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I Yam Love Sick

Original release date: May 29, 1938

Olive is busy reading a romance novel while pigging out on chocolates. Popeye strolls in, but Olive ignores him. (Popeye should have learned from Hold the Wire that he can't win if he's interrupting Olive's romance-reading.)

Popeye tries to placate Olive, but she shows him a photo of her "new boyfriend" -- Bluto, whose photo even sneers at Popeye. So Popeye fakes sickness to win Olive's sympathy. It works great, too, to the point that Olive looks out of the cartoon's frame to ask the movie audience if there's a doctor in the house.

Olive calls for an ambulance, and Popeye is removed by two ambulance drivers -- the same ones from Hospitaliky that ignored a banged-up Bluto and carted off his motorcycle (another bad sign).

Popeye mugs it up at the hospital and gets put under an X-ray machine, where we find that either Popeye's skeleton is badly malformed or he swallowed a ship's anchor at some point -- but for some reason, the doctor ignores this while wondering what Popeye's malady could be.

Not competent enough to diagnose a healthy person himself, the doctor huddles with his colleagues (in football formation, yet) and provides an examination scene enough to make one wonder if it was inspired by the Marx Brothers' similar outing in A Day at the Races the previous year.

Olive goes so far as to administer spinach, but the doctors (real geniuses, these quacks) walk away from Popeye convinced he is dead. Olive sobs over Popeye, who sits up and happily confesses all, which gets the sap everything he deserves from Olive.

My rating:

© 2007, Steve Bailey.

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