Blogging at BoingBoing about a recently-released 4-DVD set of 1930s Popeye cartoons, Mark Frauenfelder wrote, “Cartoons don’t get any better than this.” I thought that a little funny (well, maybe not funny ha ha, but…) because just last night, my boyfriend and I were watching TV and when a commercial came on for the same box set, Mr. Karina said, “I wonder if that set includes all the racist Popeyes.”

I had not previously been aware that there was a sub-genre of Popeye cartoons that were racist, although I admit that I probably should have been. He’s already an unpleasant enough stereotype of a sailor–why wouldn’t he also be a vehicle for of-the-era anti-other prejudices?

Of course, I went straight to Google and did some research. According to Karl F. Cohen, who wrote a book called Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons And Blacklisted Animators in America, while a number of Popeye shorts are generally considered to be borderline too racist for TV, there’s been no formal attempt to remove these shorts from the marketplace, and it’s up to individual TV stations to decide which episodes to air.

All of the examples he names come from the 1940s, and therefore wouldn’t be contained on this new boxset. However, one of these, a sterling bit of World War II-era propaganda called You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap (1942) is readily available on YouTube, so it must be on some disc, somewhere. Of the eight shorts named by Cohen (who is in turn citing Paul Mulan), only one is in Spout’s database: Fightin’ Pals (1940). No one’s reviewed it yet, but according to its IMDb profile, the action starts when Bluto “sails off to Darkest Africa for exploration” and doesn’t come back right away. Popeye follows, and finds the good doctor with “a bevy of native beauties attending to his every need.” On Spout, I’ve helpfully tagged it “Racist Popeye” for future reference.

Thus concludes your lesson in Reprehensible Pop Culture of the Early 20th Century for today, kids. Go out and play.