Fred Flintstone may have had trouble losing weight, but that actually wasn’t a big health concern for most cave men.
©The New Yorker
Category: Cartooning
Popeye Is Eye-Popping!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME! And to my twinster, Jean. The day is almost over, but it took time to get the video for this post ready.
Jeanie Beanie and I watched a lot of TV together while growing up, and Popeye cartoons were among our favorites. For my birthday I got what I wanted, the new Popeye DVD set. It was in expectation of that I made the new banner, with Popeye and Bluto, using a couple of cardboard puppets from the Kenner Super Show I won on eBay.
The Popeye DVD has been getting rave reviews. How good is it? Watch the 3-minute video I made, transitioning back-and-forth between the DVD and a VHS that is typical of what’s been available until now.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/SEP07/PopeyeVHSDVD.flv 400 300]
All but two of the cartoons are in black & white, but are just as stunning in their own way. To order a copy of this must-have 4-disc DVD from Amazon.com, click here.
Pre-Historic Gastric Bypass
Writer Mark Evanier, whose biography of Jack Kirby is imminent, is a gastric bypass surgery success story. But what did overweight, compulsive eaters do in the stone age?
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Eric’s Anime Pick — Mushi-Shi
Eric says that Mushi-Shi is a relatively obscure title. Indeed, it took a week for a copy to arrive in Massachusetts from a Netflix distribution center in California.
Like Kino’s Journey, Mushi-Shi is about a wanderer, with a series of mostly self-contained stories. But unlike Kino, the character Ginko isn’t exploring for its own sake, but rather he’s a healer-for-hire who exorcises parasitic creatures called Mushi.
Caution: This video depicts what is known to comic book fans as an “injury to eye motif,” and it’s yucky and gunky!
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Do Robots Dream Of Electric Mothers?
The granddaddy of anime is Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, a TV show that held much fascination for me in childhood. Partially a mixture of Frankenstein and Pinocchio, Astro Boy was often whimsical to the point of being surreal. Here’s Astro wishing he had a mother, in a scene seemingly inspired by Salvador Dali.
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Dali himself did dally in film, as seen in this scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/AUG07/Spellbound.flv 400 300]
That eerie sound is a Theremin, also heard prominently in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend. A staple of horror and science fiction films, the Theremin was famously used by Brian Wilson in “Good Vibrations.”
Popeye Comes Out Of The Can
At last! The Popeye DVD set I talked about last April is out. Mike Dobbs, an expert on the Fleischer brothers animation studio, has a review. My birthday is coming up in a few weeks, and this set is what I’ve told my wife I want.