Hits + Missiles

The pilot for the television series, the 1960 short Hits & Missiles is the only one of the TV cartoons to credit Paramount Pictures (shown on the director credit to Seymour Kneitel), and the only Paramount TV cartoon to use the 1950s power-march version (by far the best version of all) of the Popeye theme song.

It's also a sleeper classic, in you don't expect a made-for-TV Popeye cartoon to be as entertaining or well-made as this one. Opening at what is presumably Cape Canaveral on Vistor's Day, Popeye, Olive (in the only TV short in which she wears those attractive pumps that were a trademark of the late-40s and 1950s theatrical shorts), and J. Wellington Wimpy (with flaming grille under his bowler hat) are given the grand tour of a completed spacecraft, Luna #1. Among its technological advancements are artificial gravity and dehydrated food pills - which cause havoc when egg pills are put on Wimpy's hat grille, splatter in Olive's face, and she staggers and falls backward into the launch control of the ship. The ship blasts into the vastness of space, running over the cliched Big Dipper and Milky Way before crashing on a planet of cheese, which Olive surmises is the moon.

After she and Popeye slide down the holes of the Swiss Cheese Alps (highlighted by Popeye's improvised quips, a nice touch of the 1930s shorts which featured mostly-improvised dialogue), they land unharmed before little cheese men who serve the planet's Big Cheese ruler. Big Cheese appears sympathetic to their need for rocket fuel to return to Earth, but he tricks them into a cell, then punishes a wayward taxpayer by dipping him in hot sauce. This enrages Popeye into breaking out of his cell. Big Cheese rolls over Popeye, then has two limberger guards gas him. But as Big Cheese prepares to finish Popeye off, the sailor man downs his trusty can of spinach and makes quick work of Big Cheese.

As Popeye and company triumphantly return to Earth, their triumph can be shared by the viewer of a sleeper classic cartoon short.