# Popeye fans **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 21, 2003, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/popeye-fans/163196 "2003-03-21T20:06:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Walloon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/fbc32d/32.png) [@Walloon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walloon)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2003, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/popeye-fans/163196/21 "2003-03-25T05:24:27Z")
There was nothing rough about the color technology used to make the two-reel specials _Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor_ (1936) and _Popeye Meets Ali Bab and His 40 Thieves_ (1937). It was the same Technicolor, processed through the same Technicolor labs, that Disney used at the time for all its cartoons. The problem is that those two Popeye cartoons are now in the public domain, and you’re more likely to see a bad dupe than a copy made from the original film materials. ---
**Author:** ![squeegee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/squeegee/32/14537_2.png) [@squeegee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/squeegee)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2003, 6:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/popeye-fans/163196/22 "2003-03-25T06:48:38Z")
**Walloon** , hmm, you’re quite right about the color process, apologies. I was misremembering what was surrealistic about those particular animations: the Fleischers’ used a special “tridimensional camera” and miniatures to approximate 3D. The result was quite odd, to say the least. I’m not finding a googlable cite, but C. Solomon’s _The History of Animation, Enchanted Drawings_ (Knopf, 1989) p79 contains a very brief mention of the technique – I’d love to know more if someone has a better reference. Another Popeye quotable (Popeye to the magic door in “Ali Baba”): **"Open – sez me!"** ---
**Author:** ![Walloon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/fbc32d/32.png) [@Walloon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walloon)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2003, 7:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/popeye-fans/163196/23 "2003-03-25T07:02:50Z")
**squeegee** , here’s a Paramount studio press release from the 1930s, explaining Fleischer’s “3-D” process: > [@](#): > > Ordinary cartoons today are drawn and the drawings are photographed. With the method which Fleischer has introduced for Popeye the cartoon studio looks like a duplicate in miniature of a regular Hollywood production camp. Sets are built and scaled down so that they will fit on a revolving turntable. This “set” is within six feet of a special lens and camera. The machinery entailed in the new process weighs some three tons. It has trusses, moveable tables, cranks, steel framework, gears and gadgets enough to make a mechanical engineer dizzy. In other words, painted animation cells containing the characters were hung upright in a frame in front of the miniature set that served as the background, which could be incrementally rotated between frames to imitate a travelling shot. To add to the illusion of depth, sometimes foreground objects were placed in front of the cell frame (e.g, miniature bushes in an outdoor scene, miniature telephone poles in an urban scene). ---
**Author:** ![Walloon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/fbc32d/32.png) [@Walloon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walloon)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2003, 7:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/popeye-fans/163196/24 "2003-03-25T07:11:01Z")
Leonard Maltin adds in his book _Of Mice and Magic_, > [@](#): > > [Fleischer’s] Turntable camera preceded Walt Disney’s much-publicized multiplane camera by several years, and one wonders why Fleischer didn’t make as big a splash with his equally worthy invention. This injustice adds fuel to the fire of contention that Fleischer was really as much a pioneer as Disney, but simply not as recognized by the industry and the public in his time. ---
**Author:** ![squeegee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/squeegee/32/14537_2.png) [@squeegee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/squeegee)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2003, 7:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/popeye-fans/163196/25 "2003-03-25T07:25:00Z")
**Walloon** : Thanks for the references – much appreciated. It sounds like this technique was fairly painstaking – it must’ve been murder for the cel photographer (or whatever the correct term is) to hang up a cell on a stand, move a large turntable full of minatures one increment, dash back to the camera, shoot one frame, then do it all again. I can’t even imagine the ulcers that this would cause the animators. Fleischer was certainly a pioneer, but I could see how the help at the studio wouldn’t cozy to this sort of tomfoolery. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2003, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/popeye-fans/163196/26 "2003-03-25T14:36:02Z")
> [@](#): > > By “re-animated”, do you mean each cell was drawn again from scratch? Or what? Yep. If you see the cartoons, you’d realize that they’d just re-drawn them. Maybe they rotoscoped them, which would be ironic, since the Fleischers invented and patented the rotoscope. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/popeye-fans/163196.md?page=1)