Last month, I registered my disappointment with Warner Home Video for leaving the Paramount logo off the DVD release of “Zero Hour!” in a lengthy post. Warners has more than made up for this oversight by restoring Paramount logos to the 60 titles in the first-ever authorized volume of Popeye cartoons premiering July 31. The logos were removed at Paramount’s behest when TV rights were sold to Associated Artists Productions, a defunct subsidiary of United Artists, more than 50 years ago. Those rights were eventually re-sold to Turner Entertainment, whose eventual corporate parent Warners had to strike a separate deal with King Features to bring the animated shorts (some of them long available in terrible public-domain transfers from 16mm TV prints) to DVD.

Besides wonderful transfers that capture Max and Dave Fleisher’s exquisite gray scale renderings, the black-and-white cartoons feature not only feature the Paramount mountain at the beginning but at least two different treatments leading into the logo at the end. The earliest cartoons end with a live-action pen working its way into an inkwell; most of them feature the logo fading in over an anchor with Popeye’s hat perched jauntily on one end. There are also a couple of different Technicolor logos featured on the pair of two-reel “specials” that were produced in the years covered by this collection, 1933-1938. These logos are from fellow obsessive Jerry Beck’s wonderful Cartoon Research website, which has many more images of different Paramount logos and credit treatments. Many of the later Paramount cartoons (including most of the Caspers and Little Audreys) were bought by what is now known as Harvey Entertainment, which released a passel of them on DVD last year. Many were severely edited, and the Paramount logos were replaced by Harvey logos on every single one. For shame.