Olive and Popeye.

12 September – 5 December 2023.

Last time you’ll recall, Olive Oyl has decided to help the ghosts she now sees all over the world. It turns out there are a lot of ghosts around Sweethaven. And we spend a good bit of time chatting with ones who mostly met their ends in ridiculous ways.

This coincides with a series of the Olive strips drawn by Ryan Milholland. Milholland’s been drawing the Thursday, Popeye-focused strips, as well as the Sunday strips for Thimble Theatre Presents Popeye. But for the gap between Shadia Amin leaving — in late August, with Olive and company declaring they’re going on an adventure — and Emi Burdge taking over in early October Milholland drew both sides of the strip. (I don’t know how far ahead the scripts were written, or how they were coordinated during the transition.)

Emi Burdge’s Olive and Popeye for the 14th of November, 2023. I agree, this sure seems like it’s got to be Charon they’re talking about, and the character acknowledge as much today. But is it? … Probably something sillier than that. Does it have any link to Popeye and his adventure and the mysterious figure there? I don’t know. Seems imaginable, but I’m not sure how.

From talking with the many, many, many ghosts wanting her attention Olive finds a mystery: the “old boatman” who’d escort them to the other side has disappeared. And the ghosts are desperate. Also, Olive’s desperate for a night’s sleep. One sympathizes. Also along the way we the readers learn that Cylinda Oyl can see and talk to ghosts, something that Mae can’t. That or she’s just saying that every now and then and got lucky.

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Meanwhile on Popeye’s side of things. He and his fathers — Poopdeck Pappy and Whaler Joe — meet up with Pommy. Sir Pomeroy, 10th Earl of Vauxhall, I’m told by the Popeye wikia was a regular adventure partner back in the 1950s, when Ralph Stein wrote Thimble Theatre. He’s new to me too. Pommy’s investigating, first, a town rampaged by some kind of thing. Also the map to Plaidfoot’s Treasure. Plaidfoot the Pirate said it was a treasure sacred to a race of easily-fooled monsters he swiped it from.

So here’s where they’re noticed by that shadowy figure mentioned above. The figure knows who Popeye is and that he’ll ruin everything. Also the figure has Professor O G Wotasnozzle in captivity. And some of Wotasnozzle’s rather cute robots serving him. The figure sends the robots, who’ve captured Popeye in a bubble. And that’s where we stand, this week.

Next Week!

Journey through time, space, and history-warping insects with Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop … unless something happens to change the timeline and the schedule!

Reviewing _Popeye and Son_, Episode 4: The Lost Treasure of Pirate’s Cove

Are you still interested in my journey through the 1987 series Popeye and Son? You can see all my reviews of the series here. Today’s episode, the second cartoon of episode four, is The Lost Treasure of Pirate’s Cove. Its writing is credited to Eric Lewald, whom we know for bringing us The Sea Monster. And what’s he giving us now?

The Plot: Junior and his friends take an unsupervised afternoon to go shallow-sea diving in search of buried treasure. Despite mishaps including being carried off in a giant fish’s mouth, they find a sunken ship with a treasure chest. Ah, but Tank and his friends, pretending to be ghosts, steal the treasure chest — only for real actual pirate ghosts to help Junior get some spinach, rescue his friends, and get back home, never suspecting that the real treasure is the cabin full of gold coins he passed along the way.

So for the first time (to my knowledge) we have a story just with Junior and his generation. Popeye and Olive go off to tea, and to tease me with the prospect of seeing her parents. Maybe they turn up in another episode; I imagine the writers were encouraged to use whatever minor characters they felt like. It’s a good excuse to let Junior drive the story, which turns into what at least some Internet corners call a “Kids on Bikes” movie. In eleven minutes.

Most of the action is drifting between underwater jokes. That’s in a good tradition of sunken-treasure cartoons, including in the Popeye universe. The scene of the fish playing baseball was included in the teaser before the opening credits, and it had me wondering what kind of pun was being demonstrated. Was there a ”batfish” I never heard of? A ”basefish”? No, turns out it’s just a school of fish at recess. It’s a corner of the joke I haven’t seen before, will credit that. If it doesn’t work for you, that’s your business. Junior talking a couple eels into becoming an electric light is a solid one, and would be right in line with the 1930s version of this cartoon. It’s undercut only by the animation not making the setting dark enough before and bright enough after.

Oh hey, some fans of the Marlins.

The story is almost written from the moment you know the premise. The big uncertainty to me was whether it would turn out the map was some prank (by Popeye, maybe, or perhaps a promotion for Pirate Cereal or something) or accidentally sincere. I guess it’s a good thing I wasn’t sure until Tank and his friends, whose names I still don’t have, turned up as ghosts. From that, with the time remaining in the episode, I knew there had to be at least one real ghost. So the story didn’t have great surprises, but it was amiable enough and the jokes along the way were fair enough.

Where I’m dissatisfied is in characterization. I continue to have no idea who these people are. The one thing that’s certain is that Popeye Junior does not like spinach but eats it anyway, which is why he makes this little ‘yuck’ noise after eating it. It’s an obvious but workable way to distinguish Junior from Popeye. But since they never talk about it, and it never even slows Junior down from his spinach power-up, it doesn’t affect anything. Tank hasn’t even got that to distinguish him from Bluto, and then there’s five other characters before the Pirate Ghosts come up. Granting the Pirate Ghosts don’t need personalities. But why stuff the cartoon so full of characters and not give them a verbal hook?

Since I mentioned the cartoon undercutting the electric light eels by not being shaded enough let me complain about animation some. Any given still of the cartoon is fine; Hanna-Barbera of this era had enough time to design characters and draw them right. But the motion is sloppy, and has been throughout the series. The fun in seeing some feat of ability, like Junior tossing the ship up and having it land back where it was, is seeing the movement come together. Seeing the ship slide off to the right and then drop into place from the left is unsatisfying. Every episode so far has had something like this. I understand they’re working with limited time and budget to plan out complex movement, and you can’t write cartoons where no interesting movement happens. But animation where the stunts match what the story wants them to be would bump the cartoon up a full letter grade.

60s Popeye: Deserted Desert (could use a few fewer people)

We’re back to Jack Kinney here. Kinney gets credit for the story as well as production. Animation direction’s credited to Eric Cleworth and Bill Keil. So here’s 1960’s Deserted Desert.

The easy joke is that these shorts had eight bars of music and had to make them last. In truth, yeah, they had libraries and not much time or money to go outside that. I have the feeling each of the studios had their own music libraries. What starts me thinking about that is how this short starts with a peppy, anxious background music. This for Popeye driving alone in the desert. He crashes into the one tree soon enough, but the music feels like a bad fit for the scene. The have more laid-back music. It’s used for Popeye walking in the hot sun, or even when he’s grabbed by a vulture for some reason. Was the tense music opening a mistake?

This cartoon’s got a very slight plot. Popeye’s in search of the Lost Dutchman Mine, and he has a bunch of mishaps on the way there. Really he endures everything but a flash flood and JJ Looper holding a gun on him. It’s one of the rare cartoons where Popeye is mostly on his own. Brutus doesn’t show up until almost four minutes into a five-and-a-half minute cartoon. Olive Oyl and Wimpy appear for the tag. In the main, this is Popeye battling nature. The vulture, the extreme heat of the desert day and cold of the desert night. Oases.

The exception is the population of the ghost town. We don’t get to see the ghosts as characters, though. They’re strange outline figures making weird noises, in a scene that looks like it was fun to storyboard. The ghosts are usually out-of-focus outlines slid past the camera, but that’s some merry action. Popeye tires of this fast enough and punches them. It’s a fun gag. The superfan remembers that ghosts are the rare thing Popeye actually fears, because he can’t punch them. But the superfan also admits the comic strip has probably retconned that long, long ago. And Popeye just ploughing through troubles has a compelling logic to it, too.

This bit with Popeye using a rock as a pillow reminds me of a Hagar the Horrible that I read somewhere around 1980 . Hagar and Lucky Eddie are settling down in camp for the night. Lucky Eddie gets a rock because he just can’t sleep without a pillow. Hagar calls this being a ‘softie’. The paradox enchanted my young mind and apparently I’m still captivated. I’m not surprised the joke was done before Hagar. Just delighted it could be done by Popeye.

I’m a bit disappointed when Brutus enters. Popeye lurching ahead through the elements, and muttering to himself, is interesting enough. And the cartoon makes time for some fun animation. There’s the blurry outline ghosts doing their bits. There’s Popeye tossing a rock to break the Sun, and muttering, “Uh-oh, now I went and did it.” There’s also Popeye’s shoes opening their maws and barking, after Popeye says how the sand ‘makes me dogs start barking’. It’s a throwback to 1930s cartoons where idioms get drawn literally.

Brutus, in comparison, isn’t so interesting. And Popeye’s a jerk for declaring the mountain not big enough for both of them when the gold mountain is. Their fight has more action and more punching than a lot of cartoons where Brutus actually deserves it.

I don’t know how you’d resolve a version of this cartoon without Brutus. I think I’d like the fight they have put into a cartoon where it’s more justified, though. Instead end this cartoon the way the first three minutes and fifty seconds were going. Popeye was doing quite well in the desert by himself.