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JERRY BECK
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AMID AMIDI
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Hidden Message in 1952 Popeye cartoon
by jerry
August 3, 2009 12:05 am


Here’s one for the hard-core cartoon historians: Recently, Brew reader Neil was replaying an old Paramount Popeye cartoon, and made a surprising audio find. On the soundtrack of Shuteye Popeye (1952), when the mouse’s audio is slowed down to about 40%, it’s clear that the track is actually a vocal outtake (perhaps director Isadore Sparber, or I suspect Seymour Kneitel) protesting that he doesn’t know what to say. Have a listen for yourself:

08/3/09  12:25am
Doz Hewson says:

“That’s just….raw!”

08/3/09  12:26am

What an amazing find. There have been hundreds of cartoons made that contain this unintelligable squeaky voiced rodent. I wonder how many of them contain hidden messages.

08/3/09  12:44am
Professor Widebottom says:

I’m glad that there are hard-core historians with the wherewithal to provide a public service such as this. Not only does the voice come across amazingly clear, the music bed also transforms into a noir-ish brooding masterpiece.

08/3/09  1:25am
Charlie says:

That’s really cool

08/3/09  5:18am
Tom Heres says:

I love that! How cool is that?

I’d love to hear some more of the squirrels, mice and rabbits we’ve seen in other cartoons slowed down for comprehension. This is very entertaining.

08/3/09  6:19am
uncle wayne says:

That is truly an !!!!! I am glad that….”playing it backwards”…won’t deem it “Satanic!” “Herman’s Cousin Goes to Hell!” I luv it!

08/3/09  7:24am
Adam says:

Interesting discovery!

08/3/09  8:00am

Absolutely amazing. I recall Rolf Harris doing a similar thing on his early 1990s TV show Rolf’s Cartoon Club with the first Chip and Dale cartoon.

08/3/09  8:06am
Chris Sobieniak says:

That’s one pi__ed-off mouse! ^_^

Thanks Neil for the heads up on something I probably should’ve done long ago!

08/3/09  8:26am
Katella Gate says:

Putting a Full-Blown curse in a kid’s cartoon and the putting it out for the public risked being kicked out of the industry, but the thrill of doing school boy prank like this obviously outweighed the risks… Plus, it really quite safe. It would be 60 years before copies of these films could be bought as personal property, and technology permitted the easy decompression of the audio by non-specialists, and the world had enough free time on its hands to actually slow it down and listen.

Lucky for everybody it was “only” blasphemous. If it had been racial insult, well, some cows are holier than others I guess.

08/3/09  9:13am
Strawstickbricks says:

If slowing down a Famous cartoon yields even one such “noir-ish brooding masterpiece” a little more research should transform enough mediocrity into high art to fill a DVD boxed set. Add a few new scenes of mice running up peoples’ assholes, and it could even run on Adult Swim.

08/3/09  9:30am
Anthrocoon says:

Interesting! Speaking of backwards messages (see post above) the J. Geils Band had one of a Martian or something in “No Anchovies Please”. When you spun it backwards the message was “It doesn’t take a genius to know the difference between chicken s–t and chicken salad.”…The Rhino album of Beatles-related novelty songs had one called Beatles Rap, IIRC, and there was a backwards message at the end. When spun backwards: “It’s really us, you know.”

08/3/09  9:40am
Tim Drage says:

Lucky for everybody it was “only” blasphemous. If it had been racial insult, well, some cows are holier than others I guess.
How come I can’t read ANY internet discussion on ANY subject at the moment without it decending into euphamistic “maybe LIBERALS/BLACKS are the REAL racists EH??” rhetorical questions?

08/3/09  10:00am
Jenny says:

Katella: I doubt this was done as a “prank”, and it was safe, alright–it was a total non-concern for anyone working on this cartoon.

Remember these films were meant to be shown around the country for a couple of weeks at most, then withdrawn. Even in 1952 no one was thinking about television reruns, and even if they had been NO one had any ideas of digitally-manipulatable copies and anyone out there slowing them down to hear any “hidden messages.

It’s just some guys recording wild dialogue(”wild”" meaning random) to get something to use for the mouse. Any profanity spoken was just plain old everyday speech for that guy, not a sneaky plant or in-joke.

Along the same lines are those slow-downs someone did not long ago of “Rabbit’s Kin”(Jaime Weinman I believe), the Bugs Bunny cartoon with the little brown rabbit babbling on about Pete Puma. If anyone remembers, Mel Blanc really did perform the exact dialogue that the rabbit was “supposed” to be saying although speeding it up made him totally unintelligible as planned and he might as well have been reciting the Gettysburg address. It was a nice touch, for them to bother with getting it authentic.
But this is fun to listen to.

08/3/09  10:16am
vzk says:

Famous Studio’s Popeye cartoons, as bland as they were, at least were a thousand times more watchable than all the made-for-tv crap King Features did with those characters from the 60s onward.

08/3/09  12:12pm

this entire thing reminds me of an old Styx song.

08/3/09  12:45pm

Super cool! Glad it didn’t say “Wimpy is dead”!

08/3/09  12:53pm
Roger Kulp says:

This voice sounds like one that I heard a lot in 1960s TV cartoons.I can’t believe nobody has identified it yet.

08/3/09  2:43pm
Mike Fontanelli says:

S’funny, I thought I heard:
“I buried Paul (Frees.)”

08/3/09  6:17pm
Joe Torcivia says:

Now, you’ve assured that this will never be released on DVD!

Gosh darn your blankety-blank hides!

Oh, wait… It’s Warners! We’re not getting anything from them this year, anyway!

08/3/09  8:59pm
Doug says:

Check out this one from the Electirc Company, it’s even stranger!

Youtube : “The Electric Company - What? (backwards message)”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IytV4Z9oBJA

08/4/09  6:12pm
Mesterius says:

Yep, this is hardcore all right…

…I love it! :D

08/4/09  8:08pm
OM says:

…It’s time, Jerry/Amid. We need a Canonical List of Secret Messages in Cartoons. Whether reverse speech or sped up, if it’s hidden, we need it listed!

(Remembers the day when someone would suggest such a list on usenet, and a thousand people would jump up and pitch in, while at least one egotistical net.god would claim he did it first but didn’t want to share the info…)

09/3/09  2:23am
Nancy Beiman says:

Director Dave Bennett slowed down one of Clarence “Ducky” Nash’s tracks once when we were animating some EPCOT films….and he told me Ducky’s mumbling was one long string of cuss words!

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