Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Seymour Kneitel, Isadore Sparber
Short Synopsis
On Halloween night Olive Oyl reads ghost stories aloud to Popeye and Bluto, each of whom wants the other to go home. Bluto pretends to leave and sets about scaring Olive and Popeye with staged horrors: a headless man at the door, a skeleton that walks by itself, a bedsheet ghost on a balloon. He arranges for Popeye to take the blame, and Olive, frightened and furious, throws the sailor out and lets Bluto comfort her. Popeye climbs back in through her bedroom window, finds a jar of vanishing cream on the dressing table and rubs it on until he is invisible. He then haunts the house in earnest, tormenting Bluto above all until the big man flees screaming into the night. Popeye reappears, Olive kisses him until his face is red with lipstick, and he tells the audience that he loves them ghosts.
Why It Matters
- The vanishing cream, taken literally, is the cartoon's best idea, and the sequence in which an invisible Popeye terrorises Bluto with floating objects is a well-built escalation; the film is a remake of the Fleischer short Ghosks Is the Bunk from 1939, with the ghost business moved to Halloween.
- Fright to the Finish is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright never renewed, and it has been a Halloween staple of public-domain compilations for decades, as common on cheap tapes as Balloon Land or The Headless Horseman.
Notes and Trivia
- Jack Mercer wrote the story as well as voicing Popeye, as he did for several 1950s entries.
- The lipstick-smeared ending was a Famous Studios signature, reused in other Popeye and Casper cartoons.
- See also: Greek Mirthology (1954), Spooky Swabs (1957), Balloon Land (1935).
