Cops is Always Right (Commentary)
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Hi, this is Mike Barrier. I'll be talking with you about Cops is Always Right. This is a
00:09Popeye cartoon made by the Max Flasher Studio and released in 1938. This is one of the last
00:15Popeye cartoons made when the Flashers were in New York. The studio went through a traumatic
00:20strike in 1937 and then the Flashers, about six months later in 1938, announced they were
00:26moving to Miami, Florida. They built a new studio there. This is a very unusual Popeye.
00:37You'll not see any spinach in it, for one thing, and there's no Bluto. This is an example of how
00:41the Flashers were much more ingenious at coming up with stories that were not simply spinach
00:49and Bluto based than some of the later makers of Popeye cartoons were. There's more variety in
00:55their cartoons, particularly the ones they made in New York, than there was later. In fact,
00:59this is almost imaginable as a live-action to real comedy at the time. You can picture somebody like
01:04Leon Erol, one of the actors at that time, starring in a comedy that was virtually identical to this.
01:09Now, there are specific things about it, of course, that are very definitely animated,
01:13but the general structure of it has a sort of live-action comedy feel to it.
01:25Listen to the soundtrack there, the music as this goes along. It's, I think, a classic Lou
01:40Fleischer musical production. It's very simple musical accompaniments and there's quite a few
01:44stretches without any music at all. There's ocarinas, you'll hear, and accordion. There are
01:49other things that are just, again, very, very different from the cartoon composers in the West
01:53Coast, like Carl Steyling or Scott Bradley. There's a very distinct flavor that speaks of New York
01:58and of this particular period.
02:24Now, we're going to see a good example right here of the Fleischer's facility with what most
02:30people call effects animation, that is where you're not animating characters, you're animating
02:33things and natural phenomena, things like this. And here, see Popeye flipping all this furniture
02:39on a pile, wrapping it up, and then watch what he does. It looks so effortless.
02:52Fleischer cartoons, for me, are the most charming when they are doing this sort of thing here.
03:00Watch how he flips it open, furniture all pops into place. Other room, same way. It's a different
03:04sort of thing entirely from the sort of character animation or personality animation we associate
03:09with Disney and Warner Brothers, but it has a charm that I think is undeniable.
03:22What I would call the mechanical or the, again, it sounds almost like a derogatory word and I don't mean it that way, but I think this is probably the strongest reflection of Max Fleischer's own interest.
03:37He liked to work with machines. He was a great inventor. There are other people in animation who were very much that way, like Abai works on the West Coast.
03:44People whose strongest interest was in the mechanics of animation, the way cartoons were made, and not so much with creating characters and bringing characters to life on the screen.
03:51The Fleischers came up with very few enduring characters of their own. Betty Boop's probably the most famous, but certainly there was never a Fleischer character that was as enduring as all the characters that came out of the West Coast studios, like the Disney characters and Bugs Bunny and other Warner Brothers characters.
04:06It simply wasn't where the interest of Max and Dave Fleischer lay. In fact, their most famous character, of course, is Popeye, and he was owned not by them, but by Kingfisher Syndicate.
04:15So they couldn't get all the merchandise benefits, for example, that Disney got from characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
04:45Max Fleischer is something of a shadowy figurehead to most people. You see his name on the screen, but he never had a public persona of the sort that Walt Disney eventually had, or like some of the cartoon directors at Warner Brothers.
05:01But people who knew him liked him. He was evidently a very nice man. Here's a little bit about him from Dave Tindler, who was one of the animation directors at Fleischer in the 30s.
05:15He was a very quiet, sort of a retiring ball, and a highly intelligent man, and a very fine person, a wonderful personality, but he was sort of an introverted man you might say.
05:31He just liked to go into his own laboratory or his own machine shop and putter with his inventions and creating new ideas and new ways and methods of doing different things in the studio and designing different pieces of equipment and so on.
05:54And he contributed an awful lot in the studio. Many people think that Dave was the head of the studio and did all the creative work, but I think that Max contributed just as much to her. They all complimented each other.
06:13That was Dave Tindler talking with my good friend and colleague Milton Gray.
06:17Dave Fleischer and Max Fleischer were very different people, and unfortunately this ultimately led to a breakup of their long-time partnership and their studio. It was one of the sad developments in animation's history.
06:46I always respect the law, cause I'm Popeye the Sailor Man!