Last week we featured some interview pieces with the great Jackson Beck, who was the voice of Bluto in the Famous Studios Popeye cartoons as well as the King Features cartoons in the early 60s. Since I was on a scanning trip this weekend, I brought with me a King Features Popeye to scan for this week’s post.

Super Duper Market (1960) is pretty typical for one of the Popeyes that the Jack King Studio did for the series. They’re often the simplest in layout and animation.

The story is simple: Popeye, Olive and Wimpy go shopping. Brutus is running the store’s ultra modern systems, and decides to make life hard for Popeye and Wimpy by throwing them in a freezer and, in the process, making a pass at Olive, then throwing her in a cart and hauling her around. The real hero of the story is a patron who’s been lost in the store for 15 years! That’s easily the best gag in the film.

Of course, the better reason to watch (and listen) to these is to hear Mercer, Questel and Beck doing the voices. Since they recorded something like 220 of these, hearing how they ended up recording many at a time out a suggestion these seasoned voice actors made was really fun. They likely did one take of this recording. On occasion the ad libbing is these is pretty fun; this one doesn’t have too much in that department.

Enjoy the voices, and I hope your super market experience in the coming days is better than theirs! I bet Brutus got fired.

Next week I’ll be sharing something non-Popeye related— and pretty fun. As we’re approaching summer I’m looking forward to sharing the things we’ve been working on at Thunderbean.
Have a good week all!