Popeye the Sailor

Popeye the Sailor (1933)

Popeye and Bluto fight for the love of Olive Oyl in their debut short, featuring Betty Boop.

Date of release
1933-07-14
TMDB
6.9 / 10 (57)
Runtime
7m
Genres
Animation, Comedy
Director
Dave Fleischer

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Popeye

Popeye the Sailor is a 1933 animated short produced by Fleischer Studios and distributed by Paramount Publix Corporation. While billed as a Betty Boop cartoon, it was produced as a vehicle for Popeye in his debut animated appearance, who would later establish his own series. Because of this, Betty makes a cameo appearance in the cartoon, while Popeye is the star of the cartoon.

Production notes

This short also introduces the song "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man", written by Sammy Lerner, loosely based on the first two lines of the "Pirate King" song in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, The Pirates of Penzance. It would eventually become Popeye's theme song, with a portion of its instrumental appearing over the opening credits.

The animation sequence with Popeye singing was reused in the Screen Songs cartoon Let's Sing with Popeye.

The locomotive featured is a 2-4-2 (American type steam locomotive). These types of steam trains with their wheel arrangement were used most common on U.S. railroads from the 1830s through 1928.

It is the only Betty Boop cartoon to feature Popeye.

It was also excluded from the sale of the Betty Boop cartoons to U.M. & M. TV Corporation in 1955 and was instead sold with the rest of the Popeye cartoons to Associated Artists Productions in 1956. As a result, it was owned separately from the rest of the Betty Boop cartoons until Paramount Skydance (now Skydance Corporation) acquired Warner Bros. Discovery, the then-current owner of the Popeye cartoons, in 2026.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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