Popeye 75th Anniversary Collector's Edition DVD

[mmm...donuts]

Is this DVD worth buying? And what are the featured cartoons?

[J Lee]

Is this DVD worth buying? And what are the featured cartoons? Only if you can get it at a discount, and only for historical purposes, or if you'e never seen the made-for-TV King Features Syndicate cartoons and are just curious about how they look compared to the Paramount theatricals.

If you do decide to buy, the best way to watch them is to only view the ones done by Seymour Kneitel and Gene Deitch, which are at least tolerable in terms of animation (Kneitel's shorts stay on model and look about like the cartoons being done for theatrical release by Paramount in 1960-61) and story (Dietch's efforts are off-beat enough to overcome their animation problems). Avoid at all costs clicking on the links to the Jack Kinney and Larry Harmon/Paul Fennell Popeye cartoons -- life is too short for those kind of annoyances.

(I don't know if you could call any of the cartoons on the DVD "featured" but the basic rule of thumb to the KFS Popeyes is the more ornate and detailed the cartoon's title page looks, the worse the cartoon that follows turns out to be.)

[Geezil]

Better still, if you haven't yet done so, grab a copy of either one of the current well-restored-and-researched DVD sets of the Fleischer/Famous Popeye theatricals instead. You probably won't want to skip over anything. (My own bias still tilts me toward the one that Jerry Beck helped to create for VCI.)