Popeye’s Island Adventures, the worst Popeye cartoon I never heard of. I alluded to it briefly at least twice in the past, thinking it better to not dwell on, the more recent time receiving comments –and I often don’t receive any– to the effect that the commentators had heard even less of it than I had, so perhaps I ought to say SOMETHING about it. I seem to have far too much to say about it.
in 2018ish I had been aware of the notoriously low-quality cartoons that King Features produced to try and capitalize on the high returns of 1930s popeye cartoons that had begun being broadcast on television in the 1950s. King Features actually owned Popeye but had licensed the character to Fleischer Studios and then Paramount, but was missing out on big buck$ due to not owning the animated cartoons. And so King endeavored to make hundreds of its own cartoons on the lowest budgets possible with the dumbest Tom and Jerry ripoff plots ever, their only legitimacy coming from employing the same three voice actors who had most recently been associated with Popeye, Olive Oyl and Bluto in the Paramount cartoons. Which also tended to have moronic one-dimensional plots but at least were well-animated. So then inexplicably King Features’ awful cartoons turned out to also be popular, and also for, honestly, no good reason, renamed Bluto to Brutus and changed his design in a superficial manner that could easily be written off as a consequence of the budget reduction, which led to an entire generation of television viewers being confused about what Popeye’s recurring foe’s name was.
Anyway I was finally looking those up, and surprisingly they were on youtube, which had for years been deleting uploads of Popeye cartoons, but these were on the “OFFICIAL popeye and friends” youtube account, and indeed they were awful and formulaic, with occasional bits of surrealism and intensity that unfortunately are subordinate to the formulaicness. I had been writing obsessive notes about a particularly abysmal entry, name of “Hoppy Jalopy,” and at the end observed:
even if the animation and art didn’t look like they cost 2 cents to make this might be the worst popeye cartoon you (you being me) have seen, although the uploading account has a number of videos labeled “popeye for kids” that look to be at the level of the “capn crunch show” that you avoided some years ago.
“Popeye for Kids” turns out to be an unofficial title for Popeye Island Adventures but that even the official account for uses. This official Popeye youtube account had uploaded all those old cartoons legally as a way of establishing legitimacy for the new series it was trying to push. It chose the 1950s King ones because those are the ones it owns, and also that its new series looks better when compared against, and yet still not better than.
Everything about this is dumb. How are diesel and punk more ‘eco friendly’ than a character born before the invention of mass-production?
This text dump seems like something somebody would come up with as a parody of the aimless mega-liberal boredom sources that continually rise in modern cartoons. also Popeye has a whistle instead of a pipe. Why he needs a whistle was less important than him not needing a pipe, and if he simply was not given a pipe OR a whistle viewers might possibly have not noticed and then the writers couldn’t pat themselves on the back for being so progressive.
But why does the new Bluto seek Popeye’s spinach if Popeye doesn’t get strength from it and Olive is the strong one, quite without needing spinach? The only reason Bluto would assume spinach was a source of strength would be if he had been watching better Popeye cartoons.
Variations on this nonanimated graphic appear during the extremely, for lack of a better word, gay closing theme song. “you NEVER seen a nuther sailor DO the things he can,” says the song with nothing to say, that only talks at all after the wordless cartoon to make sure the intended audience knows what it is called, I suppose. That it sings the words “Popeye the sailor man” rather than “Popeye for kids” or “Popeye’s island adventures” may indicate uncertainty on the part of the hack song-creating algorithm about what this cartoon was called or what purpose it was meant to serve, or possibly a profound awareness that it ultimately has no purpose.
something is really off about bluto and I had to look in the comments (which have since been disabled by the page owner) to realize that he is missing a beard. How is a BEARD offensive? I realize I said blippi’s beard was offensive to ME but first of all it isn’t a real beard and presumably he has the same target demographic as this. I suppose they wouldn’t want to give the “nu-male” beard to a character who is not meant to be a role model, and perhaps real beards are just illegal, or retroactively proclaimed to be appropriation of religious customs, or feared that in the near future they might be.
And ah ha ho ha if Olive is supposed to be so strong and independent, why is she put into this weakling feet-pointed-at-each-other anime waifu pose? Unless she is about to fall down or do the Charlie Brown Christmas dance there is no justification for this. Hey why don’t corporate entities ever try to make Peanuts media For Kids? I don’t know anyone under the age of 50 who cares about it. Olive’s eyes each also have a tiny little line jutting off the tops of them, hinting at false eyelashes, a trait not traditionally associated with Olive’s character design except late in the Paramount era when she was made into a shrill Minnie Mouse style character and meant to be conventionally attractive rather than independent or even funny. Island Adventures Olive ends up not being any of those things.
The yellow creature is Eugene the Jeep and is in fact an authentic Thimble Theatre/Popeye character from EC Segar’s comic strips, and the automobile brand “Jeep” is even named after it. Eugene did appear in a few late Fleischer Studios cartoons (Popeye describes it as “a magical dorg”), but didn’t work well with the less storyline-driven formulas and rarely, if ever, appeared until the 1978 bad Popeye cartoon where it at least appears in the opening sequence. Though I enjoy the Popeye comic strips they are entertaining for a different reason than the animated cartoons are when they are, and so it is of not much surprise that the more the cartoons try to incorporate elements from the comics, the less they work.
Despite being a near-irrelevant mascot character in Popeye Whyland Nonventures, that actually makes it considerably less unlikable than the ostensibly more important figures. As far as I can determine, J Wellington Wimpy does not appear at all. With his most noteworthy trait being how much he annoys other characters, his omission in this subtlety-free positivity fest is also not surprising. If I said his most noteworthy trait was his fondness for hamburgers, I would be yet less surprised that he wasn’t in this cartoon. 2018 Wimpy may even canonically STILL eat hamburgers and just have given up trying to mooch them off of anyone who IS in this cartoon.
Even the lack of dialog is cited as a culturally progressive trait. So it will be “as funny in bangladesh*” as elsewhere. Except it isn’t funny anywhere and the new premise still has to be spelled out, since I did not pick up on the concept of Popeye growing spinach and saving rainwater nor of Olive being an “independent woman” until I read that these were the case in a press statement. One of the funny things about popeye has always been how he talked. Also how he looked and behaved. What IS popeye without those things? Just some guy who likes boats and spinach. Or if you go back to Segar’s 1929 Popeye, just some guy who likes boats. Maybe that is a better “role model” but there is no reason to care enough to want to emulate this Popeye, much less watch him do things other than like boats and spinach.
*Unfortunately I cannot locate now the specific press statement which used this line but I insist it exists. I would not have thought up that stupid an excuse myself and not remembered I had.
The videos, in addition to having their comments hidden, have also had their own descriptions removed in the time since I initially sloppened upon them. They aren’t anything especially incriminating, and you can still find them through archive.org, though nothing behind the “SHOW MORE” button, but their subsequent deletion functions as evidence that the property owners, conscious of the intense negative reactions, even from people that aren’t me, have attempted wherever possible to make the aura about these things more ambiguous, since they failed to achieve one that was pleasant.
Oh there’s that again! Never in my life have i heard or read someone say
ALSO “squash and stretch” in this instance is misleading because stretching or squashing a frame of cheap digital cutout animation is extremely easy and handled by the software. The artists aren’t individually drawing those frames, and so individual elements do not react to being stretched or squashed, and everything has a uniform line weight and so still looks flat and lifeless.
popeye looks so awkward moving around; he is behind an object one moment then immediately in front of it, like an old nintendo game. His individual parts all are moved but do not look like they are moving. Which is fine, for budget animation, so long as you don’t try to put this budget animation on level with something that is leagues superior to it.
Even the completely unauthorized “Popeye’s Takeaway” in Blackpool, England, is a more faithful and interesting use of the character than “Island Adventures.” King Features can’t do anything about it because, apart from the King’s authority only being ceremonial there, governments other than the United States’ don’t bend over backward to indefinitely prolong corporate copyrights on lucrative characters, although I can imagine the totally unrelated Popeyes (no apostrophe) fried chicken restaurant
having a problem or getting a problem if they ever try to expand into that region. I absolutely believe the decision to feature fried chicken on the window was made after confused tourists came into the store and asked for fried chicken rather than because the people in charge knew how to prepare it. Even in England the Eastern-Europe-style takeout joint motto is “put everything on the menu and use someone else’s pictures.” I am impressed they bothered to have someone paint that one awkward Popeye on the left, holding a can of spinach like he intends to drink it.
back to the cartoon, since I wrote allll this garbage, is it fair to issue an assessment based on a single two minute episode? yes because it isn’t popeye, it is rubbish that i wouldn’t have watched even one episode of if it had not claimed to be Popeye. It is like a video game made by Ocean. And then I felt GUILT about saying that and watched another. If something promoting itself to be a continuation of something else does not quickly establish itself as worthy of what it claims to follow, then I owe it no further attention, particularly something that hasn’t been interesting in almost 80 years, and should have been made public domain before now. The longer it isn’t, the more diluted and pointless it becomes.
Every decade gives “kids” less respect, and material that purports to be “for” them gets dumber.
yes I consider 2021 to be the next decade.
If you think it is irresponsible to show kids cartoons of fake people beating each other up and engaging in other uncouth behaviors, just don’t show them those cartoons.
There doesn’t neet to be a demographically prescribed version of every ancient character. Assuming this is meant to be a muppet babies-style companion to regular popeye rather than a replacement, I do find it less objectionable than muppet babies in any form, but I still wouldn’t recommend any of them to anyone.
Even in the 1930s Popeye was being watered down by corporate interests worrying about “the kids,” which is the sole reason Popeye’s creator EC Segar had him start eating spinach instead of big unseasoned lumps of beef to begin with.
(and also stop swearing at and physically assaulting hospital workers) and even after that happened Popeye didn’t depend on spinach to solve all his problems. It was only turned into an effective recurring gimmick in the animated cartoons because the Fleischer studios had good writing and production values. After Paramount kicked out the Fleischer brothers and took over the studio, they demanded a more disney-like product and the writing eroded immediately; popeye became a one-note, spinach-addicted loser who couldn’t do -anything- without it, Olive turned into Minnie, as I mentioned earlier, and perhaps most critically, voice actors had to stop ad-libbing lines. Ironically, it was trying to imitate Disney’s feature length productions that put the Fleischers into debt in the first place, as their shorter cartoons, foremost those featuring Popeye, had continued to come out on schedule and be lucrative. Anyway when King Features made their own cartoons the budgets caught down with the writing.
the next logical step was then, in any other situation objectively illogical, were offerings from Hanna Barbera in the 1970s and 80s, in which Bluto and Popeye were already forbidden from punching each other but not yet from speaking, being old or having beards. The trend continued in 2005’s “Popeye: Rush For Spinach” where characters still looked the same but in addition to not fighting didn’t do anything else either apart from occasionally awkwardly appropriating youth culture they didn’t understand. And now in Popeye For Kids they finally add looking totally different on top of acting totally different. I am not even sure why the latest Popeye even needs spinach if there is nobody for him to fight. Although, as noted, the spinach wasn’t even necessarily EC Segar’s idea. So by now the character has been robbed of everything that WAS segar’s idea and is exclusively comprised of an accumulation of the managements’ ideas. Segar himself got dead in 1938 at the age of 43 from liver disease AND leukemia and never had to see this happen, but couldn’t do anything to stop it, either.
I suppose it speaks to the strength of his creation that it took 80 years from the time of his death for the work to reach rock bottom.
although I like to believe Popeye was actually replaced by an impostor ages ago and escaped with at least whatever dignity he ever had.
aw naw blippy.
according to legend, recently my mother Thorax was shopping with my slightly-less-recently-turned-six-years-old niece Violin and pointed out this display, then Violin said something like “i don’t like Blippi anymore.” Thorax responded “well maybe it is something for littler kids” and then Violin said “NO, it’s for ALL kids.” However neither turns out to be true, for the boxes here all say
“Not for children under 3 years.” You are either meant to blatantly ignore the safety guidelines associated with this screeching preaching hyperactew or encourage children old enough to know better to partake of his offerings.
I first became aware of blipson 1-3 years ago at a time when Violin was perhaps just entering the target range of these toys and fortunately either they weren’t available or we simply had not come across any. Unfortunately his videos were in ample supply and I had my fill surprisingly quickly, even beside a child who watched the utterly braindead and marketer-approved “baby shark” on a loop. blippo is extraordinarily annoying and creepy. He tries to put forth an “educational” image but it is fake. Even these boxes say “collect them all,” which is a fundamentally uneducational thing to encourage anybody to do at any age.
It seems that many adults also think he was/is creepy but cannot articulate why. I can. I just never had a justification to until he appeared in real space that I potentially have access to. He is creepy because he is phony and gross. Even before I knew he was a shill for mass-produced landfill filler I thought that, though that helps me put it better in perspective. That guy looks like he smells like human fecal matter and apple juice. Largely due to the combination of neon plastic clothes like kids wore in the early 1990s but the full grown man body and the fact that he is never ever fully shaven and his mouth never fully closed. he looks like a mentally disabled adult. which isn’t a crime but I was in special education, as a student, for a long time, and this guy reminds me of some of the more tragic cases, except it’s totally deliberate. including the attire like a parent chose and applied it, the ugly hat that looks like a helmet and worst of all the facial hair. That cartoon drawing of him makes sure to color in the place where his beardling is in a slightly darker color. Not a real beard, just light annoying hair so that he looks dirty. it reminds me of when somebody uses scissors to cut the tag off of blankets or cushions instead of removing the stitching, so there is always tag residue and it is worse than the full tag being there because I KNOW it is there but it can hide. I don’t want to worry about Blippy hiding in my bed when I stay at a motel.
The writer of that other piece annoyed by blippi concedes “He’s wholesome” but he isn’t! He is bad. He’s even named after the sound of swear words being covered up on broadcast television. In actual video blechhi is loud and obnoxious, and again it is totally deliberate and calculated. I think hating something for being deliberately annoying is valid. Even if an annoying thing has ostensibly educational goals. It is not socially educational. Nobody should aspire to act how he acts. And the guy is maybe educational about one tenth of the time, and just being a noisy jackass the rest of the time. The contradictions are maddening. He is childlike but built like some creep who got drunk at your house and passed out on your couch. he is exuberant and innocent yet condescending if you have soda in your house. He is utterly amasculine, but with that ugly forced mini-beard like he is a stock photo of a “rebel entrepreneur,” while dressed and talking like
Tony Barbieri, writer of ‘Monroe,’ Mad Magazine’s worst recurring feature, portraying Jake Byrd, one of Jimmy Kimmel’s numerous worst recurring features. Who is also unforgivably annoying but fortunately not marketed at toddlers and thus never going to get into the toy section of a department store.
I had to delete the email that I forwarded to myself with the store photograph in it just because seeing his sleaze makes me so uncomfortable. I mean blippy’s sleaze, not byrd’s, but byrd would also have to go in the mercifully improbable same situation. And then I avoided looking at the picture between then and today, and realized I initially misread, at small size on my mobile machine, the command “let’s roll” as “let’s pop,” and prepared some statements about why “let’s pop” is a stupid thing to say and now I can’t even use that*, and I think that also counts as a valid reason to not like blipli. Certainly it is better for his case that he isn’t commanding children to pop with him, but I don’t want him commanding children to do anything with him. I’m not saying I think he is a sexual predator, but I would only be about 5% surprised if he was. But I also am never surprised when anybody who gets rich off of youtube videos turns out to be one of those or a neo-nazi, and it seems like they all eventually do.
Isn’t it fundamentally un-wholesome of me to encourage such a strong rejection of someone, especially an ostensibly educational persona, based on how they look and sound? Not if the rejectee is only pretending to look and sound that way. blippi is deliberate, blippi is an act, by an actor, and I have every right to disapprove of that act simply on the basis of its outward appearance. And as noted he’s also selling toys designed to look like him now.
Say what you must about Michael Jackson, but dressing like a clown, having a ferris wheel at his house, having a life-size cardboard cutout of Peter Pan in his bed room, that wasn’t an act, that was real, and everybody could see it, and they STILL let their kids sleep next to him. It is bizarre now that youtube actors in a sense emulate some of Jackson’s weirdness on purpose and they still get encouraged for it.
*
what does “let’s pop!” mean? surely this is not encouraging children to overinflate themselves, but I don’t know what else it might mean in this context. it reminds me of when TNN The Nashville Network realized Nashville, Tennessee, after which it was named and at whose residents it was aimed, was just one place that people in most other places didn’t care about and rebranded itself “the national network” and used the slogan “we’ve got pop!” and it failed because that is stupid and meaningless and STILL didn’t make anyone forget that the N really meant Nashville, then they turned into Spike TV because spikes are always marketable. Someone in chicago was once murdered for popping, I know that much. So at least start with the ringleader.
actually I am glad I can’t use that, as it is fairly lame and poorly realized, and as much as it’s blippi’s fault I can’t use it, it’s also blippi’s fault I wrote it.
I KNOW it isn’t my fault! Just tell me WHAT went wrong instead of whimpering at me.
1930s technology is apparently more reliable. I would rather my niece watched old Popeye cartoons than Blippi; these are more realistic depictions of actions and consequences. None of those shallow twenty first century values of phony smiling fake-kindness, conflict avoidance and ultra polished blemish free cowering-from-controversy garbage
You know what, I’m busy, I have to get ready to not have thanksgiving.
I actually wrote about these cartoons over a year ago but since they are apparently rightfully unpopular they never came into my business again after the first time and I forgot they existed and didn’t finish.
three more unrelated idiots that happened to have been sketched near each other.
I should look into putting up a picture with something happening in it one of these days!
Or at least deviate into a less-rigid setup than this one if I feel a need to keep crinkling out dumb illustrations to prove that i continue existing. And then make sure i don’t bland out the subtle distinctive elements of the original cheap sketch in my haste to not spend hours and hours on something that I know does not matter. And if I do that anyway, try to avoid looking back at the sketch and becoming aware of that after already smearing the “finished” one in front of all the same people multiple times across the different websites.
I trusted in a formula that usually results in passable mediocrity, like the Famous Studios Popeye cartoons, but every once in a while even a stable formula fails, and with nothing else behind it there is going to be something totally unredeemable, like when Popeye came home from World War 2 and the writers/management decided he should stop hitting people all the time and be more like Donald Duck and be a stooge to a cute animal or his dipfip nephews instead of an invincible meathead who won’t compromise even when it means leveling an entire town, even though his popularity stems directly from his ability to appear noble while being a destructive stubborn clod.
I won’t even talk about the terrible, totally official popeye cartoons made in 2018, because I am going to bed. The simple fact is that Popeye cartoons have been lame for most of their existence so freaking out over extensions of that trend will solve nothing. I think fictional characters should become public domain property after 70 years regardless of what boneheads swap the rights around. I think I said that ages ago in a post that I never finished because my brain is soup. They belong in their own time periods. Take them out too far and they become something else that might as well be called something else, exclusively benefiting and appealing to horrid people.
I do not want to appeal to horrid people. Not for free, anyway! Rushing for free is as beneficial as rushing for spinach.
This should have appeared two weeks ago*, but I was distracted by business. Imagine if I had a real job!
Surprise! Your favorite baseball team and your absolute least favorite baseball team of all the times have a mutually profitable relationship! Neither has any more integrity than the other! Despite being in the same geographic region both still get more money and attention than any other team –ehhh, excuse me, franchise– in the country, if not the world! Popeye will play for both!
But he’s such a splendid citizen he’ll even play for less important teams no one has heard of, like the Mets. Or rather, I suppose he’s playing against them, because it wouldn’t make sense for the ah thrower to be pitching an opposing force’s ball. Or if it did, it would be Popeye’s goal to catch the ball and protect it from further abuse. But instead of that he applies greater, opposing force to the object, which must hurt it a great deal, I think. As to why Popeye clutches a baseball bat club when he repels the ball with his mind, (for he still has the bludgeon in unswung position) that’s probably just one of the rules. Popeye always respects the law. Right?
I’ll never smile again.
No, Monki! Do not Meet Popeye! He is a bad man! Do not be like him!
Where have the heroes gone? What happened to all the good uneducated violent ruffians?
I suggested that a race is not a strong central basis for a side view action game. In fact, as this was implemented in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and only 2, I like it better than proper racing games.
Both heroes in the same large, fairly complex level, competing to see who can smash the most monitors, grab the most rings, keep the most rings, bop the most robots and reach the end first. While it’s no doubt momentarily amusing to see Bluto suddenly outpacing his foes by locating the secret pogo stick cache between the manure piles, Popeye: Rush For Spinach is otherwise totally boring because it was designed and programmed by
Parents Choice Award winners The Game Factory –That’s “factory” as in the industrial revolution’s mechanical workhouse for standardizing monotonous labour to produce uniform products more quickly– and not 1992 Sega Sonic Team. Why subsequent The Hedgehog games dropped that delightful versus mode in favor of “hold down right and jump occasionally” or “nothing” I have no idea. The “one player” two player mode was safe for a while, anyhow. In general I find myself confused by most immediately evident decisions made with a lot of intellectual properties these days / always. I should probably be more grateful for the lack of canonically bastardizing Ristar sequels than I typically have been.
Licensed video games, in general, have been fortified with irrational, uncharacteristic violence for the last twenty years. Finally we return to a personnage known for the punch-ups he gets into, therefore defying no logic to depict him engaging in more, and we make him race. How the storyline mode of Popeye: The Rescue of Dino and Hoppy keeps contriving situations in which the four protagonists just happen to end up trying to outrun each other and Wimpy willingly participating in any of them is kind of funny, but it doesn’t ever get exciting.
Congratulations, you made someone cry.
Not related:
Tyler Perry enters the pizza business.
In other news:
Good idea!
Oh no!
Super Mario Galaxy: The hardbound cheat book. The perfect item to bring class to any home library. I say this as the former owner of the Mario Paint book and a pair of obscenely large, barely distinct mid 1990s books about the art of user-made Doom add-ons.
A Mario Galaxy is one thing (or rather one large system of vast amounts of vaguely racist ethnic caricatures of stars), but do you ever find yourself thinking, gravy gondola, my cheap bucketware games just aren’t boring and abstractly pointless enough?
Bweeyoop! It’s Rubik Cube: the video game! The sort of simplistic and annoying toy video games were invented to be better than, now deprived of that simplicity in addition to its convenient portability and tactile appeal. I could never solve the cube1 but I enjoyed twisting it around. It also makes a fairly whimsical yet adaptable decoration. This, however, surely has a completely different center of gravity. Oh yeah and it’s in a big stupid plastic box, too. I wouldn’t even hide it where I keep my forbidden hats. At least with Minesweeper you can pretend your boring window games are saving lives. How is spinning individual parts of a dopey rainbow cube going to help the innocent civilians of your war-torn operating system? Where’s the urgency, Rubik?
1I could, if my memory is certain, complete Square 1, but it was more randomly shifting pieces in the permitted directions until the cube was formed than actually “solving” anything,
Finally, my least favorite arrpeejee mini-game available as a standalone title.
I can’t imagine there being any trace of desire to run a slot machine, much less a video slot machine, without even the slightest, nigh-imaginary chance of winning real money. But hey, you can never lose more than 20 dollars! Unless you buy both of these! It has been determined that if you put something in a box, on a shelf, in a store, somebody will inevitably buy one, regardless of what it is, if it has Betty Boop on it (seen here having a border dispute with a price sticker). Still, a more dignified King Features outing overall than Popeye: Rush for Spinach,
even if it lacks an appearance by Jagged Edge Totally Gnarly Rail-Grindin’ Wimpy. Remember, when you think electronic urban non-violent competition for the 21st century, think Popeye the Sailor Man.
You mean besides that it’s boring, totally out of character, and not a strong central basis for a side-view action game?
oh dear I wrote more about popeye rush for spinach
This is one of the final frames from the astounding Arabic opening to the rarely remembered 1978 pop pop pop pop Pop-eye cartoon. Unfortunately, I can no longer find the video online, and at the time when I could I had not yet gotten into the habit of saving such things for later viewing. What’s important right just now is this picture and the important question it raises. Do we really need six Popeyes? It is not as if there are six Blutos! Certainly never at the same time, the Brutus factor notwithstanding (I think I used that word right). And yet somehow that is the amount of popeyes present.
Though a wise man once said “Once you pop, you can’t stop,” therefore explaining how, we have yet to determine why there must be so many Popeyes. Two-thirds of the characters on this program are Popeye! That is not good. There’s regular Popeye, old Popeye, an astounding four miniature Popeyes, who will, unless we act, one day be fully grown Popeyes, and… while Sweepy (akadaka “Swee’ Pea”) is not biologically related to Popeye, he has spent nearly his entire life under the influence of regular Popeye, and has been known to emulate that Popeye’s habits and behaviors. So really, there are six and a half Popeyes. This is more than my mind can comprehend.
Additionally, I will assume, by the distance, that the three popeyes on the left are nephews and that the one small popeye in the middle is a direct descendant, delivered by stork (or more likely pelican) to normal Popeye. However, any Popeye scholar knows, just to show he’s better than Donald Duck, that regular Popeye has four nephews, one of which is merely estranged. Somewhere in the world is a seventh Popeye, bitter and resentful, looking for revenge. I’m scared.
Hitler still up to his old tricks:
I told you about this letter, right? You don’t have to read it, I will summarize it afterwards. Lazy loaf.
A more succinct version: “You took some pictures from my website and put them on yours, therefore you owe me 0.15 million dollars.”
The entry it regards was quickly stripped of the offending materials and I have not yet devised suitable replacements for them all. I made plans, but actually doing the act was soon sickening. I’ll possibly tell you if it ever happens. The offending materials consisted of a comic page, a comic cover and youtube frame all depicting the exact same character drawings arranged in different ways among seriously lousy 3D computer graphic backgrounds, and seen exactly as I found them, except for one whose background I altered (which they noticed, pog bless them). My point being that the whole thing’s an overpromoted ugly hackwork and true.
When I first saw the note on the evening of October 5, 2007, I spoke, aloud “well it’s about time.” I’m not one of those “ha ha, I’ve been banned from 37 forums THIS WEEK” people who gloats about being an antisocial gadshmap (I wish I would have gotten banished more often, back in the days, so I’d have stopped trying sooner), but one does wonder after a while if anybody is paying attention.
Almost right away I came up with some nonsense to say here, but was terribly paranoid about the whole thing and so kept it to myself. Fortunately, it’s totally the normal for me to mix new content with things I did years ago, so October is pretty timely. I am not convinced it’s possible to do time travel, but I believe I may be time travel.
I think with the facts that Capt’n Eli is a small operation and that I included Hitlerish imagery, the response is not surprising. While I could substitute the mustache-swastika-less Not Hitler from the Super NES port of Wolfenstein 3D, I think the intent would still be obvious, but if it wasn’t obvious it wouldn’t make sense. I could also replace Hitler with “call apogee say aardwolf” but that also wouldn’t make sense and would still have the ah… plaintiff’s drawing in it, and I certainly don’t want to fiddle about when people are threatening to take $149,837 I don’t have over a totally justified complaint. Yet I think if they obtained that money they could turn out a far higher quality product. If I had that money I could pay off my annoyances and turn out a higher quality product myself, making dumb comics fast enough that I wouldn’t have to write about silly things in the interim periods and thus this never would have happened. Stupid Eli.
I believe a lot of the trouble is that people on the internet have been largely desensitized against Hitler, to such an extent that I couldn’t imagine anyone – first of all, with gainful employment – bothering with my nonsense, and secondarily, having a legitimately off reaction, of such intensity, to the insertion of Cap’t Holocaust with other non-hitlery subjects. I thought it would be best to remove the thing altogether until I could devise of entirely generic and/or Hitler-free subject matter which still work with my own general complaints, which I think are valid. And I did that. I told you I did!
I suppose it was wrong to try and work out my annoyance at Maine, off brand soft drinks and web-comics all at the same time. If it’d been a picture of Richard Burton or Stockard Channing I could claim to feel wronged, but there aren’t any in Doom2 so the joke doesn’t work.
But that’s what this is about. It was quickly obvious to me that not the art theft, the thing they’re demanding money for, but what my friends up north are really mad about is the hitlerly of the second paragraph and, I suspect, even more just that I made fun of their soda, their website and their mediocre comics. And yes probably their state, too, knowing what I know about the people in that area. And many other areas. Otherwise, why would they care? The only other alternative is that they’re just nasty people, because clearly I have no power and no reputation which would give my words any great weight in a serious situation. They don’t really expect to get one hundred fifty thousand dollars from me, they just want people to stop talking spackle about Capten Eli and their precious “down east.” Evidently the irony of making crazy threats at being associated with naxis is lost on them.
Gah, no wonder the Wannawaf bofo didn’t want to sell that stuff.
You wouldn’t sue me JUST for copying a picture and putting it on a webpage any more than you would if I’d taped it to the front door of my house. That is not the first step (verily, you must climb four to reach the door). Yet this is the only real charge. Otherwise, the note implies that merely saving an image to my hard drive is a crime, and I must assume 90+% of internet users have been guilty of that at one time or another. Maybe it will come about that browser caches themselves are illegal. We already have a good amount of online video set so that it can only be viewed streamed. Oh well. As long as I can keep downloading roms, it shouldn’t be too much trouble. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the ope whose “kingdom hearts plot” guide I insulted a paragraph from came after me now.
I’m not angry at Jay Piscopo, the author. Not for this. Not that much. Because, for one thing, I don’t think it was his idea. I think maybe he found my entroid, and showed it to one of the shipyard brewers and said
It bothered me, sure, it bothered me a lot, but I came closer to crying when the ridiculous october weather here required me to rereinstall and rereuninstall my fan in the same day.
If I could go back and do things differently, would I? Certainly. I wish I had made Hitler be smoking a joint so the lawyer could inform me of the dangers of drug abuse. Or I wish I had titled the entry “Capt’n Eli is a crackhead” or “Jay P’scopo is a sobbing talentless trainwreck of a man” just to see that printed on the letter. Although neither of those things can conclusively be proven as true merely by the evidence available. And that would have made writing the return letter slightly more awkward. But oh, I wrote it. It wasn’t exactly groveling, but I think it gave in on more points than it should have. Every word is true, though. Words themselves cannot be lies, can they? I should have said every statement is true.
re: cease and desist demand
unauthorized use of copyrighted materials
Dear Sinclair Law Offices:
I am deeply troubled that my website entry was found to be offensive,
particularly by your clients, to such an extent that they would seek
legal action. I immediately complied with the demand to remove the
infringing materials, from all possible places. My goal is always to
amuse myself and potential others; never do I embark upon quests of
simple hate, so anything which appears to be such is most unwelcome at
bimshwel.com.
Though not seeking to excuse myself, I will say that the employment of
the Hitler image was intended solely to be ridiculous, as many popular
media have rendered the sight of him in recent years. The swastika was
to be thought of as incidental as the mustache, though in retrospect I
fully understand how someone could think otherwise. I myself have been
most dissatisfied with the lack of accountability among cruel and
rambunctious persons on the internet.
Please accept this letter as an assurance that the matter has been dealt
with in the requested manner.
Your humble servant,
Brendalyndalyn Cunninkhom
“Regardless of legality, I still think you’re a creepy and scary person for taking such threatening actions over the equivelant of having a hat and glasses drawn on your re-election poster.” is just one of several things I reluctantly removed before the final version. I’m glad the word “rambunctious” survived.
“Brendalyndalyn Cunninkhom” was the name those people or that person pulled from the public who-is database of internet domain registrants and then placed within doubting quotation marks in the letter which was sent to me but not addressed to me. Rather, the letter was addressed to my parental persons, whose credit card I used. Who owns the credit card is only relevant if you’re trying to make trouble. As I see it, this gang think I’m some stupid dumb kid and they thought they were going to get me punished in a domestic fashion with this business, and even if I had I wouldn’t want to think I let them have such satisfaction, believed I it within my power to control that. I’m not even convinced the “Sinclair Law Offices” exist.
I don’t have a credit card. Neither does my considerably more self-sufficient brother Eeple, but that didn’t impede some thug from breaching his myspace page and registering a credit card in his name. I’m sure it’s printed somewhere in the seven mile myspace privacy policy that they let people do that. It will probably happen to me, too, but at least when it does I’ll have a pretty good idea where the name was gotten from. Also, I like to think whoever sends a bill to me will notice it’s kind of wrong.
The vagueness of the dedication “dear sinclair law offices” is my fault, sort of. Unable to decipher the signature on the letter –and who signs a letter, especially an angry one, “sincerely by,” anyway?– I decided to seek out the law offices’ website to find a name that looked similar to the signature. Curiously, the office seemed to specialize in medical malpractice cases. The web page opened with a big five point internet font “INJURED?” I guess that also extends to hurt feelings, though that was not among one of the numerous injuries mentioned on the front page. “Bedsores,” however, shew up three times, and apparently you can sue your bed. And then I realized “oh, this is a DIFFERENT Sinclair law offices!” It has come to my attention that there are like 800 lawyers named “Sinclair,” most of them in Florida. And so I just searched for the address, which is either “harborview properties” or the center of a road, depending on whether I believe google’s text or map search more. So I’m either being harassed by a seriously small time operation or it simply does not exist. Yeh, they want $150,000 so they can stop renting space and pay someone to make a website for them.
If Eli and the Shipyard Brewers had followed Popeye and the Happy Co.’s examples, I would have just made fun of their copyright notices and we’d never have had this problem. Or I could have linked to DUDE, IT’S SHIPYARD and cried myself to sleep. This is what comedy is in Maine. It’s also in Mp4 format. I’m never one to say “get with the times,” but mice all-whitey, use a quicker imbedded video format. This is a couple boozos talking about boze, not mc escher the movie.
If I could give advice to you: don’t reuse pictures from other people’s websites, don’t insert Hitler into them, and most certainly do not link to the original website if you do the other two things. The only reason I did that was because I wanted people to see the scary, minimum effort, totally unnecessary Flash welcome. That these thugs found me means someone did, and I’m always glad to know people are clicking my links.