Popeye: A character I both love and hate...

Popeye was a character I loved as a child. It was also one of the first characters I learned to draw. I also loved the Robert Altman movie starring Robing Williams and Shelley Duvall. Yes, you read that right. I thought it was a great movie and stayed true to the original E.C. Seegar comic strips with both the look,the story, the supporting cast and the way Popeye muttered quips under his breath very much like both the comic strips and the Fleischer Studios shorts.

My love for the character kind of came back to me when I was filling in for a fellow cartooning instructor's class at the Worcester Art Museum over the past week or so. She had a stack of old Whitman Comics. One of which I owned as a child which had Popeye on the cover trying to keep his ship from falling apart. The artwork was pretty awful until the very last story which was taken from an original comic strip from the early 1950's which Popeye confronts a rather nasty little hermit who doesn't like him digging a tunnel in the middle of his mountain for the railroad.


The version of Popeye I enjoy the most are the cartoons created for Fleischer Studios between 1933 and 1942. At this time, talking pictures were still only four or five years old and still an imperfect art-form as far as audio techniques are concerned. And even some of the animation is a bit jerky. But for me, that just adds to why I like the cartoon.

You'll notice if you watch a few of the scenes Popeye will say something but you won't see his mouth moving. I believe a lot of that was due to ad-libbing from both original Popeye actor William "Billy" Costello and later Jack Mercer who became the primary voice actor for the character all the way up to his death in 1984.

It's those little quips they slip in when Popeye's mouth is closed are some of the funniest.

While the characters were a bit more polished looking than their Thimble Theatre counterparts, they retained the character designs of the comic strip.


Fleischer Studios also did three two-reelers of Popeye in technicolor that were really well done which include Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936), Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves (1937), and Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (1939).

What made the Fleischer cartoons so interesting for me is they experimented in a technique called rotoscope in which you would either film the actors first and then draw the cels over the still photo's of the actors actions as seen in their Superman shorts. Or you would film an animated character over a live scene.

Some people argue that this technique is cheating. In some case it just doesn't work. But I felt the Fleischer's did it in a way that enhanced the animations.

It's because of Fleischer Studios that Popeye is one of my favorite cartoon characters. It was when Famous Studios took over the Popeye shorts that I hate the character.

Honestly, I think the only thing they're actually FAMOUS for is making some of the most obnoxious and forgettable cartoon characters of all times. You can thank them for such characters as Casper the Friendly Ghost, Herman and Katnip, Baby Huey and Little Audrey.

You've probably seen many of these characters on the covers of DVD's located in the $1 rack at Wal-Mart and despite the price being so low you'd still like you just got ripped off even if they were giving the DVD away for free.

Characters that were just so sugary and overly cute you would feel like you'd have to go visit your dentist and have a tooth yanked right after you watched one. Even as a young kid I knew these cartoons were bad.


And sadly, Popeye was not immune to the soft and cuddly character designs of Famous Studios.

And one of the things that would annoy the heck out of me is the fact they would have scenes where both of Popeye's eyes would open. I guess it's too horrific as a child to think that Popeye only has one eye.

Another change was the fact that Popeye was changed from the red and black sailor's suit to the one worn by the US Navy. Some of that mindset I can kind of understand since it was the height of WWII and films were trying to boost the morals back home.

Which is why you have Popeye enlisted in the navy or Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson fighting Nazi spies in modern 1942 rather than solving mysteries in 1892.

I suppose in my mind having Popeye in the two different sailor suits helped me to treat them as two different Popeyes. The Fleischer Studios with the original character design is the REAL Popeye and the ones with him in the white sailor suit is the FAKE Popeye.

But even after Famous Studios thankfully stopped making Popeye cartoons, the world of animation has not been kind of our favorite squeeny-eyed sailor. The ones made by Kings Feature by Al Brodax were simply awful.

Although, they brought in many of the characters that appeared in the Thimble Theatre comic strip that had never been used in either the Fleischer or Famous shorts like the Sea Hag and King Blozo, they still stuck with that lousy character design for Popeye created by Famous. And the animation and the writing in the stories is just awful and obnoxious.

Ironically, Al Brodax went on to create one of my favorite movies Yellow Submarine which is a really well animated and delightful piece of cinematic Pop Art. With some really great animation and use of rotoscope.

Equally as ironic, Al Brodax created a Beatles Saturday Morning cartoon not long before that movie that was more along the terrible standards of his Popeye cartoons. Now talk about a paradox!!


And it just gets worse for Popeye when Hanna-Barbera entered the fray in 1978 with their hour-long Popeye and Friends Cartoon and later the much worse Popeye and Son. YES!! You read that right!! Popeye and Son!!

Although, going back to the original character design of Popeye and his friends and having Jack Mercer as the voice of Popeye, these cartoons are just bad. I'm not sure if they're actually worse than the ones produced by Al Brodax as far as animation and story are concerned. They might be tied.

What I was very surprised to read on Wikipedia when I was gathering information for this blog was that the original 1932 agreement with the syndicate called for any films made within ten years and any elements of them, to be destroyed in 1942. This would have erased all Fleisher films, which are considered the best of the series. King was not sure what effect the cartoons would have on the strip; if the effect was very negative, King was very eager to erase any memory of the cartoons by destroying them. However, the films were not destroyed, either through oversight or because of their success.

I am very grateful for that oversight because it would have robbed the world of what I feel is the REAL Popeye.

Like many of my previous blogs, if you like the Famous Studio, Al Brodax or Hanna-Barbera Popeye's, please continue to love and enjoy them. I don't and nothing you say will convince me otherwise. Just like nothing I say should convince you otherwise.

But for me, I'll keep enjoying both Fleischer Studios and Robert Altman's movie continue to be my favorite big screen versions of Popeye. And hopefully one of these days someone will create a version of the cartoons for the small screen that I can enjoy.