Popeye The Sailor (animated Cartoons) - Theatrical Popeye Cartoons On Television

Theatrical Popeye Cartoons On Television

The original 1932 agreement with the syndicate called for any films made within ten years and any elements of them to be destroyed in 1942. This would have destroyed all of the Fleischer Popeye shorts. King was not sure what effect the cartoons would have on the strip; if the effect was very negative, King was very eager to erase any memory of the cartoons by destroying them. Paramount knew that the Popeye cartoons were among their best-selling and most popular, and they held them separately for future distribution, seeing television as a rising outlet.

In 1956, Paramount sold the black and white cartoons to television syndicator Associated Artists Productions, the biggest distributor of the time, for release to television stations. Shown with a.a.p. logos replacing the Paramount logos (with one Paramount reference in the copyright line remaining), these cartoons were enormously popular. Jerry Beck likens Popeye's television success to a "new lease on life," noting that the character had not been as popular since the 1930s. King Features realized the potential for success and began distributing Popeye-based merchandise, which in turn led to new Popeye TV productions. These productions were farmed out to numerous studios and were of very low quality, employing limited animation, and many artists were unhappy with the quality of such cartoons. Most cities of large size aired an "uncle show," in which a local weatherman or entertainer would host a children's show in the afternoon, and Popeye shorts became a huge component in the success of these.

By the 1970s, the original Fleischer and Famous Popeye cartoons were syndicated to various stations and channels across the globe. In the intervening years, however, Popeye cartoons slowly disappeared from the airwaves in favor of newer television editions. a.a.p. was sold to United Artists, which was absorbed into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to create MGM/UA in 1981. Ted Turner purchased MGM/UA in 1986, gaining control of all Popeye shorts. Turner sold off the production end of MGM/UA shortly after, but retained the film catalog, giving it the rights to the theatrical Popeye library. After acquisition, the black-and-white Popeye shorts were shipped to South Korea, where artists retraced them into color. The process was intended to make the shorts more marketable in the modern television era, but prevented the viewers from seeing the original Fleischer pen-and-ink work, as well as the three-dimensional backgrounds created by Fleischer's "Stereoptical" process. Every other frame was traced, changing the animation from being "on ones" (24 frame/s) to being "on twos" (12 frame/s), and softening the pace of the films. These colorized shorts began airing on Superstation WTBS in 1986 during their Tom & Jerry and Friends 90-minute weekday morning and hour-long weekday afternoon shows. The retraced shorts were syndicated in 1987 on a barter basis, and remained available until the early 1990s. When the Cartoon Network began in 1992, they mostly ran cartoons from the Turner library, which included Popeye. Turner merged with Time Warner in 1996, and Warner Bros. (through its Turner subsidiary) therefore currently controls the rights to the Popeye shorts.

For many decades, viewers could only see a majority of the classic Popeye cartoons with altered opening and closing credits. Associated Artists Productions had, for the most part, replaced the original Paramount logos with their own. In 2001, the Cartoon Network, under the supervision of animation historian Jerry Beck, created a new incarnation of The Popeye Show. The show aired the Fleischer and Famous Studios Popeye shorts in versions approximating their original theatrical releases by editing copies of the original opening and closing credits (taken or recreated from various sources) onto the beginnings and ends of each cartoon, or in some cases, in their complete, uncut original theatrical versions direct from such prints that originally contained the front-and-end Paramount credits.

The series, which aired 135 Popeye shorts over forty-five episodes, also featured segments offering trivia about the characters, voice actors, and animators. The program aired without interruption until March 2004. The Popeye Show continued to air on Cartoon Network's spin-off network Boomerang. The restored Popeye Show versions of the shorts are sometimes seen at revival film houses for occasional festival screenings. The Popeye Show is currently airing on Cartoon Network in Pakistan as well as in India. In the U.S., a daily half-hour block of Popeye can be seen on the Boomerang network from time to time; however, the Fleischer Popeye shorts shown on this block are mostly the 1980s colorized versions, and most of the title cards thereof have been edited to the a.a.p. logo which replaces the original Paramount one.