Big Bad Sindbad

Remembering, too much, Popeye meeting Sindbad , it has the only two virtues - the naughty nephews in the visit to the naval museum and the statue of their uncle , conclusion of story, hommage to their hero.

The producers of this particularly Popeye cartoon got lazy and decided to spend much of the time using footage of a past episode. "Cheaters," I guess, is what they call that kind of practice. Anyway, I think it's a cop-out and lazy way to present a "new" animated short.

It begins with Popeye bringing three nephews into the "Nautical Hall Of Fame." There, he shows them "Washington Crossing the Delaware" in which the kids then start rowing the boat across the room. Then, it's "Noah's Ark," where Popeye notes that Noah was "the world's first sailor." Then the shows the kids a big statue of "Sindbad, the Greatest Sailor In History.

The kids ask Popeye, "We thought YOU were the greatest sailor in the world." Popeye answers, "I am," and then relates the story of his adventures with Sinbad - in which we get footage of the earlier cartoon "Popeye Meets Sindbad The Sailor."

There is a cute ending when the story is over and the nephews are convinced Popeye is still number one.

Popeye takes his nephews to the Nautical Museum. They come upon a statue of Sindbad. Popeye tells them a story. It's the Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936). Recycling happens a lot back in the day. This is not worst example. At least, it makes sense to do the flashback. I would recommend watching the original.

"Cheaters", cartoons that use stock footage and clips from previous cartoons to form the bulk of a "new" cartoon, usually with new footage as a framing device to incorporate the re-used clips, are not all that unusual. What makes this one of the strangest compilation cartoons is the fact that Paramount Famous Studios uses clips from Popeye Meets Sinbad the Sailor, which was made by Fleischer Studios (!) in 1936! Fleischer Studios made three color Popeye two-reel "Specials" in the mid-to-late 1930s. Paramount Famous Studios made three "cheaters" using footage from those three Fleischer shorts. The truly sad thing is, using the older footage makes it crystal clear how much better the old Fleischers were in terms of animations, backgrounds and plotting compared to the 1950s Paramount Famous Studios product. To be fair, cost had a lot to do with the disparity-it was a lot more expensive in the 1950s to make cartoons. But mostly, the 1950s Popeyes were remakes of old Fleischer shorts done in color with a few changes. Here, the framing footage is nice, but 75% of the cartoon is older material and they re-looped some of the dialogue and changed it, losing some of the charm. This is the saddest of the cheaters, because Sinbad was the best of the two-reel Specials. Big Bad Sinbad isn't that bad a cartoon, actually. It simply isn't that good, either. For completeists only, or people who just like Popeye, period.

One thing to note about the old Fleischer footage is that it has a new soundtrack recorded by Jack Mercer, Mae Questel, Jackson Beck and music director Winston Sharples.

I would have been nice if the late Willard Bowsky got animation credit for the old footage. In case you didn't know, Bowsky was the head animator for the original "Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor" footage. Bowsky joined the U.S. Army after Pearl Harbor and was killed in action in France.

Besides the number of nephews reduced to three (which one fell victim to budget cuts?), it's noteworthy that this cartoon features Popeye in his original sailor outfit before he joined the U.S. Navy at the end of the Fleischer era.