Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Popeye calls on Olive Oyl to take her to the zoo, and finds her minding a baby, Swee'Pea, who comes along. At the zoo the infant crawls off the moment Popeye's back is turned and wanders from cage to cage: into the hippopotamus pool, where the hippo swallows him and Popeye has to pull him out by the bonnet; among the elephants; through the monkey house, where the chimpanzees mistake him for one of their own; and into the lion's den. Each rescue leaves Popeye more battered than the last, and each time Swee'Pea crawls happily on as if nothing had happened. Popeye's spinach gets him through the lion, and he carries the baby home. There Olive scolds him for keeping Swee'Pea out so long, and the exhausted sailor, as the baby settles down, delivers the line about kids that closes the film.
Why It Matters
- It is Swee'Pea's first screen appearance, the baby of the comic strip adapted into the crawling, indestructible infant who would appear in dozens of later cartoons, and the zoo gives the Fleischer animators a procession of animal set pieces, the hippo and the chimps especially, in the studio's rubbery mid-1930s style.
- The film is the earliest Popeye cartoon in the public domain, its copyright never renewed, so it has been among the most-shown of the black-and-white Fleischer Popeyes. The backgrounds use the studio's stereoptical process, a three-dimensional model set that gives the zoo paths real depth as the camera tracks.
Notes and Trivia
- Swee'Pea had arrived in E. C. Segar's strip in 1933, delivered to Popeye in a box.
- Jack Mercer, in his second year as Popeye, mutters the sailor's trademark asides throughout.
- See also: Popeye the Sailor (1933), Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936), A Date to Skate (1938).
