I was one of the persons who preordered this Blu-ray back in 2018 and supported its production -- and I only received it in the mail five days ago. That's more than SIX MONTHS after the Blu-ray became
officially available on Amazon . Sad to say, I'll be dragging my feet when it comes to preordering anything from Thunderbean in the future. Complaining to Steve about discs not being sent out hasn't seemed to make much difference in the past, so this time I decided to just wait. But SIX MONTHS after anybody out there can buy the product is too much. I'm sorry.
Anyway, I
am still glad to have the disc. The black-and-white films I've watched so far look gorgeous. Aside from those, one of the main things of interest for me is a pretty nice-looking transfer of "Ali Baba",
without the DVNR that for some reason is all over Warner's restoration on Popeye Volume 1 and the later HD streaming releases. (The colors look nicer in Warner's transfer, but still.)
But there are also elements of the set which I think can deserve criticism -- or at the very least some questions. For one thing: why is "Ali Baba" and most of the other shorts apparently cleaned up and remastered, whereas "Sindbad" is a raw scan? Well, not 100% a raw scan: Steve mentions on
Cartoon Research that "[w]e did the best we could in cleaning up this well-loved print", a 1930s nitrate.
The Popeye in Technicolor Blu-ray started life as
a 'semi-official', Special Disc BD-R ; and it was expected back then that all the films would be more-or-less raw scans. But with time, the project expanded into a full-fledged Thunderbean Blu-ray release. So why couldn't "Sindbad" be cleaned up and restored like the other films? I only watched the first few minutes of the print on the disc, but it has some serious problems with image stabilization, focus and missing frames. I know this 1936 print from the Library of Congress includes the original end titles music, which is great, and it's certainly historically interesting that it's a first-generation release print. But couldn't Steve have combined several sources to make a restored version, like Thunderbean usually does? I think a better solution could have been to have a restored "Sindbad" among the main features, and the raw scan of the Library of Congress print as one of the special features.
I'm also wondering about the selection of cartoons. I guess the reason why this Blu-ray doesn't have as many black-and-white entries (proportionally) as
Thunderbean's 2004 DVD with Popeye is that this set is titled "Popeye: Original Classics in Technicolor". But five black-and-white shorts
are featured here. So couldn't Thunderbean have gone all the way and included the additional two, black-and-white PD shorts that were on the 2004 DVD, "I'm in the Army Now" and "Customers Wanted"? (See DVD back cover below.) At least "Customers Wanted" is on the bonus BD-R disc. But I wonder why those two films weren't included in the main program.
A much more curious omission is "Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp". This 1939 cartoon is both public domain and a Technicolor two-reeler... and it was of course on Thunderbean's earlier Popeye DVD set. So why is it NOT included on a set titled "Popeye: Original Classics in Technicolor"? I don't know if Steve has addressed the reason for "Aladdin" not being on here, but its absence feels strange.
(Additional note: The bonus BD-R was nice. One of the shorts I tried on there had skipping problems, though, which has been the case with some other BD-Rs from Steve as well.)