My Artistical Temperature

Sometimes some of the best humor on these old Popeye cartoons is right in the opening shot, where they show a business. Here it's "Sweet Art Studio," which advertises on the side of the building "Portraits Painted: If It Looks Like You....$10; If It Doesn't....$15." There are a few more corny signs, too, and funny.

Popeye is a sculptor in this story, if you can believe it. He inadvertently creates the armless Venus de Milo! That's the good news. The bad news is that Bluto shares the place. He's an artist, too - a painter - and starts off the hostilities by throwing paint at Popeye's new "masterpiece."

"That stuff's not art," he tells Popeye. "Only painting is art, especially if it is painted by a first-class artist like meself. Ha ha.".

"Well, it don't look like a masterpiece to me," retorts Popeye, who then squeezes a tube of paint which transforms the sun in Bluto's painting to a black face which says "Mammy!" (Yes, I know....cartoons were overtly racist back then.)

Anyway, when Olive enters the store and wants a likeness of herself, the "war of the artists" is on!

This is very good, with both humorous sight gags and some great mumblings by Popeye, such as "This resembles you, but doesn't look like you" or "this is going to be the best statue I ever chiseled anyone out of," etc. (I put the English subtitles on so I catch all his mumbling comments, most of which are very entertaining.)

There are so many good things in this cartoon I would hit the word limit describing all them. It's one of the better Popeye cartoons in this DVD collection of his theatrical efforts from 1933-1938, which says a lot because there were a lot of great ones.