In November 1932, King Features signed an agreement with Fleischer Studios, run by producer Max Fleischer and his brother, director Dave Fleischer, to have Popeye and the other Thimble Theatre characters begin appearing in a series of animated cartoons. The first cartoon in the series was released in 1933, and Popeye cartoons, released by Paramount Pictures, would remain a staple of Paramount's release schedule for nearly 25 years.

The plotlines in the animated cartoons tended to be simpler than those presented in the comic strips, and the characters slightly different. A villain, usually Bluto, made a move on Popeye's "sweetie," Olive Oyl. The bad guy then clobbered Popeye until Popeye ate spinach, giving him superhuman strength. Thus empowered, the sailor made short work of the villain.

The animated Popeye shorts were the first stories to suggest that Popeye's enormous strength came from a love of spinach; in the Thimble Theatre strips, Popeye did say he owed his strength to spinach, but was rarely seen actually using it until the cartoons made it a staple. In the 1954 Popeye short Greek Mirthology, the fictional origin of spinach consumption in Popeye's family is related by him. Popeye's Greek ancestor,Hercules, originally sniffed garlic to gain his supernatural powers. When an evil warrior resembling Bluto removes the scent of the garlic using chlorophyll (an obvious incongruity), Hercules ends up getting blown (literally) into a spinach field, and, upon eating the leafy green substance, finds it empowers him many times more than garlic. (However, this might have been just one of the many fictional stories Popeye told his nephews so they would eat their spinach, a common theme in the Famous Studios cartoons.) By contrast, the 1980 Popeye film postulates that Popeye initially disliked the vegetable until Bluto force-fed him some, resulting in great strength.

Many of the Thimble Theatre characters, including Wimpy, Poopdeck Pappy, and Eugene the Jeep, eventually made appearances in the Paramount cartoons, though appearances by Olive Oyl's extended family and Ham Gravy were notably absent. Popeye was also given more family exclusive to the shorts, specifically his look-alike nephews Pipeye, Peepeye, Pupeye, and Poopeye.