I loooove Fleischer's Popeye better than all the other versions,and this is one of my favorite out of the "Arabian Nights" trilogy of featurettes in color; and "Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp" too.

I love the desert scene where the three heroes - Popeye,Olive Oyl and Wimpy trudge through the sand and Wimpy sees a feast which was really a mirage (and I also love the "tank roll" part too). I also love the scene at the cafe,when Popeye snatches Abu Hassen/Bluto's underwear from him (without removing his clothes); Oh! and one last scene that love is when Olive give Popeye a kiss while pacing on guard duty back and forth on the dock.

[edit. Having just seen a difitally remastered version of this, I'm giving it an extra half star']

I remember one of Popeye's (many) TV shows from when I was a kid. If I had to guess I'd say it was probably the 50's Famous Studios shorts, repackaged, but who can tell? Point is at the time I thought them old-fashioned and not very interesting.

It's nice to find that a childhood memory actually falls short of the reality. Popeye has had seemingly countless reincarnations on celluloid since Fleischer first started filming him in the 30's (at which time, according to survey's completed by cinema owners, he was actually more popular than Mickey Mouse), but one thing that remained constant was Jack Mercer in the lead role.

It soon became clear that once Mercer got into character as Popeye, nobody could stop him improvising. This is part of the real delight of Popeye cartoons, which seems to apply to their various periods. Mercer is a hopeless ad-libber, lost in his character, mumbling and muttering often half-legible phrases while the action goes on all around him, or even if there's no action at all. To overcome this, they abandoned the idea of animating to a voice track, and had Mercer and Co. do voice-overs live to the finished animation. Not a unique concept by any means, but seldom has it been put to such good use. There are some inevitable lip-synch problems, but the impression you get is of three people standing around a microphone, watching a cartoon, and having a load of fun.

This is much what was done with the US version of 'Kimba the White Lion' for example, but at least in that case the actors seemed to have worked out what they were going to say. In 'Ali Baba', Mercer mutters and mumbles delightfully and almost continuously, and Mae Questel joins in, adding spirited ad-libs for Olive, even when her character isn't on screen!

The film itself is one of the rare Fleischer colour 2-reelers, and clocks in at around 16 minutes, so it's sort of the animated version of a novelette. There is some rather tedious riding through the desert, involving Bluto (Abu), who leads a bunch of Arabs and sings about how bad he is.

Wimpy, Olive and Popeye pick up a call on their coast guard radio, and their boat quickly grows wings, while Popeye pilots it all over the world several times till it crashes in the desert, presumably due to his complete ineptness. There follow some sight gags - some pretty good - as the three trudge across the dunes, only to find refuge in a tavern, which is raided by Abu. He captures Olive and Wimpy (I have to assume the latter was a mistake, as why anyone would want to capture a useless glutton is beyond me). Popeye needs to break into their secret hideout and rescue his friends.

This is a surprisingly strong short, probably pushed up to the 3+ star mark by my love of Mercer's relentless, unscripted muttering. Few people have ever inhabited a character like Mercer inhabited Popeye.

BTW, it occured to me whilst considering this review, the similarity between Popeye's spinach, and Asterix's magic potion. Who knows?

NB. This was the second of three, two-reel Popeye 'mini movies' which Fleischer produced in colour, and which are generally known as 'the Arabian Knights Trilogy' or something similar. I think this is easily the best of the three.