Today's Video Link

This is a 1974 episode of the game show, To Tell the Truth. If you're interested at all in it, you'll probably only be interested in the first game in which the panel has to identify the real Jack Mercer.

Jack Mercer was an assistant animator and story sketch artist at the Fleischer Studios on the early Popeye cartoons. He did a decent impression of the character and was known to do it around the office. A gent named Billy Costello had that job but the studio was unhappy with his unreliability and tendency to demand more money…so one day in 1935, they decided to dump Costello and put that kid in the job.

Reportedly, Mr. Mercer had to overcome a crippling case of Mike Fright in order to get through his first cartoons but he got used to it and got to be very good at it. He even began voicing other characters in addition to Popeye and was heard in non-Popeye Fleischer films, including Gulliver's Travels. He continued to write cartoons the rest of his life but was often heard in them.

So for the rest of Mercer's life, he was Popeye and he moved his residence to wherever he had to live in order to continue to voice the spinach-eating sailor — Miami when the Fleischer Studio relocated there, then back to New York when production moved back there, etc. In the late seventies, Hanna-Barbera was producing Popeye cartoons so Mercer lived out here. I got to meet him briefly at one of those recording sessions but it was too brief for me to have an interesting story about it to report here. He died in 1984.

Play along with the To Tell the Truth panel. I'll bet you do a better job of figuring out which one he is than they did…