There was nothing rough about the color technology used to make the two-reel specials Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor (1936) and Popeye Meets Ali Bab and His 40 Thieves (1937). It was the same Technicolor, processed through the same Technicolor labs, that Disney used at the time for all its cartoons. The problem is that those two Popeye cartoons are now in the public domain, and you’re more likely to see a bad dupe than a copy made from the original film materials.
Walloon, hmm, you’re quite right about the color process, apologies. I was misremembering what was surrealistic about those particular animations: the Fleischers’ used a special “tridimensional camera” and miniatures to approximate 3D. The result was quite odd, to say the least.
I’m not finding a googlable cite, but C. Solomon’s The History of Animation, Enchanted Drawings (Knopf, 1989) p79 contains a very brief mention of the technique – I’d love to know more if someone has a better reference.
Another Popeye quotable (Popeye to the magic door in “Ali Baba”): "Open – sez me!"
squeegee, here’s a Paramount studio press release from the 1930s, explaining Fleischer’s “3-D” process:
In other words, painted animation cells containing the characters were hung upright in a frame in front of the miniature set that served as the background, which could be incrementally rotated between frames to imitate a travelling shot. To add to the illusion of depth, sometimes foreground objects were placed in front of the cell frame (e.g, miniature bushes in an outdoor scene, miniature telephone poles in an urban scene).
Leonard Maltin adds in his book Of Mice and Magic,
Walloon: Thanks for the references – much appreciated.
It sounds like this technique was fairly painstaking – it must’ve been murder for the cel photographer (or whatever the correct term is) to hang up a cell on a stand, move a large turntable full of minatures one increment, dash back to the camera, shoot one frame, then do it all again. I can’t even imagine the ulcers that this would cause the animators.
Fleischer was certainly a pioneer, but I could see how the help at the studio wouldn’t cozy to this sort of tomfoolery. 
Yep. If you see the cartoons, you’d realize that they’d just re-drawn them. Maybe they rotoscoped them, which would be ironic, since the Fleischers invented and patented the rotoscope.