Popeye: Cartoon Icons of American TV

Created by American cartoonist Elzie Crisler Segar, Popeye (also Popeye the Sailor) first appeared in the daily King Features comic strip Thimble Theatre on January 17, 1929, billed as a Betty Boop cartoon.  (According to the official Popeye website, Popeye is 34 years old and was born in a typhoon off Santa Monica, California.)  In 1933, Fleischer Studios adapted the Thimble Theatre character and his cartoon buddies into a series of Popeye the Sailor animated shorts for Paramount Pictures shown in movie theaters.  These first Popeye shorts introduced the now-famous "I’m Popeye the Sailor Man,” song written by Sammy Lerner (loosely based on the "Pirate King" song in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta, The Pirates of Penzance, that would eventually become Popeye’s theme song).  Read more . . .

The Flintstones: Cartoon Icons of American TV

The Flintstones is an animated, prime-time American TV series that ran from September 30, 1960 to April 1, 1966, on the ABC network.  Produced by the team of Hanna-Barbera, The Flintstones follows the lives and adventures of two working-class Stone-Age families, the Flintstones and the Rubbles.  Though telecast in black-and-white during its first two seasons, it was filmed in color from the start.  A clever juxtaposition of modern everyday concerns in a Stone Age setting, The Flintstones takes place in the "modern" metropolis of Bedrock.  (In some of the earlier episodes, it was referred to as "Rockville.”)  In this fantastic vision of the ancient past, dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, and other long-extinct animals co-exist with barefoot cavemen who drive cars.  Read more. . .