The Glass Character: 1940s animation

Showing posts with label 1940s animation. Show all posts

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Auto eroticism, part 2: the Popeye connection

As a kid, I am sure I saw this Popeye cartoon (called Service with a Guile, a title no kid would ever understand) repeatedly. I remember thinking the car in it looked a little strange. It wasn't contemporary, not for 1963 anyway. More like 1943. (Today, this is the kind of car I have a major Jones for.)

I don't know what the animators were thinking here. Even as a kid, this cartoon made me a little uneasy. Something decidedly tumescent was happening to this tire as it slowly overinflated while Olive kept - hmmm. Rubbing it and rubbing it. And -

This is a wartime Popeye, and one of the ways you can tell is that they've glammed Olive up a little bit. She has nicer shoes, for one thing, with high heels, and a more shapely ass. She ain't no pinup girl, she won't give Betty Grable a run for her money, but hey, this is for the kiddies. And that turban! Hubba-hubba.

(Pre-War Olive. Compare and contrast.)

Not only is the car's scrotum about to explode, the fender now has an erection. Can't help it, that's just what I see. Popeye is in a state of panic through all this.

Now HERE is where it gets interesting. There are these two gigantic red globular "things" that keep expanding and expanding, with this horn-like thing in the middle, and then there are more red bulges coming up behind them with sort of fleshlike creases in them, and then the whole thing stretches and stretches (with a sort of weirdly sensual, tonguelike effect not unlike the Rolling Stones emblem) until you can SEE through it - and there's even a sort of creaking noise for hard-core rubber fetishists - and -

OMG. The explosion blows them all backwards through a wall, so that they land in different sets of clothing on a clothesline: Popeye is a baby, Bluto is wearing an enticing bustier, and Olive - what the hell does Olive have on, anyway? It sure isn't very sexy. At least she still has her fetish heels on. All these things, now that I look at it, are designed to be humiliating in one way or another. Long red underwear on a woman trying desperately to be a World War II pin-up girl. Bluto, the essence of manhood, in a corset and a bra. And Popeye. . . the Spinachmeister, reduced to helpless infancy.

I can see now why this cartoon disturbed me: it's plain weird, is what it is, and the more I look at that tire blowing up the more uncomfortable I get.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Fatter 'n a hamster's ass!

I swear, this isn't as incoherent as it seems. It all ties in with the grand show of vintage cars I took in on Sunday, my favorites being those immense, bulbous tanks from the 1940s. There was something imposing - almost disturbing - about these things, a great upthrusting nose like the prow of a ship, giant (bosomy?) swellings at the front and a falling-off at the back so extreme that in some cases the rear tires were completely invisible. How these things navigated road-bumps without severe damage is beyond me.

I remembered this Popeye cartoon, one of the good old vintage ones from the '40s (which means, of course, that it has a mililtary flavor to it). The car in it is a splendid example of the 1940s tank. Most of all I remembered that exploding tire scene, was almost traumatized by it as a child, and now I see why. It seems to build and build, expand and expand until you know what's coming, a sort of screen-filling red-drenched orgasm that blows all the main characters into next Thursday. They blast through several billboards before colliding with a clothesline, leaving them all clad in someone else's underwear (Bluto in a frilly corset), adding to the bizarre erotic effect.

Sex in cartoons? Are you kidding? Not that Popeye squeezing his spinach-can until it spurted into his mouth had any sort of Freudian significance at all.

It was nice to find this dear old thing - strictly through a Google search, I never would have tracked it down any other way - because I've been obsessed with those bulbous, surreal '40s vehicles lately, particularly the custom-made ones that pushed all those features to a fetish-y extreme.

The kids could slide down this one, except their short pants might get caught on that pointy rear bumper. It's hard to see the rear tires, though they do just peep through seductively. A little trap-door thingie over the rear tire is also just visible. Else how'd you ever change the thing?

A lot of these extreme cars were custom-made by a guy named Westergard. I think I caught a glimpse of one of those cars once, and it was breathtaking, but didn't quite look real.

This is some sort of convertible, I guess, but I'd be too scared to get in it. It just looks intimidating.

Now we get to it. This car has a FAT ASS. It has haunches on it that are as cobby and waddly as a hamster's. It looks overweight. It looks like it has big overstuffed seed-pouches both fore and aft: a hamster squared!

Hamster!. . . Car!. . . Hamster!. . . Car!

Does this thing even HAVE rear tires? Does it just sort of drag itself around, creating horrendous sparks behind it and making an awful screeching noise? It seems to sit level on the ground, belly down, kind of like a. . .

Yes.

Would you call this a station wagon that's been left out in the sun too long? A pregnant trailer? What the fxx IS it? Like Popeye's tire, it looks as if it's about to explode from internal pressure.

Then again, maybe it's just a hamster on wheels.

Cars were more animal-like then, but this one seems so hunkered-down, so crouched. It would have to scuttle around on its belly like a badger. And the squinty little eyes on it: disturbing. It must have run, or no one would have gone to the trouble to have this Westergard guy build it for them. But it just looks so wide. How did you navigate turns in it? How could you see out of these tiny little window-slits? How much gas would it guzzle in a day?

I don't particularly trust hamsters at the wheel, but some of their antics are kind of amusing.

But just look at this majestic thing, jeez, it almost has a face on it, with a fierce toothy frown and great upjutting phallic nose. It's a straight-ahead sort of thing, a get-out-of-my-way car. Come to think of it, it seems like something from another planet. But breathtaking nonetheless.