Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Seymour Kneitel, Isadore Sparber
Short Synopsis
Cinderella retold with the Popeye cast. Popeye is the drudge in the kitchen of a castle where his cruel master, Bluto, is preparing for the princess's ball, at which Princess Olive will choose a husband. Bluto leaves Popeye scrubbing floors and goes off in his finery. Popeye's fairy godfather appears: Poopdeck Pappy, his bearded father, with a wand, who conjures a suit of armour and a horse and sends him to the ball with the usual warning about midnight. At the palace Olive is bored by Bluto and charmed by the stranger, and the two rivals fight for her through the ballroom until the clock strikes and Popeye's finery vanishes, leaving him in rags and his horse a mouse. He flees, losing a shoe, and Olive searches the kingdom with it. The shoe fits Popeye, Bluto objects, the spinach comes out, and Popeye marries the princess, with Pappy giving them a blessing of his own.
Why It Matters
- Popeye's fairy godfather as his own disreputable father is the cartoon's best joke, and Jack Mercer's Pappy, a crabbier version of Popeye's own voice, carries it; the midnight transformation, with the armour falling off piece by piece in the middle of a fight, is well timed.
- The fairy-tale parodies were a Famous Studios staple of the early 1950s, and this is one of the brightest, in good Technicolor with Winston Sharples's score. It is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright never renewed, and so is one of the most-seen 1950s Popeyes.
Notes and Trivia
- This was Poopdeck Pappy's second appearance in a Famous Studios cartoon; he had been a Fleischer regular in 1938-41.
- The title puns on "ancient history", the kind of malapropism the series built its titles on.
- See also: Big Bad Sindbad (1952), Greek Mirthology (1954), Cinderella (1950).
