Sunday night….well, actually, Monday morning at 1 AM…the Cartoon Network begins another season of The Popeye Show, a fine series that does everything a cartoon program ought to do: It takes great old cartoons, strikes off new prints with their original titles and runs them without cuts. This is always good but it's especially wonderful in the case of The Sailor Man, since of all the great animated characters, he's probably suffered the most.
His best films — the ones made by the Fleischer Studio — have too often been unavailable, or available in well-spliced, retitled and faded prints. Matter of fact, as various batches of Popeye cartoons were later made by other studios, the quality went steadily down and the availability became greater. The worse a Popeye cartoon was, the better your chances of seeing a good print of it. Nice to see Cartoon Network reversing the trend.