Given the enormity of quantity and the differing studios involved, the quality of stories tended to differ, but overall the scripts were engaging and sometimes genuinely brilliant, such as the Paramount short "It Only Hurts When They Laughs," a hilarious takeoff on Popeye and Brutus' long-running feud over Olive. The Kinney cartoons strove to be funny, and often were, but suffered from inconsistent character designs (Ken Hultgren was the animator most frequently used and his character designs were periodically the sloppiest of the series) as well as some of the weakest soundtracks of the series, re-using the sound FX library used for "Rocky & Bullwinkle." The Paramount shorts, meanwhile, had by far the best production values of all, in character designs, backgrounds, sound FX, and in the use of Winston Sharples' background scores some of the animation was also quite good, even in the budget-crunched era of that time. Paramount and Kinney released the highest number of cartoons, and the differences in style and intangibles were striking. Some of the best animation came from the Snyder-Deitch shorts, especially those which utilized Britain's famous Halas & Batchelor animation studios, while the best character gags often came from the Harmon/UPA shorts, which sometimes used background music first used for Mr. The different studios used made for an uneven quality to the cartoons.
Character designs were also changed to reflect the "back to the future" quality of the shorts, particularly in the design of Olive Oyl, while some new characters were introduced, notably Olive's troublesome niece Diesel Oyl, a female counterpart to Popeye's four nephews (curiously not revived from the 1940s-50s cartoons).
Segar comics but were never used in Popeye's theatrical shorts also brought in for several shorts were the Goons, hulking mute characters first seen in the 1930s, and Eugene The Jeep, another revival from the 1930s comic strip. These television cartoons "updated" Popeye's world by mixing 1960-topical suburban settings with use of characters, such as the Sea Hag and King Blozo, who came from the original E.C. However, King Features, owner of the character, revived the spinach-eating sailor man and friends for a series of televisions shorts, totaling some 220 cartoons farmed out to Paramount Pictures, Larry Harmon/UPA, Jack Kinney Studios, William Snyder & Gene Deitch, and Total Television. After some 24 years in theatrical shorts, the longest tenure of any running cartoon character to that time, Popeye was curiously stricken from Paramount Pictures' cartoon cast.
0 kommentar(er)
