Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves (1937)
Popeye, Olive Oyl, and a ravenous Wimpy give chase across the desert to the bandit Abu Hassan — a bearded double of Bluto — whose forty thieves have just looted a town. When Hassan seizes Olive and Wimpy and hauls the plunder to his cave, Popeye downs his spinach and takes on all forty at once.
The second of Fleischer Studios’ three Technicolor Popeye two-reelers, Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves again combined hand-inked cels with the studio’s rotating tabletop miniatures to give the backgrounds real depth. Like its companion specials, it slipped into the public domain after its copyright went unrenewed.
Background
This was the second of three lavish, longer-than-usual Technicolor Popeye specials that Fleischer Studios produced in the late 1930s, loosely built around the Arabian Nights story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Like the other specials in the series, it combined traditional hand-drawn animation with the studio’s distinctive turntable technique, in which miniature three-dimensional sets were built and photographed to give the backgrounds unusual depth for the period.
What to watch for
Watch for the scale of the production compared to a standard Popeye short: more elaborate sets, a longer runtime, and set-piece action sequences built around Popeye taking on the bandit horde after his customary dose of spinach. Because its copyright was not renewed, the film has circulated freely for decades, unlike many other Fleischer cartoons still held under copyright. It is a good example of how far theatrical cartoon shorts could stretch their ambitions when given a bigger budget than usual.
