A-gah-gah-gah-gah-gah-gah: Happy birthday Popeye!
When I was a kid, I was a cartoon addict. It could be comic books or TV or movies, but I was discerning. Popeye was one of the ones I loved, but mostly some of those Big Little flip-it books and especially the 220 episodes of the 1960-1963 King Features Syndicate Popeye the Sailor, which I controversially think was a huge improvement on the earlier shorts both in terms of humor and cartooning.
When I’ve shown Popeye the Sailor to both my kids, they have genuinely loved them, but, like me, find the older Popeyes far too weird and muddled. One person who disagrees and loves the older Popeye much more that my beloved 1960s’ one is Roger Langridge, who has created an interesting experiment—a handful of beautifully illustrated stories based on the original Popeye but including many later elements.
In Popeye, Volume 1, released in 2013 and nestled nicely into my bookshelf of graphic novels, Langridge admits that, “for such an aggressively weird character,” our hero has an Everyman quality about him.
“I think it’s the fact that he’s so bizarre that he connects with people; because there is literally nobody like him, nobody feels left out—he alienates everybody equally. Even people who have never read a Popeye comic strip … instantly recognize that distinctive train-wreck of a face and know that a can of spinach can’t be far away.”
Popeye remains such a big deal that he even has a special day each year. Yesterday—January 17—was not only his 95th birthday but it was also officially Popeye the Sailor Man Day! The Thimble Theatre newspaper strip that introduced Popeye was actually around for about a decade before our beloved character was introduced in 1929. We think of him as now having a mysterious squint but back then he was actually a ruffian who lost his eye in a fight. “Bluto was a one-off villain in 1932” before coming back years later as a regular and many early characters—like Olive Oyl’s brother Castor and her ex-boyfriend Ham Gravy—pretty much faded away to give more prominence to our hero.
Here are more things I bet you didn’t know about Popeye the Sailor Man:
Popeye is 10 years younger than Olive Oyl.
Before spinach became the source of Popeye’s super strength, his power came from rubbing the head of a magical Whiffle Hen named Bernice.
Popeye is known as Braccio di Ferro (“Iron Arm”) in Italy, Karl Alfred in Sweden, and Skipper Skraek ("Terror of the Sea") in Denmark.
Popeye made his moving-picture debut in 1933 appearing in the Betty Boop cartoon entitled “Popeye the Sailor,” odd from the start, for some reason wearing a corset as he saved Olive Oyl from being tied to track tracks. In the cartoon, he also sings his staple song for the first time, proclaiming he’s “strong to da finich ‘cause I eats me spinach.”
Crystal City, Texas, calls itself “the Spinach Capital of the World” and erected a statue of Popeye in 1937.
The Popeye Village in Malta was developed for the 1980 Popeye movie starring Robin Williams and remains a major tourist attraction.
My favorite geographical Popeye fact is of course the one that is very close to my hometown in southern Illinois: Chester, Illinois is the birthplace of Popeye creator, E.C. Segar, and statues of the various characters dot the Popeye & Friends Character Trail throughout the city.
Olive Oyl became the first female balloon in the Macy’s Day Parade, in the 1980s.
Popeye was the first “person” ever awarded the “Good Housekeeping Nutritionist Approved Emblem” due to his commitment to healthy eating and his efforts in ocean conservation.
The Popeye comic strip still exists, I guess it goes without saying.