Popeye color theatrical cartoons on Blu-Ray 12/11

Popeye The Sailor: The 1940s Volume 1 (BD)

The first 14 color theatrical Popeye cartoons, new 4K transfers from the original nitrate negatives.

More info here:

Warner Archive: Popeye the Sailor (1940s) First Volume on Blu-ray

 

I'm a B&W Popeye man, me self.

 

Me too, those are the best, and they were all released in three DVD volumes years ago.

The color post-Fleischer era never did much for me. But to have them all restored from the original negatives, I certainly am on board for that.

 

I'm another fan of the B&W Fleischer Brothers Popeye cartoons. While the Famous Popeye cartoons were entertaining, the B&W cartoons had an edge that was just better.

 

Well, they are new 4K scans, but I think the reality is that a lot of the nitrate negs turned to goo a long time ago. But they could very well be made from 35mm protection YCMs, which is the next best thing (fine grain B&W copies of the separations). I know Warner MPI has a whole department that does nothing but fix old Technicolor material and register the RGB images. I just did a little bit of that myself for the first time on another project over the weekend, and that is hard, hard work.

Cover here:

 

The Fleischer Color specials. Sinbad, AliBaba, and Aladdin.
These are the ones I want.
Will they be part of this 4k presentation.
John M.

 

I believe those are already on the black and white sets (there in my living room but I'm too warm in bed to get up and check). I know Mark the Shark would know off the top of his head. This set continues from the black and white set in chronological order. I'm with others in this thread that the b&w cartoons are the best but I sure want the rest of that original run and have ordered this set and will order others if they keep coming out.

 

Well, that's what the press release said, but maybe someone here like Vidiot would be "in the know"...

 

The color two-reelers are on the chronological volumes already released (which are out of print now, so grab them if you want them). Off the top of my head the first two are on Volume 1 and the third is on Volume 2.

The third volume has the wartime cartoons and straddles the Fleischer and Famous eras, through the end of the black and white cartoons. The new disc picks up chronologically where the third B&W volume left off.

 

Yes, "the best three" they are.

So yeah, on some levels this announcement is a little anti-climactic, given that the best Popeye cartoons have already been released. But I'm glad to see them continuing, for that matter I'm glad to see any classic animation made available these days.

EDIT: Oh, I get what you were saying now. "The first 14 color ones" would include the first three. But those were released along with the black and whites.

 

This is still a nice surprise especially when compared to what happened with the Porky Pig set last year.

 

It's amazing what the development of the ability to digitally register 3-strip IB Tech separations with very high precision has done to improve the image quality of such presentations. The old pin-registered 35mm prints are lovely, but almost all of them have some color fringing where the separations aren't perfectly registered. When I saw a DCP of the restoration of Powell & Pressburger's THE TALES OF HOFFMANN a couple of years ago, I was astonished at how much better and sharper it looked than any previous print I'd ever seen, and commented to the projectionist on the way out of the screening that it likely looked better now than when it first premiered in 1951.

 

I'm holding out hope that they'll eventually turn up the long-lost sequence cut from the epilogue in which the storytelling protagonist is revealed to be a mastering engineer.

 

We pin-registered the color seps on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp at Lowry, and I was astounded at the work they could do at putting all the pieces together. In some cases, they have the ability to scan a print and pull just the red or just the green or just the blue off, in cases where the nitrates or another copy had disintegrated. The end result still has to be color corrected, but it can look really sharp and really impressive. The key is that they pin-register the stuff both in the scan and in the digital realm, and that lines up all the layers and makes it all look arguably better than it did with original Technicolor (at least in terms of alignment). It's an amazing process, and it works particularly well with animation.

The Disney cartoons are interesting in that a lot of them were shot in sequential YCM, meaning that the first frame got all the yellow, the second all the cyan, and the third all the magenta, so the three RGB images were on one roll of film. That way, if the film shrinks over time, the pictures will still line up accurately. If it's on three separate rolls of film, each roll can shrink at different rates, and you wind up with a really screwed-up picture when you put the Technicolor back together again.

 

Here's hoping they re-release the GOOD Popeyes on Blu-Ray. As usual, the gloom and doom announcements for this disc indicate that its success will dictate any future releases. If it happens, maybe they can fix the minor screw-ups on those sets like the wrong end title audio on (IIRC) "Ali Baba." But for the most part, they did an excellent job.

I know it's not quite the same, but those color Fleischer two-reelers had footage reused in many later cartoons, and at least one of those ("Spinach Packin' Popeye") will be on this disc.

 

It's so nice to have a site like this where I can find other animation lovers.
I always thought there would be a large market for restored classic animation.
Warner brothers has given up on Looney Tunes / Merrie Melodies, Hanna Barbara released the complete
series of some of their worst cartoons but quit before completing Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound.
Right now I've resigned myself to accepting any kind of restoration and release of the Famous Studios Popeye Cartoons.
I would love Blu-Rays of the Fleischer Studios cartoons but I doubt we'll ever see it. The DVD's are quite good but could
be better. The 220 60's era Popeye cartoons I have in quite decent quality thanks to Amazon Prime but they pale in comparison
to the Famous Studios cartoons I grew up watching.
I'm really worried that giving me just a taste of the 122 Famous Studios cartoons and then never releasing anything else will
just make me feel worse about what could have been. Hopefully the word gets out and enough Popeye fans purchase this new
disc to keep the ball rolling.

 

WAC does great work. Support them with a purchase whenever you can.

Are the "first 3" mentioned above the cartoons that the studio legal department won't approve?

 

That’s what the Forum should be called.

 

No, it's nothing like that. In fact, in my initial post, I had forgotten about those when I cited "the first 14" color Popeye cartoons, hence the confusion.

The reason I forgot about those is because they are Fleischer cartoons and fall chronologically in the black and white era, so they are part of the three DVD volumes of Popeye already released years ago. (Also, all three are public domain and have been released many times by different companies, but the best available are on the official Warner sets.)

Those three (Sindbad, Ali Baba, Aladdin) were released as "color specials" while the regular cartoons in the series were black and white. The existing DVD sets carry the series chronologically from the first cartoon in 1933 through the last black and white short in 1943. The new Blu-Ray picks up where those left off and includes the first 14 color "regular" cartoons -- all of which are new to home video in any format.

Sorry for the confusion.

 

Hold the phone here. Amazon has all 220 of the 1960-61 King Features Popeye cartoons? I want those!

I know a selection were on VHS back in the 1980s, then a sampler "75th Anniversary" (of the character) DVD set was released circa Y2K-ish, then Warner Archive released a set of all the Paramount-produced ones and a few others, which they called "Volume 1" (of one).

I gotta check this out! (I know they aren't the best, but I liked them as a kid.)