Good News and Bad/Weird News

Good news: Popeye the Sailor vol. 3 will be released on DVD in September (the second volume comes out next week). This will give us all the Popeye cartoons made by the Fleischer studio, plus many of the WWII cartoons when Popeye beat up on the Axis powers. It’ll probably have a disclaimer about the racially-insensitive material, but the cartoons will be uncut, except for the titles — Warners has a habit of reconstructing the titles by affixing a Paramount logo to the old syndication prints.

Bad/weird news: On that same day, Warners is also bringing out four episodes of the Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon series Popeye and Son. This was… this… no, I can’t even put into words how deeply wrong this is. You know that cartoon special a few years ago where Popeye was done in bad 3-D animation and it made you seasick just to watch him move? This is more offensive in many ways. And I love Maurice LaMarche, but he just isn’t Popeye.

Update: Turns out these episodes are not from Popeye and Son but from an earlier Hanna-Barbera version of Popeye, The All-New Popeye Hour. That was pretty bad too, but regular late ’70s Hanna-Barbera crappy, rather than insanely wrong like saddling Popeye with a wife and a blond surfer kid. Sorry for the confusion, and either way, get the good Popeye cartoons, not the bad made-for-TV ones.