Popeye For President

Popeye for President
Directed by	Seymour Kneitel
Produced by	Seymour Kneitel Isadore Sparber
Written by	Jack Mercer
Starring	Jack Mercer Mae Questel Jackson Beck
Music by	Winston Sharples
Animation by	Robert Connavale Frank Endres Tom Johnson
Studio	Famous Studios
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)	March 30, 1956
Running time	6:00
Country	USA
Language	English
Preceded by	Hill-billing and Cooing
Followed by	Out to Punch
IMDb profile

Popeye for President is a Popeye the Sailor theatrical animated short produced by Famous Studios (the original animation unit of Paramount Pictures) and released on March 30, 1956.

Plot[edit]

Popeye and Bluto both run for President of the United States and are tied for votes on Election Day. It's up to swing voter Olive Oyl to cast the deciding vote but she is unable to go to the polls until she finishes her chores at her farm, so the two candidates get to work lobbying for Olive's vote by competing to help her with the chores. Not surprisingly, Bluto resorts to dirty campaigning, underhanded tricks and brute force to undermine Popeye's efforts to win over Olive, but Popeye foils him each time as he helps Olive get a cord of firewood cut and stacked, get a field plowed and put a wagonload of hay into a hayloft despite Bluto's repeated interference.

Impressed with Popeye's help, Olive decides to cast her vote for him, but when Bluto punches out Popeye in response and tries to force an unwilling Olive to vote for him instead as he drives off with her, Popeye vacuums some spinach from a garden through his corncob pipe and eats it to strengthen up, then takes off in pursuit of Bluto. When Bluto drags Olive into the polling station to make her vote for him, he finds out that Popeye is already in the voting booth as the sailor sends his rival flying out the door with a right hook and into a campaign banner he gets tangled in. With Olive's vote, Popeye becomes President and they ride in an open limousine as part of a victory parade through Washington, D.C.

Trivia[edit]

• Early in the cartoon, Bluto is seen to be running as the nominee for the "Blutocratic Party" (an analog of the Democrat Party in the short). Although exaggerated for cartoon effect, the tactics Bluto uses to try to get votes during his campaign are not unlike similar such tactics the real-life Democrats have used through the decades in elections and to control the American political landscape.

Production notes[edit]

• Popeye for President is one of a number of Famous Studios-produced Popeye the Sailor cartoons in the public domain in the United States.

External links[edit]

• Popeye for President public domain cartoon at the Internet Archive