Free Popeye Cartoons to Watch Online
Popeye has been eating his spinach on movie screens since 1933. E. C. Segar created the squinting, pipe-chewing sailor for his newspaper comic strip Thimble Theatre in 1929, and Max and Dave Fleischer’s studio in New York turned him into one of the biggest cartoon stars of the 1930s. After Paramount took over the Fleischer studio in the early 1940s, its Famous Studios kept the series going until 1957, mostly in color.
Starlite TV airs twenty Popeye cartoons from across that whole run, all on our Saturday Morning channel. Most are about six or seven minutes long, so you can watch a handful over breakfast. Here’s a guide to what’s on, roughly in order.
Start with the two Technicolor specials
If you only watch one, make it Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor. It was the first of the Fleischers’ two-reel “Popeye Color Specials,” shot in Technicolor and released in November 1936, and at about sixteen minutes it’s more than twice as long as a normal Popeye short. Sindbad, a Bluto look-alike voiced by Gus Wickie, lives on an island full of captured monsters and sings that he’s “the most remarkable, extraordinary fellow.” When Popeye sails by with Olive Oyl and Wimpy, Sindbad sends a giant roc to grab Olive and wreck the boat, then makes Popeye fight his way through the bird, a two-headed giant named Boola, and finally Sindbad himself. Meanwhile Wimpy spends the whole picture chasing a duck with a meat grinder. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2004.
The follow-up a year later, Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves, is just as big. Popeye is on Coast Guard duty when word comes that the bandit Abu Hassan is raiding a desert town, so he flies off with Olive and Wimpy, crashes in the desert, and ends up fighting all forty thieves one at a time, counting out loud as he punches. He can’t remember the magic words for the cave, and he opens his spinach can with “Open says me.” Jack Mercer, Popeye’s longtime voice, gets some of his best lines here.
Fleischer black-and-white classics
The regular one-reel Fleischer shorts are rougher and stranger than the later ones, and plenty of fans like them best. In The Paneless Window Washer (1937), Bluto drums up business by spraying mud on clean windows, and he and Popeye end up fighting it out twenty stories up, outside the office where Olive works as a public stenographer. I Never Changes My Altitude, from the same year, uses the studio’s “Stereoptical” process, which put the cartoon characters in front of real three-dimensional miniature sets, so the backgrounds have a depth you don’t usually see in 1930s animation.
A Date to Skate (1938) is a simple, lovely one: Popeye takes Olive to a roller rink, she can’t skate, and he tries to teach her. Things get out of hand, and the cartoon breaks the fourth wall along the way. It was also the last Fleischer Popeye with Mae Questel as Olive. Customers Wanted (1939) is a compilation short that strings together scenes from two earlier Popeye cartoons, which makes it a quick sampler of the studio’s style.
The Famous Studios years
According to animation historian Jeff Lenburg, Famous Studios made 122 Popeye cartoons between 1942 and 1957. The first 14 were black-and-white and the other 108 were in color. One of the black-and-white ones is Me Musical Nephews, released on Christmas Day 1942. Popeye just wants to sleep, but his nephews keep making music out of mattress springs, suspenders and medicine bottles. By the end he’s so frazzled that he jumps out of the movie screen.
The color cartoons are brighter and more polished, and most of the ones we air come from the early and mid-1950s. Big Bad Sindbad (1952) is a sort of remix: it reuses most of the 1936 Sindbad special with new animation wrapped around it and a new soundtrack, and it’s one of only two Famous cartoons where Popeye wears his old comic-strip outfit. Ancient Fistory (1953) is a gender-swapped Cinderella. Popeye is the overworked, raggedy employee at Bluto’s Beanery, a fairy godfather (Poopdeck Pappy) turns a spinach can into a car, and Princess Olive holds an archery contest for her hand. Jack Mercer voices several characters in this one, including the fairy godfather.
For this time of year, Fright to the Finish (1954) is the one to watch. It’s Halloween night, Olive is reading ghost stories, and Bluto stages a series of fake haunts, including a headless man, a moving skeleton and a balloon under a sheet, then blames them on Popeye. Popeye gets even with a jar of vanishing cream. Gopher Spinach (1954) has a nice bit of trivia: the Paramount mountain logo was completely redrawn for it so the title would fit the new widescreen theater screens.
The rest of the 1950s batch is easy to enjoy in any order: Shuteye Popeye (1952), the plumbing comedy Floor Flusher, Taxi-Turvy, Bride and Gloom, Greek Mirthology, Private Eye Popeye and Cookin’ with Gags. Insect to Injury (1956) is the only Popeye cartoon directed by Dave Tendlar, and Spree Lunch (1957) is a bit of a farewell: it marks the last theatrical appearances of both Bluto and Wimpy.
Watching with kids
Popeye cartoons are slapstick, and the fights are the whole point, so expect plenty of punching, falling and Bluto getting what’s coming to him. None of the cartoons in this guide are the wartime propaganda shorts. If you have little ones, the Sindbad special, A Date to Skate and Me Musical Nephews are good places to start. For more cartoons from the same era, from Felix the Cat to the Fleischers’ Superman, see our guide to classic cartoons for kids.
Every Popeye cartoon here is on the air now. Click any title for its next showtimes in your time zone, or just tune in to Saturday Morning and see what comes on.