Today we come at last to the final cartoon of the final episode of my Popeye and Son reviews. I too regret that the world’s leading Popeye and Son blog has run out of new episodes to review, but I hope to have a postscript essay about what I learned from all this. You know, my usual after finishing a project.
Today’s episode, Happy Anniversary, is another credited to John Loy, cementing my early impression that he and Eric Lewald defined the series. This episode tells the story I would have thought might be Episode 1, Cartoon 1, how Popeye and Olive got married. Write down your guesses for how it came to pass and then watch the episode. We’ll see how close you came.
The Plot: After Popeye and Olive have a fight on their anniversary the kids learn, in separate flashbacks, the story of their wedding day. On their wedding day — the last of many attempts — Popeye has to navigate Bluto’s dirty tricks and kidnapping, while Olive Oyl has to fend of Lizzie pointing out how Popeye is not large. But Popeye has his spinach, and Olive has a motorbike. Before the day is done, Bluto’s married Lizzie and Popeye and Olive Oyl exchange vows before the captain of a garbage scow. Retelling their parts of the tale rekindles Olive’s and Popeye’s affections, and hey, Popeye did too remember their anniversary, giving a diamond-ed up version of the bolt that was their original ad hoc wedding ring. On to the surprise party!
The Thoughts: Nana Oyl is in this one! I teased you yesterday about the obscure characters and here she is, getting her second animated appearance ever, if the Popeye Wikia is complete. Her father, Cole Oyl, gets to appear too, pacing while checking his watch and not demanding apologies.
The cartoon has a nice story structure, told in parallel flashbacks from Popeye and Olive. It’s also good emotional structure, as telling the story of their wedding day, overcoming Bluto’s sabotage, gives both the chance to calm down and realize they didn’t want to fight. Popeye finds his lost anniversary present earlier in the cartoon than I expected; his impulse to throw it away is understandable in the moment. Good reflexes on Junior in catching it.
The wedding day being sabotaged by Bluto brings to mind Nearlyweds, the last Famous Studios Popeye cartoon (the handful theatrically produced after that were under the Paramount Cartoon Studios name). But there’s not a repetition in any of the stunts used. There’s rather fewer tricks Bluto uses than he did in the theatrical cartoon, in fact, amounting to just swiping Popeye’s tuxedo and then driving him out of town. The flashback structure, and splitting the story between Popeye and Olive, keeps this from feeling like an under-plotted episode.
There’s also some nice bits of filling in the setting of the series. We see Popeye’s Fitness Club and Olive Oyl’s Juice Bar. The juice bar turns out never to play into the series, but this establishes what they thought they were setting up. It also gives us a first look at Bluto’s wife, as well as her name, Lizzie, which we otherwise didn’t hear until episode five. Making her Olive’s bridesmaid was probably done for dramatic economy. It suggests an angle that could have been done for the series, though, where Olive and Lizzie were as good friends as Popeye and Bluto were rivals. It turned out Bluto had little to do with the series and Lizzie even less, but there was plot-generating potential here.
So what do you think of Popeye and Olive’s wedding, done by the dubious legal theory that the captain of a ship can marry couples? I had expected Popeye to use his spinach power-up to race to the Oyl house in time. I’m still not sure why he didn’t. Or at least call Olive’s parents to promise they were on their way, but maybe that promise was spoiled by past failed weddings. Still, one running theme of this series has been how it beat my expectations, often taking an idea in a novel direction.
I liked this. It was a surprising way to get to what we knew was there, with surprise being the hardest thing to get in a prequel. Popeye being married by a ship captain makes startling emotional sense; once seen, it felt inevitable. Having it be captain of a garbage scow is also a good touch of the scruffy, disreputable start that Popeye had. He’s cleaned up considerably since 1929. It’s good he can still touch that without losing his dignity.
There’s some nice animation touches here too. Popeye spinning his pipe around, startled, which is always a fun bit of business. Olive Oyl’s head shaking causing her eyes to swing back and forth, like her face is rubber. And Popeye peeling the roof of Bluto’s cab open has just the sort of style you’d expect from the theatrical cartoons.
As bachelor, apparently, Popeye lived at Ma Wimpy’s Boarding House. I had thought this was the first time we’ve ever seen a hint that Wimpy even has a mother, though Wikipedia tells me in an incited paragraph that she appeared in the Sunday comics. (The Popeye wikia offers no hint of this, listing just his cousin Francis, introduced in this cartoon, and his cousins Otis O Otis, whom I’ve seen in the Sagendorf reruns, and Meldew, who I never heard of before either.) Shame they couldn’t have outdone even Randy Millholland in bringing out the obscurities.
When Olive finishes her story, at about 22:04 in the video, her mouth quivers. I think this is an animation error: note how it stops the moment the off-screen character stops talking. However, it works in making Olive’s crying a better-acted thing. There have been a couple animation errors this series, most of them small enough to not be worth mentioning. I just want to highlight one that’s making things better.
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