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The Lens: Popeye lives on in revealing DVD collection

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This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: What can you say about a 79-year-old sailor who's likely to live forever?

That he was strong to the finich? That he loved his pipe, skinny women and spinach?

Say what you will, the incomparably irascible Popeye -- who was first introduced by cartoonist E.C. Segar (a native of Chester, IL) on newspaper pages in 1929 and began a long and spectacular movie career four years later -- is finally getting his due on DVD with Warner Bros.' handsomely restored releases of the complete run of the original Fleischer Studio cartoons.

The first volume, which included the first 60 shorts, had little competition as my favorite DVD release of 2007. The second volume, "Popeye the Sailor: 1938-1940," in stores this week, adds the next 31 installments. A third volume, closing out the Fleischer years, will be released in September.

While most people are familiar with Popeye - the spinach, the theme song, his love for Olive Oyl and longstanding rivalry with Bluto - the original Fleischer cartoons (produced by Max, directed by his brother Dave) don't quite get the exposure as the Disney or Warner products of the same period. I suspect that's largely because, aside from three special two-reelers, they were produced in black-and-white (Fleischer's bosses at Paramount felt that Technicolor was too expensive).

Regardless of budget, the Popeye series holds it own against any other animation from its time. Though the films offer characters as well grounded as Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse, they also display the free-style surrealism of Fleischer's Betty Boop cartoons. And though they remained monochrome, they demonstrate a wide range of innovative animation techniques , from Fleischer's unique 3D-like multiplane camera to actual three-dimensional backgrounds. But unlike most technological achievements in animation, these effects aren't gaudy or obvious; they simply add a visual subtlety and depth that's atypical for cartoons of the period.

Another popular misconception worth shattering is that the cartoons are formulaic -- that every installment consists of a rivalry between Popeye and Bluto, usually resulting in Olive being stretched across the screen like a rubber band. In fact, the shorts contained in this collection are rarely repetitive (and less than half involve Bluto).

Having firmly established the personalities of Popeye and Olive, the Fleischers turn to the broader terrain of the Segar comic strip to add figures like Poopdeck Pappy, the Goons , and Eugene the Jeep. Swee'pea , the mischievous infant of questionable origin, also becomes a more prominent figure by the late '30s and a favorite source for gags.

The addition of other characters from "Thimble Theatre" helps lend the cartoons a touch of the comic strip's exoticism, but for the most part the cartoon series avoided the elaborate and lengthy plots of the print version and worked to develop new facets of Popeye and Olive, shaping them into broader and funnier figures. (Among the major inventions of the cartoon is Popeye's reliance on spinach, effectively transforming him from the all-around roughneck in the strip to the iron-fortified superhero we know today.)

If anything, the Popeye cartoons replaced the strip's generic "adventure" setting with one that is - for its time - conspicuously modern, a world in which traditional domestic archetypes are constantly being challenged by automation and progress. Popeye and company inhabit a world that is recognizably urban in design , continually changing and often threatening. In episode after episode, he views that world with alarm, plunges into whatever challenges it poses, and, with the help of a can of spinach, finds his place within it.

Like the first set, "Popeye the Sailor: 1938-1940" is handsomely packaged, with extra features that include an informative history of the Fleischer Studios, two non-Popeye cartoons, and a selection of brief reports on the characters and performers, as well as a comparative discussion of the one-eyed sailor and the Fleischer's other great animated hero, Superman.

Also on Dvd This Week:

"You Think You Really Know Me: The Gary Wilson Story" (Plexifilm): In the 1970s, Gary Wilson , an eccentric performance artist/musician living in a small town in New York, recorded and released an album of strange, Zappa-influenced jazz/pop/lounge music called "You Think You Really Know Me." Though fewer than 1,000 copies were pressed, the collection very slowly developed a small but devoted following whose members included the Replacements, Beck and "Simpsons" creator Matt Groening.

When a small record label decided to re-release Wilson's work in 2000, information about the artist and his whereabouts was impossible to come by, even after hiring a private detective. With persistence, Wilson was tracked down to San Diego, where he works in a porno store and plays in a lounge band on weekends. By 2002, as Michael Wolk's amusing film documents, he agreed to take a train to New York (he's afraid of flying) to give his first live performance of his own music in 20 years. A cult is born.

Or is it? Wilson and his friends and family seem less inclined to cast him as an unsung genius than they are to simply look back at their experiences with a perfectly normal amount of nostalgia and amusement. There's an endearing home-movie quality at work that makes Wilson's story accessible. One of the more appealing aspects of the film is that it makes no effort to cast Wilson as the tortured, starving artist, no lofty claims for his music. Fortunately, the DVD comes with a CD of the 1977 album, so you can decide for yourself.

And, finally, "The Carmen Miranda Collection" (20th Century Fox):

Five films featuring the tropical bombshell. That's a lot of bananas:

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Robert Hunt is a longtime film reviewer and regular contributor to The Lens