An absolute shocker of a short. My partner just said: "I'm sick to the stomach watching it." She doesn't want to continue (we've only seen half), and I have interrupted the playing to start this review.
There is a warning at the start of these Popeye shorts (Popeye the Sailor 1933-1938) about how attitudes have changed:
"The animated shorts you are about to see are a product of their times. They may depict some of the ethnic, sexist and racial prejudices that were common place in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today."
The writer of that note forgot to mention another prejudice: the prejudice that tolerated violence. Apart from the opening minute, the rest is sadistic and cruel. The only features of this cartoon that raised it above 1-star were the title, the "be kind to animals' attitude of Popeye and Olive, and the window it gives into the mindset of a typical 1930's audience: that it was okay to throw punches for no reason and be violently cruel to animals, and that those behaviours can be a source of humour.
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of our Nature) has documented the fall in violence in society and this short is evidence of same. Brutality such as this, masquerading as humour, wouldn't be acceptable today.
I purchased the DVD and will be keeping it. I'm not suggesting it should be censored or kept from the public, but I certainly won't be showing it to friends in our home-theatre evenings, except as an example of the depravity of 1930's audiences (assuming audiences back then found this type of cartoon funny). I think they would have. After all, blood sports in the Colosseum were considered great entertainment, and bull-fights still operate in Spain.
Aside from my low rating, this cartoon is worth watching as a reminder of how far we have come, and the long way we still have to go regarding violence.
