Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves

A POPEYE Cartoon.

After crashing his plane in the Sahara, POPEYE THE SAILOR MEETS ALI BABA'S FORTY THIEVES when brigand Abu Hassan loots the desert village where the old spinach muncher has found respite. With Olive Oyl captured as a slave for the Thieves, it's time for our hero to come to the rescue...

This was the second in a series of 3 excellent two-reel cartoons, created by Max Fleischer, in which Popeye & his friends are interpolated into the classic stories of The Arabian Nights. They feature great animation - notice the fascinating 3-D backgrounds - and taut, fast-moving plots. Meant to be shown in movie theaters, they are miles ahead of their Saturday Morning counterparts. Jack Mercer is the voice of Popeye; Mae Questel does the honors for Olive Oyl.

In a vast Abrabian desert there's a group of thieves lead by Bruno(Ali Baba) and the 40 thieves. As they rob and steal everything in site. Popeye, Olive, and Wimpy run a coast guard post. When they got word to be on the watch for thieves. Which takes them on an air travel towards the Abrabian desert. After traveling for many days and nights, they finally made it to civilization which is one of the sites that Ali Baba has set his eyes on. And it's up to Popeye to fight and take down this aggressive thief.

Like "Popeye meets Sinbad" this one is worthy of being one of the best Popeye cartoons ever made.

It's original, it's humorous, and it has plenty of great moments with your spinach loving sailor.

Highly recommended to those who liked the Popeye meets Sinbad one.

1937 was a big year for the animation industry. So many milestones and shifts took place. Cartoons were becoming more and more sophisticated.

At the Fleischer studio, a second Popeye epic was released. This time Bluto plays the role of Ali Baba, but he identifies himself as Abu Hassan in his theme song. As with Sinbad, Popeye and Abu have a hilarious exchange of smack talk and showing off their wits and strength.

Sinbad is my favorite of the three Technicolor two-reel specials, but this is the superior one. The production value, pacing, and overall execution feels like a feature, and it should have been made as one. One can only wonder what animation history would have been like if the Fleischer studio made this as a feature to compete with Disney's Snow White as the first animated features.

It does feel like a missed opportunity, since Popeye was such a popular character at the time, and being a sailor, he lent himself to endless possibilities for epic adventure films.

While the use of Arab stereotypes may not sit well with contemporary audiences, this is a classic one cannot miss. One of Popeye's greatest films of all time.

The song of Abu Hassan and his 40 thieves is the axis of this charming short adaptation of classic story, great for the humor, fight scenes and for the admirable Wimpy serving in exemplary manner his interest. So, an admirable short film, remembering the emotions of childhood and giving a precious gift of adventures and songs and humor and wise use of cliches.

He always-innovative Fleischer Studios had its own version of the multiplane camera called the 'Stereoptical Process,' 'The Slide,' or better known as the 'setback' camera. Its system was further refined in the studio's second 'Popeye Color Special,' the two-reeler cartoon November 1937 "Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves." Popeye is in the Coast Guard. The sailorman, Olive Oyl and J. Wellington Wimpy respond to a call in Arabia to thwart the Forty Thieves while their attacking a desert town. Throughout all the chaos, Popeye confronts Abu Hassan in an effort to stop his band's destructive actions. A can of spinach enables Popeye to take on the gang.

The Fleischers departed from the vertical camera Disney had designed and built an horizontal one instead. Theirs was situated on a stage, with miniature sets and artwork placed in layers on a huge turntable to capture both background and foreground images. The drawn cels complete with characters were filmed within this framework, with the camera moving forward and backward. In "Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves" its final scene shows Popeye and Olive riding in a wagon illustrated by a three-dimensional effect. Miraculously, the camera pans to Abu and his companions in the normal two-dimensional setting while pulling the wagon. By this time in late 1937 the designers of animated cartoons were pressing the latest technological advancements, most which would still be in use until computers entered the scene in the late 20th century.