Brotherly Love

Olive Oyl is speaking to the Women's Brotherly Love Society Mass meeting. The crowd at Patterson Square Garden is overflowing. Popeye listens to her over the radio. He is inspired and tries to put that advise to work in the world.

This cartoon plays this really straight. I thought that they might have Popeye do all the good deeds but have it all go wrong. I think that would be much funnier. The punch line would be Popeye eating spinach and fixing all the problems he caused. That's just funnier. As it stands, this short is rather square. I can accept that, but there is a more inventive way to do this.

You know, when it comes to Popeye and his often amazing feats of fantastic super-strength - I find that I'm always really astounded by what this hardy, old sailor-man can actually achieve long before he's even gotten around to eating any spinach.

Anyway - When it comes to trying to persuade the antagonistic guys from the Boiler Makers Union to gladly embrace brotherly love (like Popeye has) - It seems that the only way for them to actually get it is for Popeye to, literally, beat it into them (which, in a sense, kinda defeats the whole point of brotherly love in the long run - Don't you think?).

Olive is annoyed by Popeye's propensity for violence and talks him into preaching brotherly love. So he sets out to help people. This is fine at first, but when he comes upon a couple of brawling groups, he puts a different kind of "love" into the equation. I believe spinach becomes involved.

Somehow, I doubt that Gandhi would recognize the conclusion of this short as a good example of brotherly love! A very funny cartoon, well executed and true to the character's nature. Olive is in her typically "fine" voice, as is Popeye, in the singing of the title song. Very good cartoon, if a tad obvious in spots. Well worth watching. Recommended.

Brotherly Love (1936)

*** (out of 4)

Fast-moving Popeye cartoon as Olive Oyl calling the sailor out saying he needs some brotherly love so he heads out to do some good deeds but soon runs into a riot.

BROTHERLY LOVE once again flows like a classical music as we're given a terrific little score as well as an extremely catchy title song. As you'd expect the animation itself is extremely good and there's just a fun nature that is running throughout the entire running time. There are some pretty funny moments with that raspy voice Popeye talking to people as he does his thing. The final fight itself is quite memorable.