Animation: Popeye and Archie

Time to talk about Popeye and Archie DVDs. Today two things came out, and I was anticipating them, to different degrees. First up, Popeye Volume 1:
This Popeye set has the first 60 theatrical shorts from Fleischer Studios, which produced 108 Popeye shorts from 1933 until they dissolved 1942. From 1943 to 1957, Paramount, under the name of Famous Studios, took over and produced 125 more shorts. The same thing happened to their Superman cartoons.

This is some high quality stuff right here, Fleischer Studios was pretty technically skilled. In addition to the 60 shorts, there are a couple of commentaries on the history of Popeye and of animation, as well as a bunch of "popumentaries" on the different characters.

I remember the first time I saw a Popeye cartoon, still have that video. I feel like looking it over and seeing what studio it's from...

Anyway I'm not even 1/3 through Disc 1 but already this set is awesome.

So when I was at the store, I noticed that this had also come out:


So we're going from Popeye which was produced during the golden age of American animation to...1968, well into the TV era. Big drop in quality here. I used to be a huge fan of Archie comics, and back then any from of Archie on TV was something I had to see at least once. I bought some Archie digests from Giant yesterday for the hell of it, and whenever I see some of the 70s comics for a few bucks I try to get those. So I...still read Archie from time to time. There I said it.

That's why I was more pumped from for the show Sabrina The Teenage Witch than any 11 year old kid should have been.


After seeing it I was like "WTF? Salem isn't suppose to talk! And they got Hilda and Zelda wrong, they're supposed to dress like actual witches...and...AWW HELL NAW!" In addition, Hilda was supposed to HATE non magical people. But hey, it's a TV show, so I guess they had to adapt it. So after a while I ended up liking the show and was like "You ever read the comic? No? Then suck it you freeloading bandwagon jumping Step By Step watching fuck ." Same thing when the Josie and the Pussycats movie came out, but I didn't bother to see that shit. Despite all this, I was still thinking "Oh, so Melissa Joan Hart found work after Clarissa Explains it All? Good for her."

But it still fucked up the comic, they changed the way everybody looked, since they had to cash in on the show's popularity. Hilda and Zelda were updated to wear modern clothes, and Sabrina also looked different: She didn't have her hair in that constantly folded backwards over her head with a plastic headband look. Nobody looks like this:



Now back to The Archie Show. First off This Intro should tell you all you need to know about the show. One year when I visited India as a kid I got this Archie video. (By the way if you ever want infinite Archie comics, go to India.)

So anyway like I said, anything to do with Archie in TV form was something to look at at least once. That video I got in India was the first 2 or 3 episodes from this DVD. As a result, I'd see those episodes a couple times every year that I visited. So there's a nostalgia factor. Anyway this is very cheap animation, they don't even draw the black checkered lines on Archie's head. And the voices seem wrong for the characters. But this show spawned a couple popular songs, including "Sugar Sugar". Yup, that song that people remember from time to time "you are my candy girl" and all that, is by The Archies, a "fictional" band just like the Gorillaz. If you like Sugar Sugar, I recommend Bang-Shang-a-Lang. I'll see how the rest of the series is, so far I haven't delved into new territory.

But on the back of the booklet for the DVD it said to look out for more Archie stuff on DVD next year. I can only hope it's The New Archies, which was pretty good. I remember it used to be on The Family Channel in the early 90s.

Summary: Popeye is awesome, and Archie could be cool too.