"How Green is My Spinach" (1950) ==>This review has spoilers!<==
Right off the bat, you realize that this is going to be an unusual cartoon. Bluto, showing some emotional real frustration in this cartoon for a change, takes us underground for some intense scenes (for a 40's/50's cartoon short) of poison making as he works with great intensity to once and for all remove that stupid spinach problem that has left him humiliated for almost three decades by this time.
I think this is the one "Popeye" short that you may want to watch first before you allow your child to see. The underground poison lab, the more-villainous-than usual Bluto, that purple spinach sucking cloud (along with other somewhat disturbing spinach destroying images) and a more helpless Popeye than you've ever seen before, along with no Olive Oyl could really scare a little kid. The fact that no other vegetables provide even the slightest amount of help makes things all that much worse. A newsreel providing cringe-worthy scenes of an assaulted Popeye with a helpless sounding newsman ("Is there any spinach in the house???" - Tom Ewell in a noteworthy cameo) completes the Popeye distress. In the end, a boy in the audience does have the spinach and Popeye wins again, creating a Bluto spinach planting cart and the cartoon ends with an abruptness that actually might have been planned to leave you a bit disturbed. I think one could argue that it's a cop-out - only how would YOU have ended this short? The concentrated story of this short ends so quickly (It's only 5 1/2 minutes long!) that it could actually stay with you a while after viewing. That alone makes this short one of the best ones (and certainly one of the most underrated) ever made - this despite the odd print and faded color that you see today.
You can see in some of the later 40's Popeye shorts that this one was probably inevitable; Bluto was starting to try and figure out "the spinach problem" in previous shorts. But in this one he goes all out and children should be warned.
But for the rest of you, please take a look; this is a great one.
It's interesting that after this one, the Popeye makers went back to the standard formula as if this short was never made.
Right off the bat, you realize that this is going to be an unusual cartoon. Bluto, showing some emotional real frustration in this cartoon for a change, takes us underground for some intense scenes (for a 40's/50's cartoon short) of poison making as he works with great intensity to once and for all remove that stupid spinach problem that has left him humiliated for almost three decades by this time.
I think this is the one "Popeye" short that you may want to watch first before you allow your child to see. The underground poison lab, the more-villainous-than usual Bluto, that purple spinach sucking cloud (along with other somewhat disturbing spinach destroying images) and a more helpless Popeye than you've ever seen before, along with no Olive Oyl could really scare a little kid. The fact that no other vegetables provide even the slightest amount of help makes things all that much worse. A newsreel providing cringe-worthy scenes of an assaulted Popeye with a helpless sounding newsman ("Is there any spinach in the house???" - Tom Ewell in a noteworthy cameo) completes the Popeye distress. In the end, a boy in the audience does have the spinach and Popeye wins again, creating a Bluto spinach planting cart and the cartoon ends with an abruptness that actually might have been planned to leave you a bit disturbed. I think one could argue that it's a cop-out - only how would YOU have ended this short? The concentrated story of this short ends so quickly (It's only 5 1/2 minutes long!) that it could actually stay with you a while after viewing. That alone makes this short one of the best ones (and certainly one of the most underrated) ever made - this despite the odd print and faded color that you see today.
You can see in some of the later 40's Popeye shorts that this one was probably inevitable; Bluto was starting to try and figure out "the spinach problem" in previous shorts. But in this one he goes all out and children should be warned.
But for the rest of you, please take a look; this is a great one.
It's interesting that after this one, the Popeye makers went back to the standard formula as if this short was never made.