Model sheets for the 1939 Popeye short, Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp.
Of the three Popeye Color Specials by the Fleischer Studios, Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp made the biggest impression on me as a kid. It was actually one of the first things I looked for when I discovered YouTube. There’s a wonderful balance between the funny and the creepy–the sinister–and the music hits all the right notes. I love the vibrant cel paint colors, even though they faded long ago. The backdrops are all little pieces of art, and atmospheric, the sight gags are nifty.
I was such a Popeye fan as a little kid really. On St. Maarten, the Dutch version of Hallowe’en, I always dressed up as Popeye (photographic evidence exists of this). And I was always drawing him–these are from when I was 4 or 5:
I was mighty proud of those creations. Then one day my grandfather came along, and he said, “Can I draw Popeye in your sketchbook?” “Sure!” So he took his pen and:
I just couldn’t believe my eyes. To me that drawing looked so perfect, so professional. Man, that was Popeye alright. And my own stuff? Deformed Chernobyl victims. Sorry mutants from Mars. The brick of complete demotivation hit me in the face hard that day, and it took me a while to get over that.
(There’s no funny clue or point to this story. I did just that: I got over it one day, soon after.)
Various model sheets and production art relating to Popeye: Bluto, J. Wellington Wimpy, Olive Oyl, and Popeye himself. Most of these are from Famous Studios, which took over from Fleischer in the 1940s.
That’s the perennial question for every YouTuber, isn’t it. How do you find your audience–who is out there, and how do you get their attention? It always strikes me that YouTubers who frequent internet forums with these questions seem totally unaware that they themselves are somebody’s audience, too. They’ve come to think of themselves as “creators”, as separate entities floating in space, woefully out of touch with the people on Earth. What does your audience want to watch? That isn’t the right question to ask. What do you want to watch?
f you’re desperate for viewers, try this: use thumbnails with half-naked girls. Use suggestive, sensationalist clickbait titles: “The day I almost DIED”, “The REAL REASON nobody buys APPLE anymore”, “Russia HACKED me!”, and so forth. Leave your links everywhere, spam people. Clutter your thumbnails with red circles and exclamation points. Congratulations, you’ve attracted 2,000 viewers now and lost all your dignity.
Walt Disney used to say, “Quality always wins”. It’s not entirely true, but as a strategic philosophy, I like it better than the one described above.
I’ve recently set up a second channel, a separate channel, called Humanivideo.
Every day I upload a few classic copyright-free cartoons, usually Popeye or Betty Boop, cartoons that I loved as a kid and that I still rate highly. I could have named the channel Retro Classics Spectacular or Vintage Cartoons Galore Paradiso, but me being me I had to give it a weird, unappealing name of course. The channel art is supposed to be ugly, but, again me being me, I took great care into making it look ugly. Originally Humanivideo was intended to be just a budget channel, a promo tool, a “gateway” of sorts to my real channel, Tales from Weirdland, but again, me being me, I’ve taken on the role of amateur curator and try to present these cartoons well, with nice thumbnails, the best video quality, some handy information in the description box, and more.
And another thing is, by uploading old cartoons to that side channel I can keep up a regular uploading schedule, and thus please YouTube’s algorithms, which are inherently animator-unfriendly as they reward creators who upload often and publish longer videos. (Animation is months of work for minutes of screen time.) In a way, it’s like I’m sending out Popeye and Betty Boop as vedettes every day, as travelling salespersons. “Go and tell people about Tales from Weirdland!” You just have to be a little creative in the marketing department.
The 1939 Popeye cartoon Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (1939) is one I remember very well. Of the three Popeye Color Specials by the Fleischer Studios, that is the one that made the biggest impression on me as a kid. It was actually one of the first things I looked for when I discovered YouTube. There’s a wonderful balance between the funny and the creepy, and the music is great and suggestive throughout. I love the vibrant colors, even though they faded somewhat. The backdrops are all little pieces of art, and atmospheric, the sight gags are nifty. “The laaaamp….” “I’m a feesh!” I’m positive that the cartoon helped to shape my artistic character.
Another animated short that I have really fond memories of, is Betty Boop’s Birthday Party (1933). It’s just a wonderful piece of work, with all these rubber hose characters bouncing and swinging, and singing. My grandfather was one of the first people to own a VCR, and this was one of the first cartoons he taped–for me. I watched it endlessly, and even now, many years later, the birthday song occasionally gets stuck in my head. “This is Betty’s birthday party daaaaash….” 1933–Marilyn Monroe was 5 years old. The Golden Gate Bridge was being built. And Hitler, well…
Look at the birthday cake though: Betty Boop is 14 years old.
I’m always fascinated by the voices in these cartoons. They’re the voices of ghosts. They’re coming to us through old wires, resonate through hollow tubes, their tinkling merriment long gone. You’re listening to the dead, but they themselves don’t know that they are dead.
Betty Boop cartoons were pretty raunchy actually, for their time. Before the Hays Code in 1934 (officially the “Motion Picture Production Code”), which imposed moral restrictions upon motion pictures, it was basically: be as suggestive as you want; you can tease, be naughty, show glimpses of underwear, wink, nudge. This Code lasted until 1968, after which Hollywood degenerated into the Gomorrah that it is now. The Betty Boop cartoons never recovered from the restrictions: in the later cartoons, she’s demure and boring, and most of the stories center around her dog and his wacky shenanigans.
The reason that the Code affected Betty Boop cartoons, by the way, is because they were theatrical cartoons: they weren’t shown on television–there was no television–they were shown in theatres, before a main feature or as part of a Saturday matinee. “Many people don’t realize that”, as my brother used to say whenever he had finished some trivia-filled monologue to an uninterested audience.
Above: obvious sexual harassment in the 1932 Betty Boop cartoon, Boop-Oop-a-Doop. “Do you like your job? Hehehe…” In another cartoon, Koko the Clown and Bimbo also join in on the leg rubbing, shamelessly.
So anyway, that’s my Humanivideo channel. It’s my own little Library of Congress. Like Tales from Weirdland, Humanivideo features videos that I’d want to watch myself. That has always been my main interest in doing all this, this YouTube stuff. Perhaps you’ve noticed, non-existing reader, but I never ask viewers to like, subscribe, share, and so forth, i.e. encourage viewers to “take action”, as it’s called in YouTube guides. Broadly speaking, my philosophy is that if I have to remind people to do all those things, something’s not working right.
The only thing I take into account when uploading new videos is: what are the best times to upload? The answer, apparently, is Thursday/Friday in the afternoon, as this gives Google/YouTube the opportunity to process your stuff in time for its busiest hours in the evening. So upload between 12-3 PM when you’re in LA, and between 9-11 PM when you’re in Europe. Saturday is OK too, or Sunday if Saturday isn’t possible. But I’d avoid Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, unless you’re a big YouTube star, in which case it doesn’t matter obviously.
Right.
Currently I’m working on a pretty elaborate, ambitious Star Wars-themed video. Should be good. Anyway, until next time. Oh, by the way, the girl in the thumbnail above is called Eve, and she’ll make an appearance in a later video.
In the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration eased the rules on advertising toy lines via cartoons. He-Man: Masters of the Universe, Transformers, G.I. Joe, Care Bears, and so forth, were the result.
Psychologists and other weirdos protested that these “program-length commercials” would pollute television and abuse and degenerate our innocent souls. Naturally, this didn’t happen; our souls were already so black and cold that we couldn’t possibly sink any further. We ended up with truckloads of toys, gullible little consumers that we were.
I have to say, I only really watched those cartoons because my brother did. Personally, I preferred Road Runner, The Muppets, Popeye. I also used to deliberately, against my will, watch cartoons that nobody else wanted to watch, because I felt sorry for those cartoons. I was a very sensitive kid.
The nook of my attic. Recognize Boba Fett’s ship? I’ll get to Star Wars at a later point, if I can find a way to reach the nook without breaking my neck.
That is all that if left of a B.A. Baracus figure. Right, the A-Team. My brother was a fan, so I was a fan. The team visited Holland in 1984–but only three of them. One, Hannibal, lucked out somehow and stayed home; he probably drew the longest straw or something. It gave me a strange feeling, I remember. It wasn’t right. I couldn’t be excited about it. Twenty years earlier, the exact same thing had happened when The Beatles visited Holland. Only three of them came over. I bet that if the Apocalypse happened, only three Horsemen would appear here.
A big, bloodthirsty crowd came to welcome the A-Team at the airport. It seemed like a huge event, the second coming of Christ (there you go, two biblical references in one post). Murdock yelled like a brain-damaged jungle creature, Face smiled and waved, and B.A. spouted confused gibberish at the unsuspecting kids. He seemed angry all the time. I hope he got himself sorted out eventually.
Let’s take a look at some of the sketchbooks I’ve found.
This late 20th Century marker drawing (circa 1978) depicts the artist being readied for his bath. A piece of soap can be seen on the left, the filled bath is on the far right. The violent, uncontrolled peeing and escaping turd, as well as the sneaky sideways look, are very typical of this period in the artist’s career, as he dedicated several other drawings to this particular subject matter:
Here is a self portrait from a later period, side by side with the actual model:
As you can see, I had a nice little Prince Valiant look going on. I had long hair to cover my floppy ears. I hail from a tiny rural village where the only people with long hair were women. Since I had an angelic face and feminine features, I was often mistaken for a girl actually–one of my big childhood traumas. I remember sitting on a sand hill, lost in thought, when a ball hit me. I looked, and this old man said to his granddaughter: “Ask that other girl if you can have your ball back.” You don’t forget things like that.
Donald Duck with a baby carriage. And why not.
I was a big Popeye fan. I dressed up as Popeye once for Carnival, a Dutch spring festival centered around “role-reversal and suspension of social norms”, as Wikipedia has it. Basically it’s just people getting drunk. I was Popeye, my brother was Zorro–photographic evidence exists of this, but common sense prevents me from scanning it. Anyway, I loved Popeye. Page after page, it’s Popeye fighting Bluto, Popeye in some perilous predicament, Popeye and Olive, Popeye just floating in the air and being hideously deformed, Popeye peeing violently, and so forth. I had Popeye figurines, bendables, Corgi cars, comics. I made my mother buy spinach all the time, up to the point where she said, “Wouldn’t you rather have french fries?”
I also owned a luxurious book that celebrated Popeye’s 50th birthday. I still remember the exact caption under one of the animation model sheets: “To aid the animation process, the characters were significantly simplified compared to their original comic book counterparts.”
That’s a comic from when I was 11 or thereabouts. Still drawing Popeye. And as you can see, I was happily butchering the English language, something that I still do, right here in this blog.
