Cartoon a Day: Sock-a-Bye Baby

Sock-a-Bye Baby
1934
Directed by Dave Fleischer
Available on: Popeye the Sailor Vol. 1

“Sock-a-Bye Baby” features a pretty ruthless Popeye. He’s put in charge of watching a napping “infink,” and he does anything to keep the baby from waking up.

It’s that classic cartoon premise we’ve talked about before where one character is sleeping and another tries to keep him from waking up.

The baby in this short is not Swee'Pea, who had only just been introduced into the Popeye comic strip shortly before this short was made. Olive Oyl and Bluto don’t even appear in this one, it’s just Popeye and the baby. He still manages to do a great bit of damage, though. There are some classic bits of Popeye violence in this one, including him swinging from a flag pole to knock out people in the windows of a building and punching a radio and sending an electronic fist through the air waves to sock the person at the other end of the microphone. Another great example of that warped Fleischer sense of humor.