Film

Popeye the Sailor

Name: Popeye the Sailor
Genre: Animation, Comedy
Released: 1933
Cast: William 'Billy' Costello, William Pennell, Bonnie Poe, Mae Questel

Slapstick
Light-hearted
Dip in and out

The seven-minute debut of Popeye, made in 1933, launches a squat sailor with an inexplicable accent into a brawl over a woman with stick legs. It's anarchic, crude, and moves at breakneck speed—drawn in the wild, rubbery style of early animation when the medium had no rules yet. For anyone curious about animation history or why Popeye lasted ninety years.

TMDb rating

3.5

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The wildcard

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Both are products of and meditations on their own historical moment—Popeye was made in the Depression and radiates 1933, while this film is obsessed with the 1920s from a 2011 perspective. Both ask: what do we love about the past?

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The Skeleton Dance1929

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Un Chien Andalou1929

Both are seven-minute films from the early 1930s that reject conventional storytelling entirely, but one's a comedy and one's a nightmare. They show the same moment in cinema going in opposite directions.

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