Popeye's voice in "Rocket to Mars"

[Randy Watts]

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that Popeye's voice sounds odd at the end of "Rocket to Mars"? For most of the cartoon, it's obviously Jack Mercer, but Popeye's last few lines of dialogue and his little closing song sound more like the replacement voice who filled in for Mercer while he was in the service during World War II. (I seem to recall that Mae Questel claimed to have been Popeye's "fill-in.")

-Randy

[Jon Cooke]

There are a couple other Famous Popeye cartoons from this era where Popeye's voice obviously isn't Jack Mercer (for example, "Shape Ahoy" and "House Tricks").


-Jon

[J Lee]

Mercer apparently was a late WWII inductee, since the cartoons he's not featured in are all late 1945-early 1946 releases.

"A Peep In The Deep" has the most unusual `different' voice from that period, so it may be the cartoon one which Mae Questel voiced Popeye on.

[Bobby B]

Originally posted by Randy Watts
Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that Popeye's voice sounds odd at the end of "Rocket to Mars"? For most of the cartoon, it's obviously Jack Mercer, but Popeye's last few lines of dialogue and his little closing song sound more like the replacement voice who filled in for Mercer while he was in the service during World War II. (I seem to recall that Mae Questel claimed to have been Popeye's "fill-in.")

-Randy


That's Harry Foster Welch doing Popeye's voice in "Rocket to Mars" (and "Shape Ahoy", "Klondike Casanova", "Rodeo Romeo", Fistic Mystic", "Island Fling", and "Abusement Park"). Also, in the 1960's, he did the voice for Mattel's talking Popeye hand puppet and at least one Popeye record, on which he also did the voices of Olive Oyl and Brutus!

[Mibbitmaker]

It IS quite wierd to have both Mercer and the replacement in the same cartoon. I wish there wasn't all the censorship, since we don't see the Japanese soldier stereotype behind the 8 ball (though we can still hear Japanese style music in the section they don't cut). One more thing about this cartoon...I love the epic feel they put into it. They clearly wanted to alagorize the war they just went through(I assume the war was over: (a) Olive's newer hair, and (b) the atom bomb reference. I wonder if that's the first such reference in an animated short.

[J Lee]

It's also the cartoon where Bill Tytla really, really, really worked over Jim Tyer's squash-and-stretch-and-spindle-and-crush-and-mutilate animation style that he had used to such great effect for the previous 4 1/2 years on the Popeye series. Tyer did the climatic final battle scene animation (as he did on almost all the Popeyes he was head animator on), but Tytla smoothed it out and made it look almost normal -- it's still good, but the characters stay on model way more than Tyer ever wanted them to, which may be why this was also the last Popeye he did for Famous before moving up north to Terrytoons.

"Rocket To Mars" is one of the most stylishly done and good looking Popeye color cartoons, but it may have cost them the head animator with the best sense of humor among the group at Times Square. A big loss for Paramount, as it turned out.

[JaGSQ]

Just as a note, no, it wasn't the first reference to the atomic bomb. Blitz Wolf by Avery predicted the atomic blast in a scene where the pigs blow up Japan (Not shown in the Toonheads special)