Max and Dave: Popeye 1937-38: You Better Lock Up Your Doors Today
Never mind what the feature was, it was Popeye the audiences wanted… accompanied by great songs!
Never mind what the feature was, it was Popeye the audiences wanted… accompanied by great songs!
The conventional wisdom is there is something missing from these cartoons than those in the pre-code years. But the music was just as lively.
The Fleischers, now in their new home in Miami, tried to make stars out of the relatively colorless Hunky and Spunky.
The trade magazines of 1936-37, confirm that Max Fleischer’s Popeye cartoons were the most popular shorts on the market.
If some viewers missed the spice of the earlier Boop cartoons, at least the folks at Paramount seemed to be happy.
While Fleischer attempted to spice up his color efforts with a string of original songs, they did not cross over to the hit parade, and produced little, if any, saleable material.
The screwy non-sequiturs of the early 1930’s are long gone, and the bouncing ball sequences are played straight. But the music plays on…
During the 1935-36 season, Popeye had become a multi-media sensation. There was that radio series starring actor Floyd Buckley… and, or course, recordings ensued.
In a number of these cartoons, she ceded the spotlight to subsidiary characters, most notably a dog named Pudgy, and an old inventor named Grampy.
This season of Color Classics boasted an improved palette, now that the exclusive hold on the 3-strip Technicolor process had been broken.