Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Publix Corporation
Short Synopsis
Newspapers roll off a printing press, and one front page announces that Popeye has become a movie star. The drawing of Popeye comes to life and sings "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man". At the docks, Olive Oyl waits for him and sends two pushy sailors packing with her fists. Bluto, Popeye's rival, tries his luck with her too. When Popeye comes ashore and takes Olive to a fairground, Bluto follows them. At a hula show, Betty Boop dances on stage in a grass skirt and Popeye joins her. Bluto then kidnaps Olive and ties her to a railway line, using the bent rails themselves as ropes, as a train approaches. Popeye fights Bluto and is losing until he swallows a can of spinach. Powered up, he punches Bluto into a coffin and nails it shut, then turns to the oncoming locomotive and stops it dead with his fists, the carriages concertinaing behind it. Olive is saved.
Why It Matters
- The final punch-out with the train is the scene to watch: a sailor beating a locomotive into scrap with his bare hands, a gag that captures exactly the absurd strength and confidence that would carry Popeye's series for decades.
- It is Popeye's first animated appearance and introduced his theme song, "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man", written by Sammy Lerner. Billed as a Betty Boop cartoon to give the new character a familiar draw, it was effectively a pilot, and the Popeye series it launched became one of the most popular in cartoon history and eventually overtook Betty Boop at the Fleischer studio.
Notes and Trivia
- Popeye had appeared in E. C. Segar's comic strip Thimble Theatre since 1929.
- Lerner's song loosely borrows its opening from the "Pirate King" song in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance.
- Betty's hula dance reuses animation from the Fleischers' Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle (1932).
- See also: Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936).