Popeye le marin

Popeye the Sailor (1933)

**** (out of 4)

First film in the series of shorts was also the first I've seen of any of these early films. I watched some of the later ones when I was a kid and I wasn't sure what to expect out of these theatrical shorts but this first one was great. Popeye takes Olive Oyl to a fair when Bluto shows up to start trouble. There's a lot of great humor here and I really loved the animation style. The opening scene of Popeye singing his famous song is priceless as is the appearance by Betty Boop.

Now available through Warner in a 4-disc box set.

'Popeye the Sailor' is a good debut for Popeye, but there have been better cartoons of his since.

There is not much wrong with it. There is a finding its feet/style feel, and there is a preference to the voice actors who would take on the roles later. Popeye and Bluto were fine courtesy of William Costello and William Pennell, but Bonnie Poe's voice agreed (from personal opinion this is) doesn't really fit Olive Oyl, and it was strange hearing a deeper voice when so used to Mae Questel's pretty iconic interpretation.

On the other hand, the animation is beautifully drawn, smooth and meticulously detailed, the black and white crisply shaded. The music is merry and energetic, though again am more familiar with the scoring of Winston Sharples later.

It's a very entertaining cartoon and smartly written, with a lot of charm and energy. All three lead characters are engaging and their personalities established well even for so early on. Betty Boop makes a small but memorable appearance, that's both sexy and cute.

All in all, a very good debut cartoon but not among my favourite Popeye cartoons. 8/10 Bethany Cox

The first Popeye cartoon ever, although it was marketed as a Betty Boop cartoon. It was also the first in a series of cartoons where Betty Boop met various characters from newspaper comics (Such as The Little King) in animated form. Naturally, Popeye was the only one who the Fleischer Brothers got any mileage out of.

Very entertaining, like all the early Popeye's. Betty Boop makes only a small cameo, but it's hard to miss. Try to get the black and white version, since the colorized version, I dunno. It just seems to take away some of the excitement.

4/4

The first Popeye motion picture cartoon was presented as a Betty Boop movie for marketing purposes. It quickly establishes most of the tropes that would sustain the series for the next two dozen years: he sings his song, he and Bluto fight over Olive Oyl, Popeye defeats Bluto by eating spinach, and there's a surfeit of gags in the Fleischer style, both big and little, enough to make it easily watchable many times. True, the character design is unsophisticated, with the characters' designs ornamented on basic shapes, but it's a great start to what would quickly become the Fleischers' best-known franchise.

Betty Boop makes an appearance as a hula dancer, her bosom concealed solely by a lei. Ah, for those pre-code cartoons!

The Popeye character we know and love is already intact in this, his first animated appearance on film. So is Olive Oyl and Bluto. Betty Boop is also in this, in fact, she was put on in order to attract filmgoers already familiar with her but not with Elzie Segar's popular newspaper strip. It's already known that William Costello was the first voice of Popeye but very few know that a woman named Bonnie Poe was the first voice of Olive, in fact when I first saw this cartoon I already noticed how different she sounded from Ms. Oyl's usual voice! Since she was also Betty Boop, Mae Questal probably didn't want to do two voices in the same cartoon or maybe the public would be confused since they both sound the same anyway! Before Jackson Beck, William Pennell did Bluto, though I really can't tell the difference here. Fleischer-type gags abound throughout and, yes, we have the now-famous Popeye theme song and spinach finale introduced here. Well worth seeing for Popeye and animation fans.