"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.
