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Art et designTranscription
00:00Hi, this is Mike Barrier. I'm the author of a biography of Walt Disney called The Animated
00:11Man and Walt Disney had nothing at all to do with this cartoon, which is a Popeye cartoon
00:16by Max and Dave Fleischer called King of the Mardi Gras, starring Popeye.
00:24This is a significant cartoon. It's the first cartoon in which Popeye's voice was provided
00:29by Jack Mercer, who did it thereafter for more than 40 years. It's Mercer's Popeye
00:34voice, which is much warmer and more flexible than his predecessor's voice, that defined
00:40the character in many people's minds.
00:45This is an interesting opening shot. If you look back there, you can see what's behind
00:49all this repeated animation of these crowds in front is actual models. The Fleischer's
00:53starting in 1934 began building what were called setbacks. These were little miniature
00:57sets and they would photograph the animation in front of these actual three-dimensional
01:01sets, sometimes very striking effects. Obviously, a lot of work went into them. It's sort of
01:07an inheritance from the 20s in a way, because then their principal character Coco the Clown
01:12was frequently put into live action settings, which sometimes they would actually be miniatures.
01:18But the setbacks were an effort by Fleischer essentially to give the cartoons a distinctive
01:23and appealing look at the time when the Disney cartoons were becoming more and more popular
01:26and had gone to color, and were otherwise generally setting the cartoon world afire.
01:31I'm Popeye the Sailor Man. I am what I am and that's all that I am. I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.
01:41I run the whole works here at Coney. We're power supreme.
01:51Now, this is the King of the Mardi Gras, of course, but there's a reference here that Bluto talks about Coney.
01:56In other words, it's New York, Coney Island in New York. And this is typical. The Fleischer
02:01cartoons are very distinctively Eastern urban cartoons. A lot of cartoons made on the West
02:06Coast kind of give away their West Coast origins. You'll see houses with tile roofs and little
02:10bungalows on large lots, things like this. But Fleischer cartoons are city cartoons.
02:14And even though we're talking Mardi Gras here, we're talking Coney Island, we're talking
02:18about the amusement park in New York that was so famous back in the early part of the 20th century.
02:49Now, Mercer was almost an accidental choice as Popeye. There were four Fleischer brothers
02:55who worked at the studio, Max and Dave and Charlie, who was sort of a mechanical type,
02:59and then Lou, who was the center of the music and sound head of the studio. And he overheard
03:05Mercer doing an imitation of Costello's Popeye voice when Mercer was an in-betweener at the
03:10studio. He'd had a certain amount of notoriety in that department as being a good imitator
03:15and he was imitating Costello's voice. The Fleischer brothers were getting unhappy with
03:19Red Pepper Sam, William Costello, because he was, for reasons that are unclear, but evidently
03:23he was giving them some trouble. And they heard Mercer and said, we'll give Jack Mercer
03:28a try. And Jack Mercer worked out just great and was, as I say, the voice of Popeye for
03:33many decades after that. When you think of Popeye, you think almost automatically of
03:37that voice and you're thinking of Jack Mercer.
03:45We are right back again.
03:50Will some lady kindly step up, please?
03:52Oh, that's me all over.
03:54Oh, you toots.
04:06Don't anyone want to see a man choke to death for you?
04:11Ladies and gentlemen, here we see the little lady floating in the air.
04:16Okidipokidip, round and round we go.
04:19No wires, no ropes holding the little lady up.
04:23No wires, no ropes.
04:26Okidipokidip, ipidipipidipop.
04:33One reason the voices and the sound in the Fleischer cartoons have such a distinct effect
04:37is that everything was recorded after the animation was done.
04:40So you have sound effects, music, voices, all recorded after the animation was done
04:44and all at the same time.
04:46The music is always kind of sparse and basic in these cartoons for the most part.
04:50The voices have a very unique character because there's quite a bit of what you'd call
04:54muttering or ad libs.
04:56Right now Popeye's talking toward Bluto and you don't really see his mouth moving
05:00in any way that suggests they're trying to synchronize his mouth movements with the actual dialogue.
05:06The idea was, as Jack Mercer said, that these ad libs were supposed to be somebody thinking out loud
05:10so there was not any particular importance attached to synchronizing that part of the dialogue
05:14with the mouth movements.
05:16So they would have synchronization like that, have mouth movements.
05:18For the most important dialogue, they'd go to Le Fleischer and figure out just exactly
05:22how much time to allot for certain pieces of dialogue.
05:25You'd tap out a beat and they would figure out how much time a certain word would take
05:29pronounced a certain way.
05:31So there'd be that much synchronization.
05:33What gave the cartoons their distinctive flavor was all this ad libing and muttering
05:36that, as Jack Mercer said, seemed to be thinking out loud
05:38and really wasn't intended to be heard by anybody else.
05:58I once did a phone interview with Jack Mercer and we talked about the ad libs
06:01and about the recording techniques and we'll hear a bit of that interview now.
06:31Actual lines were written while we would think of ad lib lines to fill it up.
07:02This sort of extremely busy, highly elaborate action that we're seeing
07:06as Popeye and Pluto and Olive Careen around the roller coaster
07:10really had no equivalent in the comic strip.
07:12It's remarkable how different the comic strip and the cartoons were at this point
07:15in the middle thirties. This cartoon came out in 1935.
07:18The Seaguar comic strip at this point, it's the same thing.
07:21The Seaguar comic strip, it's the same thing.
07:23The Seaguar comic strip, it's the same thing.
07:25The Seaguar comic strip, it's the same thing.
07:27The Seaguar comic strip, it's the same thing.
07:29The Seaguar comic strip at this time was sometimes devoted to,
07:32frequently devoted to stories that would run for months at a time,
07:36could actually be surprisingly serious in tone.
07:39There's always a sort of deadpan tongue-in-cheek quality to them, of course,
07:42because they were comic strip characters.
07:44But they were very different in that respect from the sort of very simple,
07:47basic conflicts that you had between Popeye and Pluto.
07:50Fortunately, those conflicts in the cartoons were played out frequently
07:54in this kind of elaborate and intricate and quite exciting animation.
07:58So it was a different sort of pleasure than the comic strip offered,
08:01but a real pleasure nevertheless.