I-Ski Love-Ski You-Ski

Popeye takes Olive Oyl mountain climbing. Bluto tries to sabotage their fun.

It's a typically enjoyable Popeye cartoon from the Fleischer era, enhanced by some nice background work and tabletop animation to bring a sense of dimensionality to the movie. Although it's often forgotten, producer Max Fleischer was an inventive man whose contributions to animation include rotoscoping. Although they are largely forgotten in the modern era of computer-generated imagery, his work helped reduce the costs of hand-drawn animation, long the most expensive type of movie-making, because every frame had to be drawn by hand and then individually photographed.

There is more mountain climbing that skiing here, but it still is one of the more clever early Popeye features. Popeye and Olive are going skiing, but as usual, Bluto has hots for our lovely female lead. This leads to some wild mishaps on the slopes and when they finally get around to actually skiing, the fun really starts.

Popeye and Bluto are walking in the snow to meet Olive Oyl in her cabin. Popeye invites Olive to do some extreme climbing. They are followed closely by Bluto. At the top, they ski back down.

This starts fair enough with the Popeye trio doing their usual drama. Then the trio do some extreme mountain climbing. They are going straight up. I wouldn't mind playing with that concept more. The rest is doing extreme skiing back down. If I have a choice, I like the climb up better. As for the title, I finally see the I Love You. Is that a Polish joke? At least, it is different, but there has to be something less clunky.

I-Ski Love-Ski You-Ski (1936)

*** (out of 4)

It's love in the snowy mountains as Popeye takes Olive Oyl mountain climbing but with Bluto coming along you know a fight is going to break out.

Here's another highly-entertaining and fun short from Fleischer who once again manages to make a film that seems as fresh as anything else from this era. What I've always been so impressed with is how these Popeye shorts move like a musical number and there's just a graceful feel to them. This one here has plenty of nice laughs as Popeye gets all the abuse you'd expect him to receive and then we get some rather fun action and especially during the ending with Bluto and the sailor going downhill and throwing punches whenever they can.

The story to this one is okay-standard Popeye beats up Bluto, this time on skis. What makes this a very special cartoon (and it is a very special cartoon) is the visuals and the work of Jack Mercer as the voice of Popeye.

The visuals-words cannot adequately describe them, they must be seen-are still great almost 70 years later. The backgrounds, animation, detail, everything is exceptional. The Fleischers seldom made a visually unimpressive cartoon.

Jack Mercer's name is well-known to fans, but the average person probably knows very little about him. But much of what makes Popeye the Popeye most people think of stems from Jack Mercer's work as his "voice". The unde the breath mutterings that are often the funniest parts of the cartoon were largely written or ad-libbed by Mercer. He is as much responsible as anyone for Popeye's personality. Thank you, Jack Mercer.

Well worth watching. Most highly recommended.