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I'm Popeye the Sailor Man! (TOOT!)

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man!

I'm strong to the finich,

Cause I eats me spinach,

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man! *toot toot*

— Part of the iconic Popeye theme song.

Originally a minor character in Elzie Segar's newspaper comic strip ''Thimble Theater'', Popeye the Sailor quickly took over the series, edging out Ham Gravy as the principal suitor of Olive Oyl. He made his animation debut in a 1933 Betty Boop short produced by Fleischer Studios, and continued appearing in cartoons throughout the 1940s and 1950s, when Famous Studios produced the series, and even continued on into several made-for-tv cartoons. Despite his sailor moniker, Popeye rarely ventured out to sea, instead spending his days romancing Olive Oyl and competed with Bluto for her affections.

He starred in an impressive 232 ^note  Discounting all the remake and clip show shorts, the number is merely 200 theatrical cartoons during The Golden Age of Animation, lasting from 1933 to 1957, his most noteworthy short being the first of the three two-reeler, 20 minute long, full-color Technicolor specials: specifically, "Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor". This iconic short, being a precursor even to Disney's Snow White, was extremely popular and was even billed along with the feature of the theater, above the main feature of the theater that played it, or even billed as the main feature of the theater itself. While it failed to win an Oscar (losing to the now obscure Walt Disney Silly Symphonies short "The Country Cousin"), it is still considered to this day to be one of The 50 Greatest Cartoons ever made, influencing even filmmakers like Ray Harryhausen, especially on his film The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

Television syndication packages of Popeye cartoons tend toward a mixture of theatrical shorts and the 1960s shorts produced by Al Brodax. In the late 1970s, Hanna-Barbera produced a new series of Popeye cartoons for CBS. This was followed by Popeye And Son in 1987.

The Movie, released in 1980 and starring a young Robin Williams in one of his first film roles, is a Cult Classic. Sony Pictures has made a deal to develop an All-CGI Cartoon Popeye feature film, directed by Genndy Tartakovsky.

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This series provides examples of:

• Adaptation Distillation: The Fleischer Popeye's played up Popeye's strength much more, gave him his Reality Warping powers, his love of spinach, and made Bluto and his rivalry with Popeye much more prominent.
• Adult Fear: "Lost and Foundry" had Swee'Pea wandering off into a dangerous factory. Although he ends up having to rescue Popeye and Olive Oyl instead of the other way around.
• An Aesop: The Aesop of the theatrical short "Be Kind To Animals" is...well, Exactly What It Says on the Tin. This lesson is repeated in the later short "Bulldozing The Bull".
  • Aesop Amnesia: In other episodes however, Popeye is perfectly willing to punch animals and transform them into meat stands, fur coats or purses.
    • Early Installment Weirdness / Characterization Marches On: most of those examples come from earlier Popeye cartoons.
• Affectionate Parody: Poopeye the Farmer Man, from The Bob Rivers Show.
• Ambiguous Gender: So, is the Goon male or female? The original comics actually suggested female, but later strips implied male, possibly due to the lack of torso coverage in the character.
  • Elzie Segar named the original Goon "Alice". She worked for the Sea Hag under duress.
  • Both male and female Goons have been seen over the years, especially on Goon Island. Maybe the two sexes prefer to dwell apart.
• Amusing Injuries: Notably, the injured are almost always humans who get beaten up in relatively realistic ways, even accounting for the usual comedic flattening. When talking about cartoon violence on the audio commentary track of the Futurama episode "A Tale of Two Santas", Matt Groening said, "But Popeye kills people."
• And I Must Scream: The fate of Bluto at the end of "We Aim To Please", when Popeye transforms him into "A Lot of Bologna."
• And Knowing Is Half the Battle: In the 1970s Hanna-Barbera series.
• Animated Adaptation
• April Fools' Plot: An episode focuses on Bluto playing pranks on Popeye during April 1.
• Ass Kicks You: Popeye does this as an attack on the Hypnotist in "The Hyp-Nut-Tist".
• Badly Battered Babysitter: Tends to happen whenever Sweet Pea is involved.
• Beam-O-War: Done with water from fire hoses in "The Two-Alarm Fire".
• Big Eater: Wimpy, who loves hamburgers so much that he is often just incidental to the plot at hand, and only wants to eat.
  • Popeye has his moments when a lot of spinach is involved.
• Big Friendly Dog: Dinky Dog, from The All-New Popeye Hour.
• Black Bead Eyes: Except in most of the Famous Studios shorts.
• Book Ends: The first scene "Popeye the Sailor" is Popeye on a ship singing his theme song. The last scene in "Spooky Swabs" is Popeye on a ship singing his theme song.
• Bottomless Magazines: Bluto's six shooter in "Blow Me Down!" is capable of firing lots of bullets without reloading.
• Brother Chuck: The entire Oyl family other than Olive (Castor, Cole and Nana), Ham Gravy, and all the rest of the original main characters from Thimble Theater, save Olive Oyl and Wimpy, became markedly less important when the comic strip was retooled around Popeye. Ham Gravy in particular disappeared for decades.
• Bullet Seed: A favorite technique of Popeye's.
• Canned Heroic Resolve The infamous can of spinach.
• Canon Immigrant: Bluto was created in 1932 for a particular story in the comic strip, but quickly started to appear in the cartoons. So quickly, in fact, that the comic strip owners later forgot they had created him, and briefly replaced him with Brutus to hedge their bets. Later writers speculated that Bluto and Brutus were twins.
• Captain Ersatz: Superman fought (and befriended) a sailor named Captain Strong who resembled a realistic-looking Popeye and became superstrong from eating shaunta, an alien seaweed. Just to confirm the homage, he was revealed to have a girlfriend, Olivia, who resembled Olive.
  • In the story's sequel, Captain Strong, his girlfriend and a glutton friend (a Wimpy lookalike) invite Clark Kent and Lois Lane to a boat trip. When a disaster forces Clark to dive and use his powers to save the day, he quickly wraps canned spinach around himself and claims he got superpowers after he accidentally swallowed it, making Captain Strong believe it was the same seaweed that gave him powers in the previous story (and thus, explaining how mild-mannered Clark Kent could emulate Superman)
  • Unfortunately (for Clark Kent) some weird natural disasters kept attacking their boat and Captain Strong (truly believing he had a new cache of "Alien Seaweed") insisted on dealing with them all by himself in a completely over the top fashion (like for example, rowing a boat through the air) much like in Popeye's classic shorts. Of course, Clark Kent was secretly behind all of Strong's awesome feats but let the captain be the hero, thus keeping the seaweed charade intact. The story is way, way better (and funnier)than how it sounds.
  • Similarly, one of the early Popeye cartoons had Bluto disguising himself as Superman to try to woo Olive. (And since Popeye was a Fleischer cartoon, that episode borrowed the theme music from the Fleischer Superman cartoons of the era.)
• Cash Cow Franchise: Originally. With decade-upon-decade of comic strips, countless comic books, and hundreds of animated shorts shown in movie theaters and TV, not to mention the live-action movie, Popeye was one of the heavy hitters in his heyday, but has since become much less popular, aside from baby boomer nostalgia. The "Popeye's Fried Chicken" restaurant chain? Used to be Popeye's very own eatery, but not anymore.
  • Actually, the claim is that the chain is named for The French Connection's Popeye Doyle — but the sailor was used in the advertising for a while.
• Cast of Snowflakes: Hoo boy...first, we have a one eyed, balding, big chinned toothless sailor with bulging arms, super strength and reality warping powers, who is ignorant but noble and is a force of good who eats terrible tasting spinach to aid himself, his girlfriend is a walking pipe-cleaner who is very fickle and as a result keeps switching between Popeye and Bluto, depending on who has the advantage of the other, Bluto, a hulking bully we've all known and met in life, and Wimpy, a intelligent but extremely manipulative glutton who would sell out his friends for a hamburger (which he will surely not pay back on Tuesday) and has a obsession with burgers in general. Elzie Segar, the creator of Thimble Theater, invented dozens if not hundreds of unique characters. Even the "bit players" have unique appearances and personalities.
• Catch Phrase
  • Popeye: The theme song above, as well as "Blow me down!" and "I yam what I yam!"
    • As well as his Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: "That's all that I can stands, I can't stands no more!"
  • Olive Oyl: "Ohhhh deaaaar!"
    • Not to mention: "HEEEEEEEEELP!!!", "Unhand me, you brute!" (with variations), Don't you dare 'reproach' me!", "Oh, Popeye!", etc.
  • Wimpy: "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today," and (particularly in the comics) "I would gladly mow your lawn for you, if you had a lawn to mow!"
    • In one strip, Popeye was so frustrated with Wimpy that he bought a vacant lot just to force Wimpy to mow its grass.
    • Don't forget "I want you to come up to the house for a duck dinner. You bring the ducks." This is made fun of by Popeye in the Plunder Island storyline in the comics when Wimpy tries to cut Popeye's head off (long story) and complains when he ducks. Popeye replies, "Yeah, I'll furnish the ducks".
    • In one strip he actually has duck and the punch line is, "You bring the tartar sauce."
    • "Let's You and Him Fight."
• Cereal Induced Superpowers: In this infamous Quaker Oats commercial, Popeye chose oatmeal over spinach for super strength. The ad was quickly pulled when people (especially the nonviolent Quakers) complained.
  • In the mid-1930s radio series, it was Wheatena.
  • In one of the early strips, he has a temporary dearth of spinach so he temporarily partially replaces his strength boost with milk.
  • On the other hand, Popeye has been credited for saving the spinach industry in the 1930's by convincing more kids to eat it, invoking this trope without it being an official advertisement.
    • Crystal City, Texas, an agricultural town that was based around spinach growing, actually erected a statue of Popeye in the town square.
• Cerebus Syndrome: In what is sure to surprise many people, Thimble Theater went from gag strip parodying vaudeville and overwrought film serials, to an adventure/comedy strip in the tradition of Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs, and was quite popular. Created in 1919, it had been running (mostly in Hearst papers) for ten years when Popeye showed up. His appearance only served to make it more successful.
• Chaste Toons: Swee'Pea, who just appeared on a doorstep one day, and Pipeye, Peepeye, Pupeye and Poopeye, Popeye's quadruplet nephews, who dressed just like him and got into various misadventures alongside him.
  • It's not like Popeye had a choice. Just look at his girlfriend; Olive Oyl would have exploded if she tried to make a baby!
  • Olive Oyl was once shown with twin sons she'd had with Popeye, who were indistinguishable from Pipeye/Peepeye/Poopeye — but this was in a Dream Sequence. And her sons in the dream were so obnoxious that after she woke up she never wanted to see Popeye again.
  • "There's no ifs, ands or maybes, I'll never have babies, I'm Popeye the Sailor Man!"
  • Averted in Popeye & Son.
• Christmas Episode: "Seasin's Greetinks!"
• Chubby Chaser: Bluto in this one, although you'd never think the trope could apply to Olive, of all people (she gained weight while the boys were at sea). The short contains some pretty massive Values Dissonance, too, as the heroic Popeye tries to make Olive thin down before he can be attracted to her, and Bluto is completely accepting of it.
• Clip Show: At least 14 shorts consisted of stock footage from from previous shorts, with a framing device always wrapped around them. The Fleischers only made 4 clip show episodes, but Famous produced 10.
• Cock Fight: Whenever Olive Oyl shows up, Bluto and Popeye immediately start a competition to win her affections.
• Comedic Hero
• Comic Book Adaptation: From 1948 to 1984 there was a comic book being published from many different publishers (Dell, Fawcett, Charlton, etc.). A new series began in 2012 through IDW.
• Commedia Dell Arte Troupe: The characters' roles never changed, but the shorts would shoehorn them into a wide variety of settings and personalities
• Conspicuously Light Patch: The original black and white shorts weren't too bad about this, but the recolored versions from the 80's suffer terribly from it.
• Construction Zone Calamity: The short "A Dream Walking" has Olive Oyle sleepwalk into a construction site, as Popeye and Bluto try to stop her from killing herself.
  • A Recycled Script short "Nix on Hypnotricks" has Olive wander into a construction site after being hypnotized.
  • And in "Mess Production" she does the same thing in a boiler factory.
  • In "Child Shockology", Popeye and Bluto chase an escaped Sweet Pea, who wanders into a construction site.
• Cool Ship: Popeye's flying gunboat from "Ali Baba and His Forty Thieves."
• Couldn't Find a Lighter: Popeye used a hot plate to light his pipe once.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Popeye's voice actor Jack Mercer had to briefly leave the studio to serve a tour of duty during WWII. In his absence, Mae Questel voiced Olive Oyl and Popeye, and nobody could tell the difference. Incredible.
• Damsel in Distress: Olive Oyl
• Deadpan Snarker: In the 1930s shorts, this was Popeye to a tee. It mostly came about due to his voice actor having to ad-lib many quips after the animation was done.
• Deranged Animation: "Wotta Nite-Mare", which almost feels like a throwback to the earliest Fleischer cartoons like "Swing You Sinners" in terms of content.
• Did You Die?: One old cartoon features Popeye telling his nephews about one of his adventures. At one point they ask, "Did you get killed?"
• Diner Brawl: We Aim To Please and What - No Spinach?
• Disproportionate Retribution: "Sock-A-Bye Baby" has Popeye beating up people, demolishing a building under construction, smashing cars and sinking a cruise liner, all because they're making noise and he's afraid they'll wake a baby he's taking care of (which happens anyway, courtesy of a tiny pin hitting the ground).
• Doorstop Baby: Swee'Pea joins the cast in this manner.
• Everything's Better with Spinning: Popeye's classic twister punch demonstrates this.
• Evil Counterpart: Bluto to Popeye, to a certain degree.
• Executive Meddling: At the height of his popularity, Popeye developed a strong following among children. King Features Syndicate, as a result, force the character to be a better role model for kids. Poopdeck Pappy was soon created as an outlet for some of Popeye's old vices.
• Expy: Brutus replacing Bluto (or Sindbad or whoever)
• Extreme Omni Goat: The goat in question was an oddly Avery-esque Screwy Squirrel character who ended up eating the entire ship Popeye was on. A Bizarro Episode if there ever was one, since the character seemed as if it had stepped into the wrong cartoon series.
• Finishing Move: The twister sock/punch.
• Flexing Those Non-Biceps. Curiously averted, in that when Popeye has his spinach, they become huge, with objects inside like a battleship firing to show how powerful they are.
• Played straight in one short where Bluto has killed all the spinach in the world. After eating some broccoli ("That's almost the same as spinach!") Popeye flexes, and his upper arm droops into a U-shape.
• Friendly Enemy: Depending on the Writer, Popeye and Bluto often get along fine til they spot Olive Oyl, and even then, Popeye is often a very gracious winner. In one cartoon, after a fierce fight over treasure, Popeye gives half of it to Olive, and the other half to Bluto.
  • In that particular episode, Popeye gave Bluto his half because Popeye was living up to an agreement they'd made at the start of the episode, and even after Bluto had been a total Jerk Ass throughout the episode trying to steal all the treasure for himself. Though because of that, Popeye knocks both Bluto and his share of the treasure into the sea.
  • And, as an infamous Minute Maid commercial showed, once they've had their orange juice, they're downright affectionate.
  • Not to mention the entirety of the cartoon "Fightin Pals" is focused around Popeye going into Darkest Africa to find Bluto. And when he finds Bluto (surrounded by wine, woman and coconuts, no less) and faints, being on the verge of death after finding Bluto, Bluto and his girls rush over to him, Bluto telling them that their efforts won't work as he pulls out a can of spinach, from his own shirt, and gives it to Popeye - sure, they start fighting at the end, but it comes off as a sort of friendly game. If that ain't a friendship, what is?
• Funetik Aksent: Ever wonder why Popeye talks that way? During his first appearances, his bizarre speech was Seger's written approximation of how sailors—possibly BRITISH sailors—really talked.
• Gentle Giant: Alice the Goon. While her inital appearances subverted this, it was only because the Sea Hag was holding her child hostage; she became more amiable when she was freed from her servitude.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: This clip from "Shuteye Popeye", which was sped up in the actual cartoon. It's apparently the voice of Seymour Kneitel, the director of these cartoons.
• Growing Muscles Sequence: Every time Popeye eats his spinach, with images like cannons, warships, turbines etc. superimposed over his arm for extra imagery.
• Have a Gay Old Time: From the third Popeye color special: "I've never made love in Technicolor before!"
• I Am What I Am: What he says in his theme song. He's probably the Trope Codifier.
• Image Song: Sort of. At the end of every short, Popeye sings some variation of the "Popeye the Sailor Man" song, depending on the situation or setting of that particular short, and always ending with the trademark "Toot, Toot!" whistle. For instance, in a short where Popeye is a sculptor and Bluto is a painter and the two fight over who gets to use Olive as a model, he sings, "A painting won't match you / it must be a statue / I'm Popeye the Sailor Man / Toot, toot!"
• Informed Attractiveness: Olive Oyl is apparently ravishingly beautiful.
  • It's more apparent in the Famous Studios shorts, however.
  • As mentioned elsewhere, Olive was originally conceived as a flapper, which, in 2010, is a fashion now almost a century out of date, but in general the flapper ideal was, indeed, something like Olive Oyl: skinny as a rail, with as little of a figure as a girl can possibly manage, and sort of tomboyish of attitude. They tended to be party people.
• It Runs in the Family: Poopdeck Pappy, Popeye's nephews, and Swee' Pea all behave just like Popeye, more or less.
  • Junior, from Popeye & Son metabolizes spinach no less than his famous father, although the boy hates the taste of it.
• Jabba Table Manners: Bluto Abu Hassan when he's eating a large meal in his cave. Complete with improvised hamming, as he makes amusing chewing and gobbling noises as he devours his meal.
  • That may be a Viewers Are Geniuses reference to the real story of Abu Hassan in the Arabian Nights... a man who enjoyed all the good things in life a bit too much. Doubtful that Bluto would have been that embarrassed, though.
  • Bluto in We Aim to Please orders half a dozen sandwiches (with no intent of paying for them) and, flipping them in the air, gobbles them down like a dog.
• Just So Story: Popeye's story of why the sea is salty from one of the 60's TV cartoons, played straight, then promptly lampshaded by Swee'Pea's response.
• Kick the Dog: The short "Seasons Greetinks" literally has Bluto whipping a dog.
  • And Be Kind to 'Aminals' is centered around his mistreating the horse who pulls his cart.
• Kidnapping Bird Of Prey: The Witch in the comics has a giant vulture who is able to lift up people and bring them to her.
  • Sindbad the Sailor has the Roc who destroys Popeye's boat and carries Olive off.
• Large Ham: Bluto, and any variation on him (Abu Hassan, Sindbad, etc.)
• Last Name Basis:: J. Wellington Wimpy
  • The Sea Hag often calls him Wellington.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Popeye in the The Shadow Strikes comic book (1), and probably others.
• Let's Get Dangerous: Popeye's trademark line, "That's all I can stands, and I can't stands no more!"
  • Popeye will usually spend much of his time getting his butt kicked by Bluto. But once he gulps down a can full of spinach, the tide turns in his favor considerably.
• Let's You and Him Fight: Trope Namer; one of Wimpy's early Catch Phrases
• Live-Action Adaptation: Released in 1980, with Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall
• Love at First Punch: Played straight with Popeye and Olive in the original comics.
• Love Triangle: Popeye, Olive and Bluto. Depending on the Writer Olive's feelings toward Bluto vary from hatred to lust, and she sometimes gets tired of Popeye. In some episodes Popeye really deserves better than her.
• Lull Destruction: Popeye tends to mutter to himself under his breath when he's just ambling along without much of a goal in mind.
• Made of Iron: Cripes, the things Popeye and Bluto have survived!
  • In the comics, this verges on Nigh Invulnerability — Mafia bosses will invite Popeye to sit at the table with them in a restaurant, because he makes for such a good bulletproof shield.
  • In the early Fleischer cartoons, too. He's thrown into an iron maiden ("Can You Take It?"), walks into a buzzsaw (ditto), is pounded by a pile-driver ("I Eats Me Spinach"), and is even shot in the back of the head ("Blow Me Down"), and he doesn't even flinch. And this is without spinach.
  • In fact, Popeye's indestructibility was his main "superpower" in the original comic strip, and spinach had nothing to do with it. In his initial adventure he was shot several times, and survived by repeatedly rubbing the head of an African whiffle hen — Castor had brought her along because rubbing her head brings good luck, and he was going to an island of gambling casinos. The whiffle hen is also indestructible, and although Segar never made this explicit, Popeye had apparently managed to permanently infuse himself with these qualities.
• Mad Libs Theme Song: When singing his iconic tune at the end of an episode, Popeye frequently inserts episode-specific references in lines three and four.
• Magical Native American: If one's definition of this trope is broad enough, the indians from the very early short "I Yam What I Yam" (AKA "The Indian Fighter") feature a tribe of hostile indians who are capable of shapeshifting into nearby foliage (and in one's case, a miniature house) in order to sneak up on Olive and Wimpy's cabin.
• Manipulative Bastard: Wimpy
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover:
  • The 1972 TV special The Man Who Hated Laughter, which teamed up virtually every popular King Features Syndicate character, even those from strips of completely different genres and art styles.
  • He was also part of the Imaginationland defense force on that episode of South Park. ("More spinach for Popeye!" <poof!>)
• Megaton Punch: Usually how he ends his spinach-boosted beatdown combos. Maybe the Falcon PAWNCH from Super Smash Bros was based on this ultimate finisher?
• Never Wake Up A Sleepwalker: Bluto and Popeye have to join forces to save Olive Oyl from herself in the short "A Dream Walking", especially once she wanders into a construction site.
• No OSHA Compliance: True, Popeye predates OSHA by a long shot, and started back when A-list stars in the movies still did stunts without the benefit of a Stunt Double or safety nets, but you still wouldn't want to work in, say, a factory with Everything Trying to Kill You, right? Well, it's clearly nothing for the world's strongest sailor to worry about in "Lost and Foundry".
• Not-So-Safe Harbor: Sweethaven, especially in the Live-Action Adaptation.
• Once an Episode: Popeye gets in a life-threatening situation, pulls out a can of spinach, and summons the strength necessary to save himself — and, probably, Olive. Occasional variations cropped up, such as Olive Oyl saving Popeye from a hillbilly giantess in Hill-Billing and Cooing, but even these variations nearly always involved the strategic use of spinach.
• One Extra Member: "Jeopardy Sheriff" in which Popeye starts to read Swee'Pee the story of the Three Bears: Moe, Sam, Lefty, and George. Also referred to as "The three bears of which there were four".
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Scooner, generally called Swee'pea
  • In the live action movie, Swee'pea was the baby's name. This led to the following exchange:
  Olive: Well I think "Swee'pea" is the worst name ever given to a baby!
  Popeye: What would you have called him? "Baby Oyl"? I found him in Swee'haven and he's me Swee'pea.
• Only One Name: Popeye, due to not having known his parents.
• Overly-Long Name: Again Swee'pea, who's full name is Scooner Seawell Georgia Washenting Christiffer Columbia Daniel Boom.
• Painting the Medium: In "The Ace of Space" after Popeye has been captured by the aliens, when subtitles of what the aliens are saying pop up, Popeye himself takes a moment to read some of them.
• Panty Shot: A rare moment for Olive Oyl in "Abusement Park", when a rope (or seat belt) in the back seat of the roller coaster cart is tied to her ankle by Bluto and she's dangled, and dragged across the whole way. A frontal shot of her white unmentionables exposed to the audience occurs after a turn is made and just before she crashes into a tower.
  • Olive has another in "Popeye, The Ace Of Space." She's yanked out of the window bay of a suddenly propelled rocket ship and hanging outside the bay by her knees, stretched out. Her thigh-length pantaloons are in total view.
  • The first time we see Olive's unmentionables is in the very first Popeye cartoon simply titled "Popeye the Sailor" (which was billed as a Betty Boop cartoon) when Bluto lifts her into the air and she tries kicking him.
• Pirate Girl: The Sea Hag (although she is definitely not a Buccaneer Babe).
• Pocket Protector: In one episode, at the losing end of a fencing duel against Bluto, Popeye is saved from a finishing thrust by none other than a can of spinach hidden in his shirt.
• Poorly Disguised Pilot: The Betty Boop short Popeye the Sailor, making this trope Older Than Television.
• Power Incontinence: In at least two shorts ("For Better or Nurse" and "Beaus will be Beaus") Popeye force-feeds a can of spinach to Bluto, whose body uses its new super-strength to beat Popeye senseless despite Bluto legitimately not wanting to hurt Popeye. This casts a bit of a shadow over Popeye's use of spinach.
  • In "Seein' Red, White and Blue," Popeye administers spinach to both Bluto and himself so they can both open a can of whoopass on some Japanese agents who had gotten the best of them (as well as Hirohito and Hitler). Ends with Bluto joining the Navy, which he tried to avoid earlier in the cartoon.
• Power-Up: He's strong to the finich 'cause he eats his spinach, remember?
• Power-Up Food: Spinach, of course!
  • Hard to believe, but there was a time when Popeye didn't get his strength from spinach! Segar had him simply as a very tough sailor. He put the spinach business in later, but never with the inevitable focus that the cartoons had.
  • The spinach also has other uncanny abilities besides merely granting excess strength. It also grants Popeye Reality Warper powers, and can even reverse odd effects that have occurred to Popeye (i.e. being squished down into a midget in "Popeye Meets Rip Van Winkle", being aged to 125 years old and later being turned invisible in "The Ace of Space")
• Primal Fear: Slapstick as they are, "A Dream Walking" and "The Paneless Window Washer" involve the fear of heights.
• Punched Across the Room: And how. In one episode, a spinach-addled Popeye punched Bluto all the way to the moon.
• Punny Name: Olive Oyl, and everyone from the original comic's cast
• Rapid Aging: In "The Ace of Space", the aliens use such a device to age Popeye into being 125 years old. Eating spinach reverses the effect, but to the point of where Popeye becomes two years ago. Quickly spitting out some of the spinach reverts him back to his normal age of 40 years old.
• Rapid Fire Fisticuffs: Popeye may well be the Trope Maker in this case, as his cartoons are the earliest example of Rapid Fire Fisticuffs anyone can find.
• Reality Warper: Big time. Popeye has altered the forms of the things he's punched, punching tigers into leopard skin coats — that's right, tigers into leopard skin coats — as well as punching Indians into nickels, Bluto into bologna, a trapeze artist into a light fixture, and breaking the very film he was printed on at one point.
  • Not to mention punching a big Native American chief and turning him into GANDHI!
  • In one short, Popeye punched The Sun and changed day into night. Or killed the sun, depending who you ask.
• Recycled IN SPACE!!: Especially with a lot of the later Famous Studios shorts.
• Remake: 17 shorts in the series were remade throughout the series run.
• Retool: The original comic strip changed drastically after Popeye's breakout popularity, dropping many regular characters.
• Retraux: The Famous Studios short "Cartoons Ain't Human".
• Satellite Love Interest: Olive Oyl, sometimes. She's always fiercely devoted to Popeye, but her ability to be charmed by Bluto and how she acts when Popeye isn't around can change greatly depending on the short.
• Scenery Porn: Had some very elaborate architecture backgrounds, all done in perfect perspective. "A Dream Walking" and "The Paneless Window Washer" take full advantage of this.
• Sealed Good in a Can: Spinach grants super strength to any character who consumes it, not just Popeye.
• Shaggy Dog Story: "Sock-A-Bye Baby".
• Signature Laugh: Popeye's "Ug-ug-ug-ug-ug!"
  • Before his "Ug-ug-ug-ug" laugh caught on though, it was "AWF, AWF, AWF, AWF," in his earlier shorts.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: Believe it or not, that's how Popeye and Olive started out. This was no Love at First Sight; they fought for weeks before they realized they loved each other. In fact, Olive's first words to Popeye were "Aww, shut up, you big bilge rat!"
• Slippery Swimsuit: In the short Alona of the Sarong Seas, this happens first to Olive, then to Popeye and Bluto.
• Spinoff: Popeye first appeared in animated form in the Betty Boop cartoon Popeye the Sailor (1933).
• Spin Offspring: Popeye & Son.
• Standard Snippet: Whenever "The Stars and Stripes Forever" cues up, it means Bluto's about to take a beating.
• Stock Footage: 13 shorts were clip show episodes consisting of older footage, but even normal episodes occasionally reuse footage. For instance "With Poopdeck Pappy" in the scene where Pappy scats off to the bar after tying up Popeye, is partially recycled from an earlier short "The Dance Contest". The mini-short "Lets Sing With Popeye" reuses all of its animation from the very first Popeye short.
• Story Arc: As mentioned above, the original comic strip began to use these.
• Strawman Political: The short Olive Oyl for President presents Congress as a room full of arguing donkeys and elephants (Democrats and Republicans, respectively) — for every proposal that Olive presents, the donkeys say, "We accept it!" in unison, and the elephants scream, "We reject it!" in response. Political polarization is Older Than They Think.
  • It was a remake of Betty Boop for President (1932), complete with the "We accept it! We reject it!" from elephants and donkeys, and Oyl imitating politicians of the day.
    • I'm strong to the finish/ 'Cause I vote Kucinich!
• Super Mode: Popeye's Spinach Mode counts as this.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Some animated cartoons feature Brutus instead of Bluto, perhaps under concern of copyright issues.
• Temporary Bulk Change: Olive in Weight For Me.
• Terrible Artist: In the short "Cartoons Ain't Human".
• Theme Music Power-Up: "Popeye the Sailor Man" plays in the background of every "spinach strength" scene.
  • Some could argue that the original shorts were among the earliest innovators of this trope.
• Three Shorts: In TV syndication packages. On the Boomerang network, there is a half-hour block consisting of four unedited shorts, and sometimes airs the early black-and-white Fleischer Studios shorts during Late Night Black and White.
  • In previous decades, when the cartoons were syndicated, local stations would create their own Popeye programs, where the classic shorts were sandwiched by live-action hosts.
• Through a Face Full of Fur: In "Abusement Park", Olive Oyl's face turns pale with petrification and panic when she and Bluto take a huge, long drop from the highest height of a roller coaster in the cart, and she screams on the way down it.
  • In "Lunch With A Punch", a young Bluto's (seen in a flashback of a story that Popeye tells his nephews about how spinach has aided in his super strength) face turns red with ire and his hair forms devil's horns, as he devises a way to get back at young Popeye for stealing young Olive Oyl away from him.
• Tiny-Headed Behemoth: Alice the Goon (and all other Goons). Their heads are about the same size as their shoulders (which admittedly are larger than average).
• Trademark Favorite Food: Spinach and hamburgers for Popeye and Wimpy, respectively.
• Unfortunate Names: Seriously, Poopeye!?
  • Another case of Have a Gay Old Time, as back then the word "poop" hadn't yet come to mean what it means today.
  • It's a nautical series; he's named after the poop deck.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Popeye's nephews. There are at least 2 shorts where they won't eat their spinache. Popeye is finally able to talk them into it. The nephews then use their newfound strenght to beat the ever-living CRAP out of their kindly uncle!
• Verbal Tic
• Villain Song: Sometimes the villains have one. For example, Sindbad and Abu Hassan have them in the colour features.
• The Walls Are Closing In: Popeye and his friends were once trapped in a pit with the walls closing in. Desperately, Popeye throws his can of spinach to jam in the edge of the walls on top. The walls crush the can, causing the spinach to fall into Popeye's mouth. Now strong to the finish, Popeye easily forces the walls back and the gang escapes.
• Wartime Cartoon: During World War II, Popeye (re)enlisted in the Navy and delivered all kinds of cartoon smackdown on stunningly racist depictions of the Japanese in the Pacific theatre.
  • Don't forget Those Wacky Nazis.
• Why Won't You Die?: A crook and conman shoots Popeye fifteen times, but he refuses to go down.
• Wicked Witch: The Sea Hag, a cadaverous old woman who menaced ships and stalked Popeye. She was said to have "a face that sank a thousand ships." Her slave, Alice the Goon, was a terrifying figure who reportedly gave kids nightmares, until Segar revealed that Alice only worked for the Sea Hag because the Sea Hag was holding her baby hostage. Rescued by Popeye, Alice became Swee'Pea's babysitter. The Sea Hag had a crush on Wimpy, and among other things once made him grow to giant size.
• Wild Take: Olive Oyl's eyes bulging out when she notices just how high she and Bluto are on the roller coaster as she looks down in "Abusement Park".
• William Telling: "William Won't Tell" has Popeye as William Tell forced to shoot a very tiny apple off Olive Oyl's head for refusing to remove his hat before the king. Popeye uses a trick arrow to spear the tiny apple but it boomerangs around and removes his hat to reveal what he did not intend—a kiss on his forehead, bestowed upon him by the Queen for helping her in a time of need.
• With Friends Like These: Wimpy certainly qualifies.
• Women Prefer Strong Men: A central trope throughout all of the cartoons, with Popeye and Bluto trying to perform greater feats of strength to impress Olive Oyl.
• World's Strongest Man: Popeye
  • In one episode, Popeye dreamed he'd lost a boxing match by knockout, and that Olive Oyl dumped him because he was therefore now a "weakling." When he awoke, he ran over to Olive's house to prove himself, and lifted the entire house into the air. Without eating spinach first!
• Wouldn't Hit a Girl: Humorously subverted. While Popeye is too much of a gentleman to hit a woman, that doesn't prevent Olive Oyl from fighting a female villain for him. One notable incident had Popeye and Olive Oyl both consuming spinach at the same time to fight Bluto and the Sea Hag, respectively.
  • In another episode Bluto dresses as a woman specifically because he knows Popeye won't fight back, and proceeds to try to humiliate Popeye at the woman's gym he's working at by out-doing him and taking cheap shots at him. But once Popeye finds out it's Bluto and not a woman doing this to him, it's on.
  • Subverted by Popeye at the ends of "Wild Elephinks", "Shiver Me Timbers", "Brotherly Love", and "Ghosks Is The Bunk" though those were only accidents. The same goes in one early Sunday strip where Popeye was asleep and thought Olive was an enemy of his and slapped Olive in the "Clint Gore" story arc for saying bad things to him. Of course, that was before he was toned down in 1934.
  • Also subverted by Pappy in one strip.
    • During the arc that introduced Alice the Goon, Popeye beats her up during the fight, however this happens before he learns her gender.

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Pooch Café

Newspaper Comics

Prickly City

Betty Boop

The Golden Age of Animation

Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor

Bimbo's Initiation

The Great Depression

Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor

One Big Happy

Print Long Runners

Prince Valiant

Pac-Man

Creator/Cartoon Network

Pokémon

Pinocchio

The Forties

Private Snafu

Duckman

Creator/Paramount

Rango

Pole Position

Western Animation

Popples

The Unicorn in the Garden

The Fifties

Looney Tunes

Rupert Bear

The Roaring Twenties

Little Orphan Annie