The Fleischer Studio Popeyes

Last year, Warner Brothers put out a wonderful DVD set featuring 60 of the original, mostly black-and-white Popeye cartoons.

One of the many really neat qualities of the Popeye cartoons (and the Fleischer cartoons in general) is the seamless mesh of animation with music. These cartoons are timed to perfection--body language, movement and action all exquisitely match the accompanying music, which makes watching them an addictive experience.

One of the cartoons--The Man on the Flying Trapeze--is one of the few I had never seen before. It's so much fun to watch, I replayed it three times before finally moving on to the next cartoon on the disc.

Of course, now I have the song stuck in my head, but I've learned to live with that.

The DVD set is worth getting, both for the cartoons and the nifty little documentaries. But you can also see many of these cartoons on-line (most, if not all of them, have fallen into the public domain).

So if you want to risk being glued to your computer screen all day, unable to do anything productive, take a look at this link:

The Man on the Flying Trapeze