Popeye for President

With a title like that, you expect a lot more than Popeye and Bluto helping Olive out with farm chores so she can get to the polls. How about Popeye kicking out Congress?? Single-handedly building new roads?? How about Bluto trying to frame him in a scandal?? How about entertaining us??!!

Popeye and Bluto are running for the same office. Everyone has voted save Olive Oyl, and her vote will decide the election. So they head over to her farm and compete by doing chores.

While I can forgive the folks at Famous Studios their failure to explain the Electoral College in six minutes, I find it harder to ignore the utterly hackneyed way in which they present this cartoon. Popeye and Bluto fight. Bluto cheats. Finally Bluto clouts Popeye and leaves him in a situation from which he cannot escape, but there's some spinach to hand, which he eats, escapes, and clobbers Bluto. Just like all the other times.

It's the Presidential election time and Popeye, of the Spinach Party, is running against Bluto, of the Blutocratic Party. Popeye promises free ice cream while Bluto dishes out cigars. Things are not looking good for our hero, according to the crowd size. Popeye has just one little dog sitting there waging is tale while Bluto has a huge group of people listening to him.

While the two candidates get in an argument, they notice a neon ticker-tape sign flashing on a nearby building that says the election is all tied up with just one vote left in Green County: a "Miss Olive Oyl." Naturally, our two rivals are going to do their best to persuade Olive to vote for them so they race out to the country outskirts to woo her.

Popeye's methods of chopping and stack wood, plowing the field and putting hay in the hayloft are creative and very funny. Bluto is stupid and ineffective in every thing he does in this cartoon, an appropriate representative of his party name.

Popeye for President (1956)

*** (out of 4)

Popeye and Bluto are running for President and they soon realize that the election is tied with only one person in the country who hasn't voted yet and that's Olive Oyl. Both men rush to her farm to win her vote by doing the various chores.

POPEYE FOR PRESIDENT is certainly one of the better shorts from this era of the series. There's a lot of great action throughout the film as well as some nice laughs. The highlights certainly begin once we're on the farm and we get some creative scenes of Popeye helping out on the farm including a very funny bit dealing with some wood that needs chopped. Fans of the series will certainly enjoy this film as the action is non-stop.

Really like to love a good deal of Popeye cartoons and like the character of Popeye. Love Bluto more and his chemistry with Popeye has always driven their cartoons. Will admit though to preferring the Popeye cartoons from the Dave Fleischer era, the cartoons tend to be funnier and there is more originality and more risk taking in some of them.

'Popeye for President' is another late Popeye cartoon and made in Famous Studios' roughest and most variable period where budgets were much smaller in particularly the animation and deadlines and time constraints were shorter and tighter. All things considered, while there are infinitely better Popeye cartoons (especially during the Fleischer era) and there are signs of what made this period an inferior one for Famous Studios, 'Popeye for President' is not a bad late Popeye cartoon at all, actually really very enjoyable and one of the better cartoons in Famous Studios' late output.

As to be expected, the story is standard and formulaic, all it is basically is Popeye and Bluto battling for Olive Oyl's affections although it isn't repetitive and there is a little more variety with the presidential theme.

Much of the animation is fine for late 50s Famous Studios, but there are parts where the backgrounds are sparse and the drawing lacks finesse.

What is fantastic about 'Popeye for President' is the music score, the best thing for me. It's beautifully orchestrated, rhythmically it's full of energy and there is so much character and atmosphere, it's also brilliant at adding to the action and enhancing it. The animation is also on the most par surprisingly good for late Famous Studios, colourful, nicely detailed and fluid. The gags are very amusing to hilarious for late Famous Studios/Popeye, the interplay between the characters is lively and witty if in need of more variety at times and the pace is never dull.

The three main characters do a great job carrying the cartoon, Bluto being the funniest and most interesting. Olive Oyl is a good charming character where you can totally see what Popeye sees in her, but it's the entertaining interplay between Popeye and Bluto that really sparkles. Jack Mercer, Mae Questel and Jackson Beck give great vocal characterisations, Beck in particular and Mercer and Questel are the voice actors that spring to mind generally for me for Popeye and Olive's voices.

Concluding, very enjoyable. 8/10 Bethany Cox