From Pixar to Popeye: The Devolution of Taste

The children in our household learned to surf the web before the age of five so I was not terribly surprised to find that they developed a level of sophistication that surpassed my own at the same age.  This is progress.  They seem a lot smarter than I was.  Their little tastes and preferences seem much more refined.  Maybe too refined.    Take animation for example. 

For $1.99 I recently downloaded Pixar’s short animated film One Man Band.  My son has now seen this video about 100 times.  The good people of Pixar, in their quest to develop incredibly realistic films, have raised the threshold of animation.  One Man Band is perfect:  wonderful animation, great music and a very amusing storyline.  The boys love everything Pixar produces.  One day I decided to test them, similar to the way in which one might try to test a top chef by substituting his foie gras with bologna.   One day instead of Pixar’s shiny new animated feature I loaded a Popeye the Sailor cartoon; one that was clumsily crafted during the Eisenhower administration.

Surprisingly my boys were strangely drawn to it.    They had more questions than anything.  Suddenly I had become an expert on something.  Every scene elicited more questions which made me realize that they didn’t quite understand the physical world of cartoons back in my day.  The strength giving properties of a can of spinach made just as little sense to them as a roadrunner’s ability to run through a painting that had been quickly brushed on the wall of a hillside.  To fully appreciate the decidedly low-tech cartoons of the past I explained a few physical laws of the cartoon world to help them understand the world that they were discovering.

Eight Rules of the Cartoon World

1. An individual suspended without support will not succumb to the force of gravity until said individual mentally processes the fact that they are without support and thus subject to fall. 

2. A hat, when sat upon the head of a character who becomes excited unexpectedly will launch itself in the air, turn a back flip and return to its original position. 

3. The eyes of an individual who encounters a surprising situation may extend outside of the eye sockets for an instant, presumably to help the individual increase his visual recognition of the event. 

4. When disturbed, a hive of honey bees will unite and form the shape of a standard household item, i.e. scissors, hammer, etc.  Once the formation has been completed the colony of bees will be able to perform the physical actions of the object they now represent, usually in pursuit of the individual who disturbed their hive.

5. The blackened residue of an explosion, particular one that occurs near or on a person, will vanish quickly, usually by the next scene.

6. For some reason in the cartoon world manhole covers are frequently removed from the manhole, creating convenient pits to trap those who chose to journey by foot in the middle of the street instead of on the sidewalk where they belong.

7. An individual who has been knocked into a space formerly occupied by an object may retain the qualities of said object.  For example, a person who is knocked into a fountain may exhibit fountain like qualities, similarly the eyes of a person knocked into a traffic stop light may blink red or green until they remove themselves from the space the object previously held.

8. Most of life’s problems can be resolved within 4 minutes.Armed with this information my boys seemed to have a greater acceptance of vintage cartoons.  In fact they now ask for Popeye all the time.  Of course it didn’t take me long to remember how much I hated Popeye in the first place. I suppose progress isn’t so bad after all.  Personally, I can’t wait for the next Pixar short.

Good luck noodads.