Popeye The Sailor Man
Popeye RUbber Duck

Popeye made his film debut in Popeye the Sailor, a 1933 Betty Boop cartoon (Betty only makes a brief appearance, repeating her hula dance from Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle). It was for this short that Sammy Lerner's famous "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man" song was written. I Yam What I Yam became the first entry in the regular Popeye the Sailor series.

Songwriter Sammy Lerner composed a theme song, "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man", for the first Popeye cartoon, which became forever associated with the sailor. As one cartoon historian has observed, the song itself was inspired by the first two lines of the "Pirate King" song in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, The Pirates of Penzance: "For I am a Pirate King! (Hoorah for the Pirate King!)" The tune behind those two lines is identical to the "Popeye" song except for the high note on the first "King".

Thanks to the film series, Popeye became even more of a sensation than he had in comic strips. During the mid-1930s, polls taken by theater owners proved Popeye more popular than Mickey Mouse. In 1935, Paramount added to Popeye's popularity by sponsoring the "Popeye Club" as part of their Saturday matinée program. Popeye cartoons, including a sing-a-long special entitled Let's Sing With Popeye, were a regular part of the weekly meetings. For a 10 cent membership fee, club members were given a Popeye Kazoo, a membership card, the chance to become elected as the Club's "Popeye" or "Olive Oyl" and opportunities to win other valuable gifts.

The Popeye series, like other cartoons produced by the Fleischers, was noted for its urban feel (the Fleischers operated out of New York City), its manageable variations on a simple theme (Popeye loses Olive to bully Bluto and must eat his spinach and defeat him), and the characters' "under-the-breath" mutterings. The voices for Fleischer cartoons produced during the early and mid-1930s were recorded after the animation was completed. The actors, Mercer in particular, would therefore improvise lines that were not on the storyboards or prepared for the lip-sync. Even after the Fleischers began pre-recording dialgoue for lip-sync in the late-1930s, Mercer and the other voice actors would record ad-libbed lines while watching a finished copy of the cartoon.

$11.99

Not intended as a toy for ages 13 and under.