Cinema: Popeye Boycott

As any inquiring reporter from Mars would soon discover, the Earth’s most popular entertainers are not made of flesh & blood. They are a number of two-dimensional creatures whose native haunts are the animated cartoons. As every cinemaddict knows, the thousands of hand- drawn pictures that go to make up one of these cartoons are the work of many hands. Last May, at Manhattan’s Max Fleischer Studios (Popeye, Betty Boop, Screen Songs, Color Classics) 76 members of the Commercial Artists & Designers

Union threw in their hands, went on strike. Said one of their picketing placards: “We can’t get much spinach on salaries as low as $15.”

Employer Max Fleischer whose Popeye does most of his heroic feats on spinach alone, hired other help, refused to accede to strikers’ demands. All summer the strike dragged on, marked only by such minor incidents as an abortive attempt by picketers to float propaganda balloons up past the studio windows, by the arrest of a few female strikers on such charges as shin-kicking, biting a police sergeant in the arm. In metropolitan theatres loud-lunged claques greeted the appearance of Fleischer cartoons with resounding boos. Fortnight ago C.A.D.U. announced that 13 cinema theatre circuits, including more than 500 theatres, had banned Fleischer cartoons pending settlement of the strike. Attorneys for Paramount Pictures, Fleischer distributor, promptly denied it. Fact was that some theatres had indeed banned the Fleischer cartoons, others had temporarily dropped them to keep their audiences quiet.

Meantime both sides settled down to a finish fight. Paramount and Max Fleischer continued to ignore the strikers as best they could; the strikers continued to picket Max Fleischer’s studio, singing their own words to a well-known tune:

We’re Popeye the union man, boop boop!

We’ll fight to the finish ’cause we likes our spinach;

We’re Popeye the union man.