Studio: Paramount Cartoon Studios (formerly Famous Studios)
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Seymour Kneitel, Isadore Sparber
Short Synopsis
Popeye and Olive Oyl are adrift on a raft, playing checkers, when Popeye sights an old sailing ship. He spins his pipe like an outboard motor, the raft hits the hull and breaks up, and the two are flung aboard the Sea Witch, derelict since 1678. The ship has a crew of ghosts with English accents who like the quiet of drifting and do not want to be taken to port, and when Popeye announces that the vessel is seaworthy and sets a course for land they set about getting rid of the boarders: throwing the anchor overboard so that the rope sends Olive spinning through the wheel, greasing the anchor rope so that it pulls Popeye into the sea, sabotaging every attempt to make way. Popeye eventually gets to his spinach, which the ghosts cannot stop, and he sets the ship moving at last, with the spectral crew dealt with in the usual manner and Olive looking forward to television.
Why It Matters
- Spooky Swabs is the last Popeye theatrical cartoon, the 230th, and the last appearance in cinemas of Popeye and Olive Oyl after twenty-four years; the ghost crew includes several ghosts borrowed from the studio's Casper series, and the film is a remake of the Fleischer short Shiver Me Timbers! from 1934.
- It is in the public domain in the United States and so is the most accessible way to see where the series ended, in a Paramount Cartoon Studios production that looks nothing like the Fleischer original it was remaking. It was also Isadore Sparber's last film as director.
Notes and Trivia
- King Features took the character to television in 1960, with 220 cartoons made in two years.
- Olive's eagerness to get home to the television is the series' acknowledgement of what had killed it.
- See also: Spree Lunch (1957), Fright to the Finish (1954), Popeye the Sailor (1933).
