Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Popeye and Bluto are rival window washers working the skyscrapers. Bluto, wanting the contract for the building where Olive Oyl works as a secretary, drives past in his truck spraying mud over every window on the block, then turns up offering to clean them. Olive is impressed until Popeye arrives and the two set about outdoing each other on the ledges, swinging from scaffolds, squeegeeing in rhythm and sabotaging each other's work. Bluto cuts Popeye's rope and throws him off the building more than once; Popeye climbs back each time. When Bluto turns his hose on Olive and tries to carry her off the ledge, Popeye reaches for his spinach, sends Bluto through a series of windows and finally through a pane of glass that frames him like a portrait, and finishes the job himself, with Olive leaning out of her clean window to admire the result.
Why It Matters
- The skyscraper setting lets the Fleischer animators use their stereoptical sets and their taste for vertigo, with the two rivals dangling over a city street drawn in deep perspective, and the squeegee duet is a good example of the studio's habit of turning manual labour into music.
- It is the first Popeye cartoon of 1937 and one of the handful of Fleischer Popeyes whose copyright was never renewed, which has made it a staple of public-domain compilations and of early television packages. The gag of Bluto creating the demand for his own services is pure Depression humour.
Notes and Trivia
- Willard Bowsky, the lead animator, was the Fleischer studio's Popeye specialist and later worked on the Superman series.
- The title puns on "painless", a word Bluto's methods do not describe.
- See also: Little Swee'Pea (1936), I Never Changes My Altitude (1937), A Date to Skate (1938).
