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.
Category: Cartooning
Is This Cartoon Offensive?
MAD With Greed
Some time back I offered a bit of background behind the face of MAD Magazine’s mascot, Alfred E. Newman. The image of ‘The Kid’ had been around, in one form or another, long before it came to rest in MAD. Recently, while watching a reconstruction of Erich von Stroheim’s epic film Greed, from 1924, I happened to notice this.
Eric Simpson
Eric has been Simpsonized! Here he is, visiting the school he would have attended if he lived in Springfield.
Girl-God Raises the Yamato
An episode of the previously-blogged anime Kamichu took us rather by surprise. Girl-god Yurie’s spirit form travels to the bottom of the Pacific ocean to raise the spirit of the Japanese battleship Yamato, for an elderly man who left the crew before the ship’s sinking in 1945. I’ve spliced a few scenes together.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/JUL07/KamichuYamato.flv 425 240]
What surprised us was how the episode rejoices in the legend of the ship — the largest ever built — without political overtones or, for that matter, ever mentioning WWII. The PBS program NOVA has a good section about the Yamato on its Web site. The old man in the cartoon who rhapsodizes about sailing on the Yamato says he was born in 1920, so either he’s supposed to be well into his 80’s, or the show takes place some time ago.
Indiana Jones and the Comic-Con
If you follow Mark Evanier’s NewsFromME site, you can’t miss the fact that he’s at the San Diego Comic-Con. The cable TV station G4 had a show from the con, and I was hoping Evanier would be featured, but I didn’t see him. They did, however, have this…
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