During the late 1930’s, the Fleischers’ Popeye the Sailor cartoons rivaled even Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse shorts in popularity, and this second collection makes it easy to understand why. In contrast to the realistically animated characters in Disney’s lavishly beautiful shorts, Popeye, Olive and Bluto were rubber-limbed and broadly comic. These cartoons aren’t badly animated: notice the fun the artists have with Olive’s precarious balance in “A Date To Skate” (1938) or the way the trio struggles to act refined in “It’s The Natural Thing To Do” (1939). The Fleischers’ approach to animation was just broader and cartoon-ier than Disney’s. But the period of 1938-1940 represented the last hurrah of the Popeye shorts. To accommodate the large staff needed for the studio’s first feature, Gulliver’s Travels (1939), producer Max Fleischer moved the studio from New York to Miami. The run-down apartment houses and gritty streets of the early Popeye cartoons gave way to suburban houses and gardens. The backgrounds and supporting characters in “Popeye Meets William Tell” (1940) look like leftovers from Gulliver, and the film lacks the élan of the shorts made just a year earlier. The studio would close and be re-organized under new management after the failure of Hoppity Goes to Town in 1941.

Popeye the Sailor: 1938-1940, Volume 2 is the second of a series of DVD sets released by Warner Home Video collecting, in chronological order, the theatrical Popeye cartoons originally distributed by Paramount Pictures. The collection features 30 regular one-reel black-and white Popeye cartoons, and also the last of the three two-reel Technicolor Popeye Color Specials, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp.

Links: TV.com

Popeye.the.Sailor.VOL.2.DVDRip.XviD-NODLABS
XviD | MP3 | 3.39GB

In 1933, a squint-eyed sailor with outsized forearms danced a hula with Betty Boop–and began one of the great series in American cartoon history. Popeye had made his debut in Elzie Segar’s comic strip “Thimble Theater” four years earlier, and the jump to animation only increased his popularity: by 1938, he rivaled Mickey Mouse. During the ’30s, when Disney was creating lushly colored, realistic animation, the Fleischer Studio presented a gritty black-and-white world that was ideally suited to the bizarre misadventures of Popeye, Olive, and Bluto. The animators ignored anatomy, with hilarious results: Olive Oyl’s rubbery arms wrap around her body like twin anacondas, and her legs often end up in knots. Exactly what Popeye and Bluto saw in this scrawny, capricious inamorata was never clear, but they fought over her endlessly.

The plot lines in the animated cartoons tended to be simple. A villain, usually Bluto, makes a move on Popeye’s “sweetie”, Olive Oyl. The bad guy then clobbers Popeye until Popeye eats spinach, which gives him superhuman strength. The fundamental character of Popeye, paralleling that of another 1930’s icon, Superman, also invokes traditional values possessing uncompromising moral standards and resorting to force only when threatened, or when he “can’t stands no more”! The first volume includes 58 (7-10 min) theatrical blk & white shorts from 1933 to 1938 and 2 two-reeler 20 minute color cartoons. This DVDRip PACK was released by group NODLABS. Besides the 60 episodes, audio commentary tracks and EXTRAS were also released by the group too.

Links: TV.com

Popeye.the.Sailor.VOL.1.DVDRip.XviD-NODLABS
XviD | MP3 | 5.1GB