Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Seymour Kneitel, Isadore Sparber
Short Synopsis
Popeye proposes and Olive Oyl accepts, and she goes to bed the night before the wedding full of visions of married bliss. The visions turn into a dream: she and Popeye are married, and in short order she has a houseful of babies, each a small, pipe-smoking, squinting Popeye, who wreck the house room by room, swing from the chandelier, flood the bathroom, eat spinach and knock their mother flat. The babies multiply faster than she can count them; Popeye, in the dream, is useless. Olive wakes screaming on the morning of the wedding, and when Popeye arrives in his best suit she slams the door on him and calls the whole thing off. The sailor is left on the step with his ring.
Why It Matters
- Olive's nightmare of a dozen Popeye babies is the cartoon's one idea and a sharp one, and the animation of the miniature sailors, each with the squint and the pipe, is funnier than most Famous Studios gags of the period; it is a Popeye cartoon without a Bluto and with a heroine who, for once, decides her own future.
- The film is a remake of the Fleischer short Wimmin Is a Myskery from 1940, and it is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright never renewed, which is why it has been so often reprinted. Its view of marriage is as sour as the title promises.
Notes and Trivia
- Larz Bourne, the writer, later wrote for Deputy Dawg and Hanna-Barbera.
- Popeye and Olive never did marry in the cartoons, though the dream of it recurred.
- See also: Taxi-Turvy (1954), Floor Flusher (1954), Greek Mirthology (1954).
