It’s been rather quiet here for a long time, but I just thought I’d point out that I’ve been doing a podcast for a while:
Just thought I’d point that out.
Cartoon Hell #36 – “Circus Capers”
February 5, 2010Cartoon Hell is Nicholas Merlin Karpuk’s attempt to review every single installment in an awful $5 collection called “150 Classic Cartoons” purchased at his local Wal-Mart. Your prayers are welcome.
Not a food or a heist.
A shaky black and white slide accompanied by lazy clarinet music? This can only mean one thing. It’s about to get sleazy in this circus.
It looks weirder in motion.
The opening shot screws with my perspective right off the bad. All the members of the circus are marching, but they’re propelled forward while walking in different directions. Some element of depth is missing, making it all look completely wrong.
There’s several minutes worth of animal shenanigans. Elephants dancing and pantomiming driving, giraffes cavorting, and through all of it the visuals and audio keep fading in and out. It’s like watching television while trying not to fall asleep.
Cartoon Hell #35 – “Private Eye Popeye”
January 25, 2010Cartoon Hell is TheKarpuk’s attempt to review every single installment in an awful $5 collection called “150 Classic Cartoons” purchased at his local Wal-Mart. Your prayers are welcome.
Sounds like an affliction the elderly would get.
You can only make so many Popeye cartoons where he loses Olive Oyl to Bluto, then beats Bluto into a coma. Sometimes changing the setting isn’t enough. Eventually they had to give him actual occupations beyond being a sailor who did no actual sailing.
Why, in the mid-fifties, with hard-boiled fiction and movies at a high rate of popularity, did they decide to dress up Popeye as Sherlock Holmes for his detective outing? Did they not think people would realize he was a detective if he simply wore a Sam Spade costume? It speaks to the general cluelessness of the Fleischers as a whole.
I guess with a squint that prominent a magnifying glass might be useful.
Popeye receives a scream via phone, and traces the call by following the wire using a magnifying glass, because this cartoon is intent on using the laziest visual shorthand for everything.
He follows telephone line to a fabulous home, one suspiciously similar to the nice home in every Fleischer cartoon, finding the door left ajar. He of course enters. At this point I’m completely unsold on the whole premise. Why is a man trained as a sailor doing any of this? An alternate theory comes to mind, if you’ll indulge me for a moment.
Maybe Popeye is a infant with progeria acting out his fantasies? All this behavior would make perfect sense if done by a five year old. Of course a little kid would think detectives still dress like Sherlock Holmes. He’d also think a magnifying glass was the most important tool for a private investigator, and that the hat is a requirement.
Sadly, this theory doesn’t change what Popeye actually is. Once he goes through the door, a crazed Olive Oyl opens fire with a Tommy Gun, creating a Popeye-shaped outline of bullets. This is one of those gags where I stop for a moment and ask, “Was this ever funny?” Maybe it’s like that chicken crossing the road gag, where it’s never evoked laughter, but always comes so easily that hacks can’t resist.
Cartoon Hell #34 – “Felix the Cat and the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg”
January 19, 2010Cartoon Hell is Nicholas Merlin Karpuk’s attempt to review every single installment in an awful $5 collection called “150 Classic Cartoons” purchased at his local Wal-Mart. Your prayers are welcome.
Pinching out gold might be rough on the insides.
Felix the Cat is about as close as animation gets to a hipster icon. He’s obscure, but vaguely recognizable, and iconic enough that people keep trying to revive the franchise. It gives you that extra bit of cred to have his merchandise, but ask anyone what their favorite Felix the Cat moment is, and you’ll be treated to blank stares. There’s a reason for that: No one watches silent cartoons, and all the talkies with Felix are awful. They resuscitate the corpse of Felix every couple of decades to try and recapture the magic, but I’ve never seen the appeal. Apparently there’s brewing right now.
Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse both started as silent film characters. They both functioned as mimes going through a series of stream of consciousness animation experiments. Adding voice to a silent character sank a lot of careers, and if you listen to Mickey Mouse, he’s boring as hell, which is why he became the straight man to the antics of characters who actually possessed specific personalities. He was the Zeppo Marx of animation.
You can’t take an existing character and betray peoples’ expectations, which is probably why the studio that made Felix resisted doing talkies for so long. This particular cartoon was an attempt by Van Beuren to revive the popular character, and they missed the point entirely, which is why only three were ever made.
The reason so many characters of yesteryear fail is because they either had no personality, which later technology revealed, or the owners of the rights no longer have the courage to let them behave that way. Popeye isn’t hyper-destructive, Bugs Bunny isn’t obnoxious, Donald Duck no longer has a rage problem, they all become paper stand-ins with nothing more than a recognizable profile and an annoying voice.
The voice is indeed the biggest problem here. From the first line, Felix’s talking cuts like a knife, a shrill, kiddy tone only replicable by having a child yell half an inch from your ear.
Good to see we've moved to a goose-based economic model.
Felix is running a relief stand powered by the Goose and its golden eggs. Maybe I’m just being a nerd, but wouldn’t you rapidly devalue the local currency doing that? Damn it, Felix, do you not understand scarcity, quit squeezin the goose!
Cartoon Hell #33 – “The Little Stranger”
January 15, 2010Cartoon Hell is TheKarpuk’s attempt to review every single installment in an awful $5 collection called “150 Classic Cartoons” purchased at his local Wal-Mart. Your prayers are welcome.
What? You're telling me no one's ever given you a little stranger?
“Don’t look around, don’t make a sound, there’s a stranger here in town. Where he’s from, nobody knows. Lonely little stranger he looks so alone. He thought he was in danger, the day he was born.”
That’s a bleak opening song for a cartoon. In tandem with a title that sounds like an obscure sex euphemism, it makes for a bad first impression. Even the title card is messed up, giving me low expectations for the fidelity of this transfer. The first shot is damn confusing because it seems darker than originally intended. I’m fairly sure it’s a chicken worrying over a nest of eggs, but it’s doing it in the forest. Do chickens every really come in a wild variety?
The chicken cries over an egg before depositing it in the nest, making the whole scenario clear. This chicken is pulling a cuckoo-bird on some unsuspecting egg-laying species. This whole thing raises a lot of questions this cartoon isn’t prepared to answer. What sin justifies a chicken going to that effort? Is some farmer going to lose his temper from illicit chicken sex? They spoot out eggs and chicks as a lifestyle. Did she breed with another species? Is that a basilisk in there? Oh man, I’m starting to imagine cartoons far more interesting than whatever is about to happen.
Cartoon Hell #32 – “Little Hawk”
January 11, 2010Cartoon Hell is TheKarpuk’s attempt to review every single installment in an awful $5 collection called “150 Classic Cartoons” purchased at his local Wal-Mart. Your prayers are welcome.
Brother to Fat Dove and Trifling Pigeon.
The titles for this cartoon don’t make things very clear. After the title, the words “Young Peoples Records” appears. I wish it had a possessive, which would make it sound like an old person describing a music collection they’d just stolen.
This map gives the impression of Lord of the Rings set in Detroit.
As far as opening images go, this one is damn confusing. Am I looking at a leaf, or a poorly drawn depiction of the Great Lakes? Fortunately, the narrations clarifies that our story takes place by Lake Michigan. I should learn to trust my keen eyes.
The story is about an Ottawa boy that everyone calls Lazy Bones. He’s a watches people do common activities, suggesting that thoughtfulness is correlated with laziness, which let’s be honest, isn’t entirely unfair.
As far as shoddy limited animation techniques go, Little Hawk’s is one of the worst. They took real pictures of natural scenery and cut them to fit their forest areas, drawing a few crude trees on top to give the appearance of depth. The Ottawa boy isn’t the only lazy one here.
