Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Seymour Kneitel, Isadore Sparber
Short Synopsis
Popeye is growing his own spinach, a whole garden of it, and a gopher has found the patch. The cartoon is the war between them: the gopher tunnels up under a plant, pulls it down into the earth and moves on to the next, and Popeye, who has watched his crop disappear row by row, sets out to stop him with traps, a hose down the burrow, a shotgun, a lawnmower and his own fists, every one of which the gopher turns back on the gardener. The burrow runs under the whole garden, so Popeye never knows where the next plant will vanish, and the gopher pops up behind him at every turn. The end is the series' joke on itself: the gopher gets to the spinach first, eats it, swells with the usual muscles, and gives Popeye the beating that the sailor usually gives Bluto, leaving the gardener flat in his own vegetable patch.
Why It Matters
- A Popeye cartoon in which someone else eats the spinach and wins is a rarity, and the gopher, a silent, methodical pest in the manner of Warner's Goofy Gophers, is a better opponent for the ageing sailor than most of the mid-1950s villains; Tom Johnson's animation of the vanishing spinach rows, plant by plant, is the film's running gag.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States: it is marked unrenewed on Wikipedia's Popeye filmography and on the Film Superlist-derived list, and no renewal appears for it in the Catalog of Copyright Entries. It is a solo Popeye, without Olive or Bluto, from the series' last years, when the studio was economising on cast as well as animation.
Notes and Trivia
- The gopher-versus-gardener plot was a 1950s staple at every studio, from Warner's Goofy Gophers to Disney's Chip 'n' Dale.
- Carl Meyer, the writer, had scripted Popeye and Superman cartoons since the Fleischer years.
- See also: Insect to Injury (1956), Shuteye Popeye (1952), Greek Mirthology (1954).