Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Seymour Kneitel, Isadore Sparber
Short Synopsis
Popeye wants a night's sleep, and a mouse in his bedroom wall wants to keep him awake. The mouse scratches, squeaks and gnaws; Popeye sets traps, blocks the hole, lays cheese as bait and sits up with a club, and each scheme comes back on him, with the mouse pulling the bedclothes off, leading him into his own traps and raiding the icebox. The escalation ends with Popeye reaching for his spinach to finish the job, only for the mouse to get to the can first, grow muscles and thrash the sailor. Beaten, Popeye gives up on the war; the final shot has the two of them asleep in the same bed, the mouse tucked in beside him and both snoring. The director, Isadore Sparber, voices the mouse himself.
Why It Matters
- The mouse who steals the spinach is the cartoon's one real idea and a good one, the series' sacred formula turned on its hero, and the night-time staging, with Popeye's bedroom lit only by moonlight and the mouse's hole, gives Al Eugster's animation a cleaner look than most early-1950s Famous Studios films.
- Shuteye Popeye is one of the Famous Studios Popeyes whose copyright was never renewed, so it is in the public domain in the United States and has circulated in cheap prints for decades; it is also a late example of the solo Popeye cartoon, without Olive or Bluto, that the studio made when the triangle plots ran thin.
Notes and Trivia
- Sparber, co-head of the studio with Seymour Kneitel, rarely voiced characters.
- The mouse-versus-sleeper plot was a 1950s staple, used by Tom and Jerry and by Disney's Pluto.
- See also: Me Musical Nephews (1942), Ancient Fistory (1953), Insect to Injury (1956).
