A Fleischer Popeye cartoon to add to the Vintage Monkey Cartoons list.
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Popeye in Organ Grinder’s Swing (1937)
Reply
Category Archives: THE CARTOON CRYPT
THE CARTOON CRYPT: The Organ Grinder (1933)
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Nimbus Libéré
A excerpt from a weird and ugly (but interesting) WWII propaganda cartoon made by inept and humorless nazis featuring Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Donald Duck, Goofy, Felix, and horrible Jewish stereotypes. I’ve seen a lot of WWII propaganda from the Allies, but not much from the Axis… presumably most of it was destroyed. If all their animation was this uninspired, it is no wonder we won the war.
WARNING: This cartoon contains offensive ethnic caricatures. If offensive stereotypes bug you, you may not want to view it.
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Uranium Blues (1956)
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Philips Broadcast 1938
This is a short cartoon from 1938 by George Pal advertising Philips radios. Special effects pioneer George Pal was the king of what is known as “replacement animation” in the world of stop motion animation.
Replacement animation is an extremely labor intensive process (in the already inherently labor intensive process of animation) where different elements of an animation puppet are removed and replaced with another similar item in a slightly different pose. A single character can potentially have hundreds of replaceable elements in different poses.
It is very common for this technique to be used with character’s heads… Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas is a good example of a very-well done puppet with replaceable facial poses.
The Phillips Broadcast animation is remarkable in how much of it is done with replacement animation… the heads are replaceable on all the characters… but so are entire bodies. The shapes distort and transform wonderfully with the kind of physical exaggeration generally only seen in hand-drawn animation.
It boggles the mind how much labor must have gone into this short film. It has to be seen to be believed. It is truly a masterpiece of stop-motion animation.
Note that it is REALLY, REALLY worth your time to go and view this cartoon at a higher resolution with much more brilliant color here on the Europa Film Treasures site (unfortunately that version is not embeddable on this website).
WARNING: This cartoon contains racial depictions that many will find offensive. If this sort of thing bothers you, you may not want to view it.
Go here to check out the George Pal DVD set George Pal – Flights of Fantasy
on Amazon, which contains this and many other cartoons.
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Pete Roleum and His Cousins (1939)
Here is a gorgeusly designed and animated, extremely bizarre stop-motion animation for the petroleum industry from the demented mind of Charley Bowers, the man who made the previously posted and equally bizarre Metal Eating Bird.
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Who Killed Cock Robin? (1933)
Here is the last spooky cartoon I’m going to get to before Halloween… check out the expanding Directory of Vintage Spooky Cartoons here. It will continue to be updated as long as I keep finding more… and there are a lot more out there still. This is a Terrytoon called Who Killed Cock Robin! from 1933, discovered courtesy of the Saturday Morning Blog.
Read more about this cartoon on The Big Cartoon Database here.
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Egyptian Melodies (1931)
Here’s an early Disney Silly Symphonies cartoon for the Vintage Spooky Cartoons list… Halloween is coming up fast.
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Popeye in Shiver Me Timbers (1934)
Another cartoon for the ongoing Vintage Spooky Cartoons list… the Fleischers’ Popeye versus a ghost ship.
Unfortunately, the only version of this available online that I can find right now is the colorized version. I’m not talking Ted Turner colorized either… bad as that is, this is much worse. My understanding is that at some point (around the time color television came around?) some brilliant entrepreneur decided it would be a good idea to make a buck by remaking some old public domain black and white cartoons in color by tracing cartoons on the cheap, coloring them and re-filming them. The results are poorly traced, and hideously colored, with far less “in-betweening” than the originals… leaving the animation a clunky, jerky, ugly mess… a hollow shell of the original. I imagine that they generally have chunks of the cartoon outright missing as well, judging from the budget-minded nature of this monstrous process (not to mention the sort of censorship that inevitably occurs when dimwits revisit the material of yesteryear and judge it by modern standards). In the very likely event I have any of this information wrong, someone out there please do correct me in the comments. Needless to say, I’ll replace this with a black and white version if it becomes available.
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Mickey Mouse in The Mad Doctor (1933)
Another cartoon for the ongoing Vintage Spooky Cartoon list in anticipation of Halloween. Could this Mad Doctor be The Phantom Blot? Apparently this cartoon was considered too frightening for children by British censors.
Read more about this cartoon on The Big Cartoon Database here.