1933 was also the year the Flesichers introduced their biggest hit with their long-running adaptation of E.C. Segar’s Popeye comics. I’ve said before that these cartoons never reached the heights of their source material. Catching up with his earliest screen appearances hasn’t changed my mind, but there’s no denying two things — these cartoons made Segar’s sailor an icon, and they’re the best animated version of Popeye by several orders of magnitude. 

My main beef with the Fleischer Popeye is how often they returned to the same plot — Popeye and Bluto duking it out, almost always for Olive Oyl’s affections (there’s that undercurrent of sexual violence in supposedly light entertainment again). And that formula was in place from the very first Popeye the Sailor called, simply enough, Popeye the Sailor. Even the most excruciatingly repetitive part of the formula — spinach’s graduation from Popeye’s everyday diet to the almost magical deus ex machina of every installment — is already in place, ready to play out endlessly over the next ninety-odd years.

So is Popeye’s iconic voice, which is a heck of a feat, since the Fleischer Brothers wouldn’t bring along Popeye’s official voice, Jack Mercer, for another two years. It could be Mercer wanted to smooth the transition, or it could be that you look at that character and know there’s obviously no other voice to give him. 

I’m inclined to lean towards option No. 2, because for most of the year, Olive Oyl will sound nothing like the Olive Oyl we all know, with a voice a good couple of octaves higher. Mae Questel, doing double duty as Betty Boop, would finally come onboard with the third installment. And just to make things even more confusing, she’d disappear from the role for the next six months. Did the Fleischers not know a good thing when they had it? Did they create these shorts in a different order than they released them? Look, I know way too much about these old cartoons, but even I can’t answer that one.

These early shorts are strange in other ways, too. The Popeye comics are hardly what you’d call gritty realism, but all their goons and jeeps and Sea Hags sure look that way by comparison when the characters are dropped headfirst into the world of the Fleischer Brothers’ Betty Boop. Betty herself supposedly stars to help pre-sell the new character, just as she did, to much less success, with other comics heroes like The Little King and Henry. The truth is, she’s just here to cameo, uncomfortably in brownface, as a hula dancer. But it’s pretty clear this crossover gives her the home-court advantage, and it’s very strange to see Popeye and Olive leave Segar’s exaggerated pulp adventures for a whole different genre of fantasy full of talking animals. For a while, it seems like the Fleischers have learned their lesson, populating Popeye’s world with human adversaries in I Yam What I Yam! and Blow Me Down! before reverting to form in I Eats My Spinach and Wild Elephinks. 

Even when Popeye isn’t lost in animal-land, it’s still distractingly easy to separate the Segar- and Fleischer-designed characters. That’s true in plenty of other ways. The Fleischers faithfully adapted Segar’s characters — at least when you’re grading on a curve that includes Krazy Kat — but they had no interest in a stylistic adaptation. For one thing, these near-pantomime cartoons had no room for Segar’s verbal humor, reducing poor, loquacious Wimpy to a bit player. You’ll notice what little dialogue these cartoons have was apparently yad-libbed after the animation was done, since the characters’ mouths don’t move. Mercer would take advantage of this method to add one of Popeye’s most memorable quirks, the constant muttering under his breath. Could all that half-audible, overlapping dialogue have drawn Robert Altman to adapt Popeye fifty years later?

As for the Fleischer Brothers, their gags were purely physical, lifted straight out of the Betty Boop playbook unaltered. So was the look, but strangely, the thick, shadowy atmosphere that made both the animated Betty and the newsprint Popeye so memorably is absent from the sailor’s shorts. Sometimes, this is bad — you’ll get real sick of seeing Popeye punching something so hard it turns into a dozen smaller things real quick, I’ll tell you that. Other times, it approaches the heights of surrealism the Fleischers reached in Snow White.

The variation on that tired old punch-based punchline in I Eats My Spinach takes it far enough to transcend cartoon absurdity into Dalí-class surrealism when a bull splits into a fully furnished butcher shop, right down to the cleavers and a barrel of dog bones. That short also includes some of the most successful explorations of the Fleischers’  obsession with the mutability of animated forms. Bluto competes in a fancy riding competition by splitting his horse into four ponies; Popeye one-ups him by yanking on the horse’s tail until its head pops out of its keister. In I Yam What I Yam, after pushing cartoon logic past its breaking point when Popeye punches a tree into a log cabin with a stone chimney and a fire already lit, the Flesichers tap into a deeper source of dream or myth logic when Native American warriors surround the cabin disguised as bushes, turning formless and re-forming with every step. 

Those warriors are caricatured every bit as offensively as you’d expect, but even they aren’t as horrible as the South of the Border denizens Popeye meets in Blow Me Down!, all unkempt beards and fist-sized teeth. Fortunately, there’s still pleasures to be found here, like Bluto and Popeye punching each other back and forth across rooftops, which isn’t choreographed as excitingly as it might be, but still, it’s a hard concept to fuck up. And Popeye gets an introduction that tops (and possibly inspired) Jack Sparrow’s in Pirates of the Carribbean. Like the later film, we’re introduced to the hero hanging onto the mast before the camera pulls back — in this case to reveal that the ship isn’t sinking, but a dolphin holding the mast in its blowhole. Blow Me Down! also briefly made me eat my words about the quality of the Fleischers’ adaptation with an Olive Oyl dance scene that could have been traced straight from Segar.

There’s also a misguided attempt at source fidelity when temporary Popeye William Costello tries to adopt the hero’s iconic “Arf arf arf!” laugh. It’s pretty obviously supposed to be a phonetic representation of a hoarse chuckle, but that’s not how Costello saw it. Instead, he flatly reads it out loud, sounding more like he’s saying “Off off off!” Fortunately, once Mercer came onboard he’d ignore the comics entirely to create the endlessly imitated laugh Popeye would use for the. rest of his existence.

These early Popeyes also show the Fleischers experimenting with three-dimensional space in ways that foreshadow their invention of the setback camera. We see the kind of 3D miniatures the setback would allow Popeye to walk around inside in the ship-set title sequences, already in place from the first installment. Seasin’s Greetinks sees the Fleischer crew redrawing the frozen river frame by frame to follow Popeye and Olive along it. And then there’s the long pan of Popeye racing through the woods to save Olive from a dive over the falls, foreground and background moving separately but flawlessly synchronized four years before Disney’s much-hyped invention of the “multiplane camera” to achieve the same effect. 

Popeye wasn’t immune to Kongamania, either: Wild Elephinks washes him and Olive on a tropical island populated with a menagerie of animals (including such un-tropical species as bears and moose), but their main adversary is, of course, a gorilla, who even carries Olive off like Kong carried Fay Wray.