How Green Is My Spinach

The 1950s was not the best decade for the Popeye theatrical series or Famous Studios, the early-50s efforts being better and a little more consistent than those from the late-50s. The less polished animation quality, lower gag count and varying effectiveness of them and less fresh stories being the primary reasons for the inferior quality, compared to several of the 40s Famous Studios Popeye cartoons and Fleischer Studios' output.

'How Green is My Spinach' is in many ways one of the most interesting Popeye cartoons and certainly stands out in the series, there isn't another Popeye cartoon quite like it. It is on the most part one of the best early-50s cartoons and one of the ones that is deserving of a lot more attention. There is another Popeye cartoon that has a more vengeful Bluto and more vulnerable Popeye called 'Friend Or Phony'. For me though 'How Green is My Spinach' is by quite some way the superior cartoon, it's more inventive, it's funnier and it avoids being too mean-spirited (something that was a bit of a turn off in 'Friend Or Phony').

It is one of the shortest Popeye cartoons and part of me did feel that it was too short and that it could have ended not as abruptly as it turned out.

Not much wrong otherwise. As far as the Famous Studios Popeye cartoons go, 'How Green is My Spinach' is one of the most unique, the studio's Popeye cartoons tended to be quite formulaic but there is much less of that feel here. The differences are many. Not just that there is no Olive Oyl (which doesn't hurt the cartoon at all), but there is a live action sequence with a memorable cameo appearance and the characterisation is a change of pace. Popeye as said is more memorable and Bluto more vengeful, this was an interesting change and brought a dynamic not seen a lot before in the chemistry between Popeye and Bluto.

Bluto's treatment of Popeye is cruel but doesn't come over as overly-mean-spirited, like it did in 'Friend Or Phony' which was balanced out enough with laughs so it became quite depressing to watch. Whereas here, there were amusing and well-timed gags that were also quite clever, while what sounded like a not particularly tasteful concept on paper wasn't handled anywhere near as distastefully as it could easily have been. It goes along at a crisp pace too, if slightly rushed in places due to the short length.

Visually, 'How Green is My Spinach' is typically vibrant with the background art being especially impressive and the use of the gas cloud was an ingenious touch. The live action fit well and doesn't jar. The music is lush, dynamic and characterful. The voice acting from both Jack Mercer and Jackson Beck is very good.

Summing up, very good and one of the better early-50s Popeye cartoons. 8/10

"How Green is My Spinach" (1950) opens with a montage of Popeye's spinach-fueled defeats of Bluto. Finally fed up with Popeye always beating him after eating spinach, Bluto sets out to create a lethal mixture (arsenic, Castor Oil, DDT, and "Essence of Skunk") that will poison the country's spinach crop, an act of villainy far more ambitious than usual for Bluto. He flies around in a plane marked "Spinach Killer" with a row of sharp teeth painted on it and sprays the spinach fields. Eventually poor Popeye has to try out other vegetables, all to no avail. A TV newsman (patterned after someone on the air at the time, although I'm not sure who) reports on the disaster. Eventually, the newsman's narration becomes blow-by-blow coverage of Bluto's shellacking of Popeye in a supermarket, which then becomes a color cartoon newsreel seen in a theater by a live-action audience in tinted black-and-white. When the narrator asks, "Is there a can of spinach in the house?," a well-prepared boy in the audience comes to the rescue.

All of this begs the question of just why Bluto couldn't simply eat the spinach himself in order to be on an equal playing field with Popeye.

One of the audience members in the live-action footage appears to be comic actor Tom Ewell, who was already co-starring in movies at this point (e.g. ADAM'S RIB). IMDb's Trivia note insists that it IS Tom Ewell, which leaves us wondering where this shot came from and how it got into this cartoon.

Olive Oyl is not in this. The TV print I saw had a running time of 5:30, pretty short for a studio cartoon.

Bluto is tired of constantly being beaten by Popeye. He comes up with a scheme to destroy the spinach crop. Finally, Bluto turns into a supervillain. There are some fun touches like the kids cheering on the end of spinach. It's a little bit outside the norm for a Popeye cartoon but it's still plenty fun.