The rubber/plastic arms looked fine, but they were murder on Williams. Altman shot around Williams' arms while they waited for replacements to come in from Italy. At first, the crew created lightweight inflatable "muskles," but they neither looked nor worked right.
The prosthetics Williams needed to wear for Popeye's iconic meaty forearms certainly didn't help any. After the first day on 'Popeye,' I thought, 'Well, maybe this isn't it,' and I finally wound up going, 'Oh God, when is this going to be over?'" Even the infamous Evans/Altman recreational activities weren't enough to help him unwind - instead, he'd go inland to perform in Maltese bars. "This is my 'Superman,' and it's going to go through the f***ing roof! I also had the dream of getting up and thanking the Academy, but I got beyond the 'this-is-it' stage as soon as we started shooting. It turned out to be a wise investment - forty years later, Popeye Village is still a popular tourist attraction. Altman chose Malta for his location - according to Parish, because it made it harder for his producers to reach him if they didn't like his methods. He did the same for "Popeye" with the fishing village of Sweethaven. Miller," Altman dramatized the building of a new town by actually building it right there on camera. While most movies only build as much set as shows up on camera, for his western "McCabe and Mrs. Besides, Altman had overseen large undertakings before. He was more interested in small-scale, dialogue-driven movies like "Nashville" and "3 Women."Īs it would turn out, his style of improv-heavy, overlapping dialogue dovetailed nicely with the under-their-breath ad-libs of the Fleischer shorts. Robert Altman was not the man you'd go to for cartoon spectacle. With that in mind, his unorthodox choice to direct "Popeye" was very on-brand - but few others thought it made any sense. Amazingly, they did all this years before Disney got much more publicity for their own 3D process, the multiplane camera. This allowed the camera to move in three dimensions, and the animators to use studio lights for realistic day and night scenes. As Fleischer biographer Ray Pointer explains, the studio used what they called a "setback" camera to take the transparent cels the characters were painted on and lay them vertically in front of a sculpted background instead of horizontally on a flat painting. The answer's about as simple as you could hope for: Those backgrounds really are 3D. That's especially true in scenes where Popeye wanders through vividly realistic 3D landscapes at a time when the words "computer animation" would get you a blank stare. They introduced Popeye to moviegoers in 1933 in a crossover with Betty, and they'd continue animating his adventures until the studio shuttered in 1942 and their bosses at Paramount handed off the Sailor Man to the new Famous Studios.Īnimation technology has come a long way since then, but there's still a lot in those old cartoons to amaze modern viewers.
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