Word: cartoonable
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ALMOST FIFTY YEARS after the first Popeye cartoon, director Robert Altman and cartoonist-author-screenwriter Jules Feiffer have adapted the sailor to another medium--that of the musical-comedy feature film--using real people instead of animated figures. When such heavies team up with a talent like manic Robin Williams to interpret a piece of American folklore, the result ought to transcend the original material. Instead, they produce a faithful if restrained reproduction of the cartoon version--and somewhat of a disappointment...
...most of all, people were talking about the Depression. In a poignant cartoon, the Dixon Evening Telegraph memorialized dejected workers leaving a steel and wire company carrying their lunch buckets home after being laid off. In Davenport the Union Bank failed, a year after the American Savings Bank and Trust Co., and the John Deere Co. shut down six plants, throwing 716 men out of work. In surrounding Scott County a monthly average of 7,000 persons -10% of the population-were on relief, getting beans, flour and potatoes. People were understandably riled that Iowa farmers, angered...
...roll the cameras, and what will result: (a) Animal House on a Hill, (b) The Blues Brothers Camp Out or (c) Samurai Height Fever? Answer: none of the above. In Continental Divide, Belushi climbs into what he calls his first "realistic acting role," one that is "less of a cartoon than any I've done before." It takes him 14,000 ft. up in Colorado's Sangre de Cristo mountains, where he portrays a Mike Royko-like Chicago reporter who has raked so much local muck that his editors have decided to pack him off to the Rockies...
...scarcely a major comic-page figure who has not been reincarnated on the screen, or a comic strip that has not been influenced by the way movie directors frame and compose scenes. Yet the transitions from one medium to the other have not been very successful. Most of the cartoon characters who originated in print ended up in serials and B pictures, which had, at least, a sleaziness that nicely matched the tackiness of newsprint. But the realistic air of nonanimated movies, with their illusion of three-dimensionality, worked against the divine simplifications of the comics' conventions...
This stinging, slap-happy cartoon of contemporary race relations is one of the standout tunes on one of the year's standout albums, Minimum Wage Rock & Roll, by a brash new Los Angeles band called, with appropriate bemusement, the Bus Boys. Since the group consists of five blacks and one chicano drummer, its excursions through the realms of brotherhood come as naturally as a walk around the block, and are sometimes just as risky. KKK announces a fearless ambition guaranteed to turn both sides of the color line to a common, angry red: "I am bigger than a nigger...