Sock-a-Bye, Baby

Popeye has been given the task of looking after a baby. Because his environment is so noisy, he sets about destroying, with his fists, everything that comes in his path. This includes destroying buildings, cars, musical instruments, and other obstacles. He also kills Harpo Marx and probably others working on construction.

Sock-A-Bye, Baby (1934)

*** (out of 4)

Weaker but still entertaining Popeye vehicle has him babysitting and beating up anyone or anything that dares to wake the kid up. There's plenty of action in this short but there aren't as many laughs as normal. The highlight is a great sequence where Popeye punches a radio, which sends his fist across the country to the actual guy singing and knocks him out. There's another rather funny moment where the baby steals Popeye's pipe and begins smoking it. The baby falls asleep right after his few hits so I'm guessing Popeye was smoking something other than tobacco.

You just have to be a certain type to appreciate the humor in cartoons like this. It takes a certain sick sense of humor, something not everyone has. Cartoons like "Boom Boom", one of the first Porky Pig cartoons with his co-star, Beans the cat, in which the two spend the whole film dodging malicious bombs with minds of their own. And the present film, in which Popeye proves even more of a bully than Bluto himself ever was. This was the REALLY early days, when Popeye would beat the living crap out of anyone and anything in his path. The cartoon is stuffed with gags, including the theme song which here is, naturally, the lullaby "Rock-A-Bye Baby", which is punctuated with all kinds of violent sound effects.

Like I said, it takes a certain type to savor this.

Popeye wheels a sleeping Sweepea through the tow, where various noises wake the infant. The sailor man responds by biffing the noise makers.

Popeye's voice actor offers some of her real singing voice in this cartoon. It's still in the Fleischer era, so the gags flow freely under the direction of Dave Fleischer, and although the background work is simplified to remove the slovenliness that amuses fans of Segar's Thimble Theater comic strip, there are plenty of mildly askew details.

For some reason Mae Questal is credited in the IMDb listing as the voice of Olive Oyl, even though she never appears.

Popeye begins this with his familiar song but an unfamiliar role: rocking a baby to sleep in its carriage on a sidewalk outside. When nearby Harpo Marx's harp playing wakes up the baby, Popeye kills him with one sock, and poor Harpo is now playing his harp with a halo over his head.

More crazy scenes occur, like Popeye singing and playing a banjo; the baby taking his pipe, smoking it and blowing smoke rings. From that point, the whole story is Popeye doing whatever he can to stop noise, so the baby will go back to sleep and stay that way.

Outrageous scenes follow. Popeye's solution to everything, at least in these first-year cartoons, is to sock it - whether it's people or an inanimate object. You cannot believe the damage - and the number of people he killed - our "sailor man" does in this story. In real life, he would spent his entire life in jail, if the jail could hold him!