Why 1980's had a Popeye craze all of a sudden? Was it the movie, or was it because HB ran out of ideas?
Why 1980's had a Popeye craze all of a sudden? Was it the movie, or was it because HB ran out of ideas?
Why 1980's had a Popeye craze all of a sudden? Was it the movie, or was it because HB ran out of ideas?
I dunno, but Popeye is awesome, and any appreciation is fine by me. I happen to have been watching the original shorts earlier today. I like how he's kinda a psychopath in the earliest stuff.
The movie definitely helped, but I think another part was home video making the public domain shorts more widely available.
Primarily what these guys said:
People found out they could put public domain stuff on VHS and sell those tapes for way less than the regular tapes of movies at the time (which was like $40-50 or something) and Popeye was one that had like 30 or so shorts that were PD.
Meanwhile TV channels reran Fleischer/Famous Popeye and 60s Popeye. I think this lasted till at least the early 90s. This was the quickest way for kids to learn about the character
The Popeyes Chicken chain also used to license Popeye even though their restaurant wasn't named after the character.
There was also a Popeye arcade game, which led to
The movie didn't do well (though it still probably got attention to the character)
However H-B did make an all-new Popeye cartoon, The All New Popeye Hour, which lasted from 1978-1983
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_All_New_Popeye_Hour
After it ended it got rerun in syndication though not as much as the Fleischer/Famous stuff and the 60s cartoon
H-B also did that Popeye and Son cartoon in 1987 which wasn't successful
The 80’s was also when they colorized the classic Fleischer shorts.
Poorly, might I add. I kinda wish they'd go back and digitally recolor the black and white shorts with colors similar to the 3 color films eventually. Looney Tunes had some of their shorts digitally colored for Nickelodeon back in the 90s and it actually looks really good.
>looney tunes on nickelodeon
God I forget just how fucking late Cartoon Network came around. I often forget Nickelodeon has been around since the 80s.
Nick aired Looney Tunes all the way up to 2000
Popeye cartoons still aired a lot in syndication and cheap vhs tapes of them were common. It’s more like Popeye was always ingrained in pop culture and then faded away when the cartoons stopped airing.
For a kid born in the 80s, pop culture was like 80 percent the same as a kid born in the 30s. Popular old stuff used to stick around. Today even popular new stuff is forgotten in a week.
I was a kid in the 80's and a vast majority of all the cartoons on TV were antique reruns.
I’m sure it helped that the 80s and 90s were a boom time for merchandise and they rolled out a lot of Popeye stuff in response to all the Garfield crap people were buying.
Popeye is fun
Simple as
The movie.
Donkey Kong was originally Popeye
b00mers who watched Popeye as kids grew up
Why does Bluto always make the calarts face?
he's evil
Cause he was the one who pushed the Cal Arts face, he learned from Joker to put a smile on people's face so he created Bluto gas and used it on modern cartoon characters
I don't know, but I really wish we'd get another one. I absolutely adore the original Fleischer run of Popeye Theatrical Shorts and I would love for Warner or Paramount of whoever the fuck has the ability to make a spiritual successor series with traditionally animated rubberhose slapstick (not cheap tweened garbage like the cuphead show) and more characters and plots from the original comic strips. The Popeye Fleischer Shorts to me are the absolute best in slapstick comedy and it's a crime they don't get more recognition nowadays.
>(not cheap tweened garbage like the cuphead show)
Unfortunately I anticipate more of that happening
The Cuphead cartoon was done by King Features
Oh wow, I don't actually know that. That does explain why Bimbo the dog made an appearance in an episode.
Hopefully if they decide to bring him back they wouldn't go that route since to me the appeal to Popeye is the absurd slapstick violence, which is extremely hard to pull off with tweening.
I'm just hoping King Features just lets the Cuphead game creators put Popeye in a game
Imagine if they made a Popeye beat em up game and they made the scenery look like those 3d dioramas they would create for panning shots.
Fleischer's model backgrounds were amazing. My personal favorite was the train yard from Play Safe https://youtu.be/KZrSxdjDGpw?si=9dBry7UIlDWxdQqX&t=187
Does King Features even own a studio? I figured they were just an IP warehouse at this point
Fleischer's Popeye is insanely good. They were snappy, visually imaginative, and the music was brilliant. The art was also excellent - not just the animation, but the backgrounds and the ambition were also were also extremely high-quality. Outside of Disney, Fleischer truly made a lot of the best animated content from the 1930's. Famous Studios Popeye is also pretty good (maybe even vaguely underrated), but Fleischer was still the best.
I’ve been going through a lot of the Fleischer era shorts and I’m still convinced I haven’t seen them all
Internet Archive has all of them, but in low quality:
https://archive.org/details/popeye-the-sailor-1933-to-1942-fleischer-studios
If you want them in hd, try 1337x 😉
He's a chad
>funny
>chad
>charismatic
>awesome fights
>great slapstick humor
>beautiful
>well animated
>nice songs and dub
>fucking badass sailor tells kids to eat green and healthy