Big Bad Sindbad

Remembering, too much, Popeye meeting Sindbad , it has the only two virtues - the naughty nephews in the visit to the naval museum and the statue of their uncle , conclusion of story, hommage to their hero.

Popeye takes the nephews to the sailing museum, and tells them about the time he whupped Sindbad the Sailor. At this point, we leave the 1952 footage and enter an edited version of 1936's POPEYE THE SAILOR MEETS SINDBAD THE SAILOR, back when the Fleischers were in charge of the studio.

And in so doing, this cartoon shows how budgets shrank over the sixteen years between.... or at least how inflation had knocked them to pieces. Although there is a lot to say in favor of the character design of Popeye int he 1950s, there's little comparison terms of the lush background art, Technicolor, or sheer number of gags.

One thing to note about the old Fleischer footage is that it has a new soundtrack recorded by Jack Mercer, Mae Questel, Jackson Beck and music director Winston Sharples.

I would have been nice if the late Willard Bowsky got animation credit for the old footage. In case you didn't know, Bowsky was the head animator for the original "Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor" footage. Bowsky joined the U.S. Army after Pearl Harbor and was killed in action in France.

Besides the number of nephews reduced to three (which one fell victim to budget cuts?), it's noteworthy that this cartoon features Popeye in his original sailor outfit before he joined the U.S. Navy at the end of the Fleischer era.

Big Bad Sinbad (1952)

*** (out of 4)

Popeye takes his three nephews to a museum that shows off the greatest sailors in history. They come across Sinbad and Popeye tells the story of how the two of them had a major fight over Olive Oyl.

If you're a fan of the Popeye series then you'll certainly enjoy this entry because there are plenty of nice laughs as well as some great violence (action). Obviously Sinbad is played by Bluto and there's no doubt that he and Popeye get to have a really good fight here that includes all sorts of punches. There are some good laughs and especially during a sequence where Popeye scares a couple lions that are chained up. The animation is good as you'd expect and this is certainly one of the better films in the series.

"Cheaters", cartoons that use stock footage and clips from previous cartoons to form the bulk of a "new" cartoon, usually with new footage as a framing device to incorporate the re-used clips, are not all that unusual. What makes this one of the strangest compilation cartoons is the fact that Paramount Famous Studios uses clips from Popeye Meets Sinbad the Sailor, which was made by Fleischer Studios (!) in 1936! Fleischer Studios made three color Popeye two-reel "Specials" in the mid-to-late 1930s. Paramount Famous Studios made three "cheaters" using footage from those three Fleischer shorts. The truly sad thing is, using the older footage makes it crystal clear how much better the old Fleischers were in terms of animations, backgrounds and plotting compared to the 1950s Paramount Famous Studios product. To be fair, cost had a lot to do with the disparity-it was a lot more expensive in the 1950s to make cartoons. But mostly, the 1950s Popeyes were remakes of old Fleischer shorts done in color with a few changes. Here, the framing footage is nice, but 75% of the cartoon is older material and they re-looped some of the dialogue and changed it, losing some of the charm. This is the saddest of the cheaters, because Sinbad was the best of the two-reel Specials. Big Bad Sinbad isn't that bad a cartoon, actually. It simply isn't that good, either. For completeists only, or people who just like Popeye, period.