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Under discussion:

Fightin' Pals  (1940)

Blogging at BoingBoing about a recently-released 4-DVD set of 1930s Popeye cartoons, Mark Frauenfelder wrote, “Cartoons don’t get any better than this.” I thought that a little funny (well, maybe not funny ha ha, but…) because just last night, my boyfriend and I were watching TV and when a commercial came on for the same box set, Mr. Karina said, “I wonder if that set includes all the racist Popeyes.”

I had not previously been aware that there was a sub-genre of Popeye cartoons that were racist, although I admit that I probably should have been. He’s already an unpleasant enough stereotype of a sailor–why wouldn’t he also be a vehicle for of-the-era anti-other prejudices?

Of course, I went straight to Google and did some research. According to Karl F. Cohen, who wrote a book called Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons And Blacklisted Animators in America, while a number of Popeye shorts are generally considered to be borderline too racist for TV, there’s been no formal attempt to remove these shorts from the marketplace, and it’s up to individual TV stations to decide which episodes to air.

All of the examples he names come from the 1940s, and therefore wouldn’t be contained on this new boxset. However, one of these, a sterling bit of World War II-era propaganda called You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap (1942) is readily available on YouTube, so it must be on some disc, somewhere. Of the eight shorts named by Cohen (who is in turn citing Paul Mulan), only one is in Spout’s database: Fightin’ Pals (1940). No one’s reviewed it yet, but according to its IMDb profile, the action starts when Bluto “sails off to Darkest Africa for exploration” and doesn’t come back right away. Popeye follows, and finds the good doctor with “a bevy of native beauties attending to his every need.” On Spout, I’ve helpfully tagged it “Racist Popeye” for future reference.

Thus concludes your lesson in Reprehensible Pop Culture of the Early 20th Century for today, kids. Go out and play.

Yesterday, an obituary for Jeremy Blake (see previous coverage here and here) appeared in the New York Times, alerting many to the story of his disappearance and his girlfriend Theresa Duncan’s death for the first time. Coming right on the tail of the deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, some suggested that the death-in-threes cliche was now complete.

On a comment on a post at The House Next Door, I wrote that I thought that Blake’s actual death occurred “too long ago to fit into this trifecta.” But then again … it might just be that no other moving image artist has died yet this week, but on further reflection I do feel as though Blake, though obviously not as accomplished or as well-known as the late European vanguards, can comfortably be spoken of in the same breath. At the very least, as someone known for producing a kind of moving painting (see his video for Beck’s “Round the Bend” above), he’s definitely got a kinship with Antonioni, a filmmaker who thought of himself as a painter and who literally painted props and locations in order to get his desired color effects.

I’ve rounded up a few odds and ends relating to all three deaths:

• Kate Coe has a long, investigative report on Duncan in the LA Weekly. The tenor of the piece can be gleaned pretty accurately from the subtitle: “A writer–game designer and her boyfriend commit suicide, and a façade falls away.” Duncan’s alleged first feature-in-progress was apparently part of the façade. Many, many additional details at the link.
• The Bergman Obit Master List has been updated to include comments from Woody Allen and Roger Ebert. If you know of a Bergman tribute that I’ve missed, please paste a link in the comments to that post.
• The Playlist offers an, um, playlist of songs from Antonioni movies.
• Jon Swift takes the opportunity of Bergman and Antonioni’s passings to coin the name of a new movement in critical theory: Derrièrism, inspired by Jack Warner’s habit of judging pictures “by whether his ass shifted in the seat while he was watching them.” Says Swift: “The deaths of Bergman and Antonioni have given Derrièrism is a shot in the arm, or a shot somewhere anyway.”
• Roger Ebert has compiled a number of celebrity tributes to Bergman, including testimonials from Studs Terkel, Guy Maddin and Richard Linklater. Says Maddin: “I subconsciously thought that guy would live for ever. Even though he’s dead now he must still be perceptibly animated somehow by his unkillable Swedish lust and dread.”

Under discussion:

Rocky Balboa  (2006)

Stardust  (2007)

• The French Commission for Film Classification is looking to extend its jurisdiction to festival films — meaning that it wants to have power to place age restrictions on screenings at Cannes and elsewhere. Apparently, the French censors are super-lenient when it comes to sex, but fairly strict on violence: the only film they’ve limited to audiences 18 and up of late is Saw III. So even if the censors do get their way, all those preteen film festival goers should still be able to get their softcore kicks at Cannes.
•  John Anderson reviews Stardust: “Sprinkled with tongue-in-cheek humor, fairly adult jokes and some well-known faces acting very silly, this adventure story should have particular appeal to fans of “The Princess Bride,” but in any event will never be mistaken for a strictly-for-kids movie.”
• Simon Cowell is producing a feature remake of Fame. “We want it to be the musical version of Rocky– an underdog story, a feel-good film.” Then can we just skip ahead to the sixth sequel, where the champion has brain damage but tries to compete again anyway?