Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp

Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp is a two-reel animated short from the Popeye Color Specials series. It was made in Technicolor and hit theaters on April 7, 1939, distributed by Paramount Pictures. Max Fleischer produced it, Dave Fleischer directed it for Fleischer Studios, David Tendlar served as head animator, and Sammy Timberg oversaw the music. Jack Mercer voiced Popeye, Margie Hines voiced Olive Oyl, and Carl Meyer voiced the evil Wazzir.

In the plot, Olive Oyl works as a screenwriter for Surprise Pictures, crafting a version of the Aladdin story in rhyme where she plays the princess and Popeye plays Aladdin. As she types, her adaptation comes to life on-screen. Popeye must outsmart an evil vizier who wants to control a magic lamp with a powerful genie. After finishing the script, Olive receives a termination notice from the front office: "Your story of Aladdin is being thrown out... and so are you! [signed] Surprise." Gags often come through dialogue. When Princess Olive waits for Popeye/Aladdin to declare his love, he turns to the camera and says, "I don't know what to say... I've never made love in Technicolor before!" During the final fight with the vizier, Olive yells, "Help! Popeye—I mean Aladdin—save me!!"

This short was the last of three Popeye Color Specials. Each ran over sixteen minutes, about three times longer than a regular Popeye cartoon, and theaters often billed them alongside or above the main feature. Unlike the first two specials, this one has a more Disney-like plot and pacing and does not use the Fleischer Tabletop 3D background process. According to its press release, the film used two hundred colors and twenty-eight thousand individual full-color drawings. The release also mentioned 3D animation, but that footage never appeared in the final cut. A glimpse of it can be seen in a Popular Science short that documents the film's making, showing a sculpted model of the castle being photographed. Running twenty-one minutes, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp is the longest entry in the color feature series and the only one produced at the relocated Fleischer Studios in Miami, Florida. Footage from this short, with a new soundtrack and rerecorded dialogue, was reused in the 1949 cartoon "Popeye's Premiere," where it appears as a movie Popeye starred in.