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JERRY BECK
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AMID AMIDI
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Vintage Popeye frame by frame
by jerry
November 6, 2008 1:00 am


Your moment of Zen: Fleischer historian Leslie Cabarga put this Shockwave Flash (SWF) file together awhile ago from ALL the drawings in this scene from Sock-A-Bye Baby (most of which have been sold). Click Here!

11/6/08  1:28am
Brad Constantine says:

I couldn’t help noticing that Popeye takes an open can of spinach out of his shirt and then puts it back in after a few bites. I bet the smell of that would blow you down…thanx fer sharing. we need more frame by frame goodness online to study and appreciate.

11/6/08  1:58am
Pez says:

AMAZING! The drawings have so much personality. I love that every frame of the feet are even different. The slight squash on the feet and legs give Popeye a lot of weight. I once saw a huge scene from “The Henpecked Duck” of Daffy desperately trying to make the egg reappear, over at Van Eaton Galleries. I believe who ever bought those drawings bought them all together. If true I wonder if that person is a reader and if they would like to share? . Whenever I buy a piece of animation art I share it with the Asifa Hollywood Animation Archive. Imagine if everyone that bought or owned animation art did that! We might be able to reconstruct whole chunks of cartoons in pencil test form. Just wishful thinking I know.

Thanks for the post Jerry!

11/6/08  9:37am
Sam Levine says:

Wow! This is amazing to see! I spent hundreds of hours watching Popeye after school, but never saw animation drawings move in sequence. It’s nice to see a bit of animation history that stands out from both Disney, WB & MGM in this form.

Thanks for posting!

11/6/08  10:07am

The real art of animation is visible in the sketch. This is gorgeous stuff. I gotta admit I teared up a little seeing that. Thank you, Leslie Cabarga.

11/6/08  10:13am

I think there’s a drawing out of order.

11/6/08  12:10pm

Wow! Beautiful and fascinating.

11/6/08  12:15pm
Mike Fontanelli says:

There is indeed one drawing out of sequence, but it’s incredible nonetheless. Original Fleischer artwork is rarer than hen’s teeth, unfortunately - most of it didn’t survive the WWII paper drives. To this day, the Fleischers are criminally underrated. BTW, the classic Fleischer style has been beautifully captured by cartoonist Steve DeStefano, who’s been designing the recent DVD boxes.

11/6/08  2:58pm
John says:

There actually was a scene like this during the series’ run — Dave Tendlar in the 1937 cartoon “Fowl Play” used the non-inked animation drawings of Bluto being repeatedly punched into and bounced off Olive’s house wall. Very unexpected and effective.

11/6/08  5:15pm
Fred Cline says:

Still charming after all these years. My 9-year-old discovered the old b/w Popeyes on the DVD collection and they are his favorite cartoons!

11/7/08  5:04am
Bob Porrazzo says:

Well shiver me timbers! And Fred, you are raising a good kid!

11/7/08  9:26am
top cat james says:

Re: Pez

Back in the early 90’s, I attended a comic book convention where one of the vendors told me he owned an original pencil test sequence of Yosemite Sam ( from the scene he described, it sounded like it was from “Honey’s Money”). Then he told me he was going to break it up and sell the individual drawings. I shook my head and thought, “What a dick”.

11/7/08  1:21pm

By the way, this looks a lot like Roland “Doc” Crandall’s animation to me, how about the rest of yez?

11/7/08  4:37pm
Greg Lee says:

Hats off to top cat james, above, for noting that selling individual drawings from a complete scene is something truly lamentable. Like the gallery’s recently tearing apart an old Schlesinger studio publicity book in order to sell it page by page, this is no less than an act of vandalism. Would anyone ever feel good about dismembering a church triptych or the pages of an illuminated manuscript? Horrors.

11/5/09  11:15am
corey waters says:

i like the picture. its really good. i wish i could draw that good, ive had a lot of practice and i still cant do that. c(=

11/5/09  11:16am
corey waters says:

thats one of my new tattoo’s. im gonna have popeye doing a superman on a bmx bike.

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