Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Seymour Kneitel, Isadore Sparber
Short Synopsis
Olive Oyl's kitchen tap is dripping, and she calls for a plumber. Popeye and Bluto, rival plumbers, both answer, and each sets out to prove himself the better man while making sure the other fails. Every pipe one of them tightens the other loosens; every leak one stops reappears somewhere else; the water rises from a drip to a flood, filling the kitchen, then the house, with Olive wading, then swimming, then floating on the furniture while the two plumbers fight in the deepening water. Bluto traps Popeye in the pipework and makes his move on Olive. Popeye's spinach, eaten underwater, gives him the strength to burst out, pound Bluto, and plug the leaks at last, draining the house through Bluto himself. Olive, wrung out, has had enough of plumbers.
Why It Matters
- The steadily rising water is a good comic engine, each round of the rivalry fought a little deeper than the last, and the underwater spinach scene is one of the series' odder images; the film is a remake of the Fleischer short Plumbin' Is a Pipe, from 1938, done with the Famous Studios unit's cleaner, flatter look.
- Floor Flusher is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright never renewed, and it is one of the better-known 1950s Popeyes for that reason. It was released on New Year's Day 1954, although the title card carries a 1953 copyright notice.
Notes and Trivia
- Famous Studios remade a number of Fleischer Popeyes in the 1950s, usually without credit to the originals.
- Jack Mercer co-wrote the story as well as voicing Popeye.
- See also: Ancient Fistory (1953), Taxi-Turvy (1954), Bride and Gloom (1954).
