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00:00Hi, this is Mike Barrier. I'm the author of a book called Hollywood Cartoons, American
00:11Animation in its Golden Age. And in that book, I write about Max and Dave Fleischer and cartoons
00:16they made for Paramount and about the Papa cartoon specifically. And one of those cartoons
00:21is called A Date to Skate, which is what we're going to be looking at now. You'll see the
00:25name Willard Bowski as one of the two animators credited. Willard Bowski was actually what
00:30we would call now an animation director. Dave Fleischer was in overall charge of the cartoons,
00:36supervised the work of the animation directors, was very much involved in the recording sessions.
00:41But the day-to-day work of doing the layouts for the cartoons, supervising the work of
00:45the animators, handing out work to members of a group of animators, this is what was
00:48done by the animation directors. And Willard Bowski was one of those people for quite a
00:53few years in the 30s. Bowski had an interesting history. He was born in 1907 in New Jersey.
01:00And when World War II began, he enlisted in the army in 1942 at the age of 35. He certainly
01:05would not have been drafted otherwise. Most people in animation in those days who went
01:09into the armed forces wound up, if they went at all, frequently they were exempted because
01:14they were working on military training films at the studios. Other people went in the military
01:18and worked in animation studios like the one out in Hollywood called Fort Roach, first
01:22motion picture unit of the army air force. But Bowski actually went into combat service
01:27and was killed in action in France in 1944. It's hard to think of any other people in
01:32animation who were active in animation in the 30s who died in combat. I'm sure there
01:36were others, but he was certainly the most prominent. One of the animators in his unit
01:41around the time this cartoon was made, it was released in November 1938, and so it
01:45would have been made earlier that year. One of the animators in his unit around that time
01:49was Gordon Sheehan. I talked with Gordon Sheehan some years ago about what was involved
01:55in working as an animator in Willard Bowski's unit, and here's a little bit of that interview.
02:20Willard Bowski was a great one for trying to add to stories, make them funnier, make
02:26them more interesting. As a consequence, I think that he turned out the best pictures
02:31that Fletcher made. And so the whole group was given a chance to add to the picture and
02:40add a little gag here and a little extra something here so that we ended up with a better script
02:47than we had originally.
03:17If you've looked at some of the earlier Popeye cartoons, you may notice that the animation
03:26here is starting to look a little more realistic, a little more natural there than when Popeye
03:31was skating earlier. It's not the kind of, you want to say, mechanical sounds like, a
03:36little derogatory, which isn't what I mean, but there's a, earlier Fletcher cartoons,
03:40there's much more of a sense of finding sort of abstract patterns of movement and the way
03:44characters move. They're not really trying to look realistic at all. There's more of
03:48a sense here of, well, this is how people like Popeye would actually move if they were out
03:53roller skating.
04:14There's nothing realistic about what happens now when Olive goes skating through town. And
04:31here you do have a lot of the Fletcher facility with the intricate mechanical movement. All
04:36this swooping and looping through town is the sort of thing that they were exceptionally
04:41But what you're seeing here is the kind of change that took place in animation generally
04:45in the 30s under the weight of the example of the Disney cartoons and of other studios
04:50that were more or less successfully imitating the Disney cartoons and achieving more realistic
04:54movement of the characters. This was not the natural bent of the Fletchers. I mean, some
04:59of the times they did it quite well, other times it was more uncomfortable for them.
05:02The best parts of these later cartoons tend to be this sort of elaborate, intricate movement
05:07that you're seeing here with Olive goes hurtling around.
05:37Here's Popeye. I can't recall, stop, who actually introduced this sort of shadow-on-the-screen
05:50gag. Certainly Tex Avery at Warner Brothers used it very inventively. But it was, of
05:55course, it has an impact on the theater that you can't get on television. But sometimes
06:00there could be extremely elaborate changes worked on this whole idea of interaction between
06:04the character on the screen and the people in the audience. Characters threatening the
06:08people in the audience not to tell something and so forth. Here it's just a way of giving
06:12a new twist to the whole idea of Popeye and his addiction to spinach.
06:34At this time, Olive Owe's voice was provided by Mae Questel, who was originally the voice
06:39of Betty Boop. Mae Questel was an actress. She appeared on screen as Aunt Bluebell when
06:43she was selling Scot towels back in the 60s and 70s. And she was Woody Allen's mother
06:48in a segment of the film called New York Stories. She even provided Popeye's voice at one point
06:54during World War II.
07:04Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada