Trivia / Popeye

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• Acting for Two:
  • In addition to voicing Popeye, Jack Mercer also often voiced Wimpy.
  • At one point in the 1940s, Mercer was drafted. What did Paramount do? Have Olive's voice actor, Mae Questel, do a nearly flawless impersonation of Popeye!
• Bad Export for You: Both Paramount and Disney had their part in financing the Robert Altman movie. Due to this, Paramount got the rights to distribute all copies of the movie in Region 1, whereas Disney has the rights to distribute the movie most everywhere else in the world. As a result, if you want to see the full, uncut version of the movie, you’ll need to seek out a Paramount Region 1 release. Disney’s British and European release versions run approximately fourteen minutes shorter than the uncut American version. These edits in the movie almost completely eliminate Ray Walston's Pappy from the story, two songs in the film are left on the cutting room floor, and these edits render at least one of the movie’s subplots to be incomprehensible.
• Box Office Bomb: The 1980 film's budget was $20 million and grossed $49,823,037 domestically, and $60 million worldwide. Even with this high gross, Paramount and co-producer Disney considered this movie to be a flop due to not reaching the expected gross target, plus it received mixed reviews from critics. Subsequently, Paramount bosses Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg would jump to Disney within 5 years. Screenwriter Jules Feiffer did not have another screenwriting credit on a full-length film until the end of the decade (and that movie is Feiffer's last film), and it's the last film Robert Evans produced before a cocaine trafficking conviction sent his life and career downhill for the 1980s. No other attempts to bring Popeye to the big screen have materialized since this film.
• 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. As The '80s progressed, however, he became much less popular, aside from baby boomer nostalgia. The "Popeye's Chicken and Biscuits"^note Now officially known as "Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen". 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.)
• Channel Hop: The cartoons were originally released by Paramount. The television rights were acquired by Associated Artists Productions in 1956, which in turn was acquired by United Artists two years later. United Artists assumed full rights to the Popeye cartoons in 1967, once the theatrical rights with Paramount expired. In 1981, UA was acquired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and five years later, Ted Turner acquired MGM/UA, only to sell it again. Among the assets that Turner kept from his brief ownership of MGM/UA were the Popeye cartoons, which formed the basis for Cartoon Network at the time of its launch in 1992.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Shamus Culhane disliked his sole Popeye directorial effort Popeye Meets William Tell, and mentions it in passing in his biography as being akin to "putting a bow on a wild boar".
  • The 1980 film was Robin Williams' first major starring role, and he made light of it for the rest of his life.
  • Even Robert Evans, the film's producer, admitted his regret in making it.
  • During the production of Popeye's Voyage: The Quest for Pappy, Billy West described his role as "the hardest job I ever did, ever" and the voice of Popeye as "like a buzzsaw in your throat."
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Popeye's voice actor, Jack Mercer, had to briefly leave the studio to serve a tour of duty during World War II. In his absence, Mae Questel voiced Olive Oyl and Popeye, and you can't tell the difference. ^note Back in her vaudeville days, one of Mae Questel's talents was as a vocal impressionist who could mimic the likes of Maurice Chevalier and Eddie Cantor, among others.
• Cut Song: "Din' We" didn't make it into the final film, though it did make it onto the soundtrack album. "I'm Mean" and "Kids" are missing from European cuts (likely because they contain swear words and Disney, which had only started releasing PG movies the previous year, handled the European release).
• Development Hell: In March 2015, production on the CG animated movie was postponed due to creative differences between Genndy Tartakovsky and studio execs. Then, in May 2020, King Features decided to continue the project and team up with Tartakovsky.
• Follow the Leader: The 1980 film was Paramount Pictures' attempt to cash in on two then-recent success stories. The studio wasn't able to get the film rights to Annie, an extremely popular musical adapted from a comic strip, and executives also noted the recent success of Superman: The Movie, an adaptation of a popular comic book. Paramount owned the rights to Popeye, a comics character with super-strength, so they decided to build a big-budget movie musical around him.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Beyond the "Great American Desert Saga" (a two-year sequence of Sunday strips focalizing pre-Popeye protagonists Castor Oyl and Hamgravy's attempts to weather a caricatured American West) and a small handful of outliers, the vast majority of the pre-Popeye run of Thimble Theatre (spanning 1919 to 1928, from the strip's genesis to the opening of the Dice Island storyline) has never been reprinted, thus limiting its availability primarily to online newspaper archives.
  • As of 2020, all of the Fleischer Popeye cartoons and the Famous Popeye cartoons up to 1949 are available on DVD and/or Blu-Ray from Warner Bros., which wound up with the rights following their merger with Turner (and most also on HBO Max, save the ones that wouldn't get replayed on TV because of concerns of old racially stereotype caricatures) Warner Bros. has plans to restore and release the color 1950's Famous shorts (via Warner Archive) to complete Popeye's theatrical filmography. So far, they’ve completed a few short restorations. Unfortunately, these restorations are only available on the Boomerang streaming service (for the time being). None of the Famous Studio 1950-1957 short restorations have been mirrored anywhere online due to copyright, so if you aren’t subscribed to the Boomerang streaming service, and you want to watch these 1950-1957 shorts in non-pixellated quality (and without TV watermarks), you’re SOL.
  • Likewise, some of the 1960s made-for-TV Popeye cartoons are on DVD, but not all of them, though all can be found on the official franchise YouTube channel, being the rights to those are held by Popeye franchise owner King Features. The later Hanna-Barbera produced series are also on the channel.
  • All known copies of Popeye and the Pirates have a jumpcut when Popeye is changing out of his drag disguise, removing the part where Popeye throws the cannonballs he was using as breasts overboard, suddenly cutting to Popeye out of his disguise and the pirate captain climbing back on-board with the cannonballs in his mouth. Most commonly believed (including in the disclaimer on the Blu-Ray) to have been censored for violating The Hays Code.
  • Finding an original 3-strip print of A Wolf in Sheik’s Clothing is pretty much impossible. Given the short was made in polacolor, the yellow and Cyan records of the original negative were in bad shape, even moreso than usual! Hell, the magenta record either went completely missing or was destroyed! All known prints in circulation use this faulty negative.
  • When Associated Artists Productions bought the cartoons in 1956, they were compelled to remove the Paramount references in the opening and closing titles. This resulted in replacement titles for all cartoons, and most color cartoons having the opening and closing music from "Olive Oyl For President" spliced into their openings. The DVD's and Blu-Ray's undo most of this, but because of carless preservation of materials, some of the original cartoons' opening and closing cues and even the original endings of a couple of cartoons ("Me Musical Nephews" and "The Hungry Goat") remain at large.
  • The licensed Nintendo game has never seen a re-release outside home computers of the 80s, arcade, and NES.
• Looping Lines: In the 1980 film:
  • Robin Williams had to re-loop all of his dialogue twice because test audiences couldn't understand what he was saying.
  • While not overly obvious, many of the diner toughs were dubbed in post-production: most of them were Maltese and did not speak English very well.
• Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.": Some people that are unaware of the series comic roots tend to forget that Olive Oyl was one of, if not the main character of Thimble Theatre, and has been around for much longer than Popeye, 10 years before he even appeared in the comic.
• On-Set Injury: While filming the scene where Pappy throws Popeye the can of spinach, Ray Walston hit Robin Williams in the head so hard that he required several stitches in his scalp and delayed filming for several weeks.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Popeye went through several voice actors in the run of theatrical shorts. His first, William Costello (AKA Red Pepper Sam) was fired due to his ego getting to his head, and he became impossible to work with. And for "Be Kind to Aminals", the studio inexplicably hired Popeye's radio voice actor, Floyd Buckley, to voice him. Jack Mercer would assume the role of Popeye for decades starting with "King of the Mardi Gras", but on one occasions where he was not available, another voice actor briefly substituted for him, and Mae Questel would substitute for Mercer now and then!
  • Olive Oyl and Bluto also had rotating voice actors. Bluto is especially notable for having two major actors throughout the theatrical run: Gus Wickie for the bulk of the B&W cartoons (and before that he was voiced by William Pennell), and Jackson Beck for the Famous Studios shorts, both bringing very distinct interpretations of the character. Pinto Colvig also briefly lent his voice to Bluto in the later B&W shorts.
  • The Latin American Spanish dub of the 1980 film was recorded in Los Angeles, as opposed to Mexico City, where the original series was recorded.
  • Considering that the Popeye franchise's classic voice actors have died by the Turn of the Millennium, Popeye did get new VAs time to time such as Dave Coulier, Seth McFarlane, Billy West and Tom Kenny doing the voice for Popeye while Tabitha St. Germain, Kelly Hu, Tara Strong, Alex Borstein and Grey DeLisle does the voice of Olive Oyl.
• Permanent Placeholder: The iconic Popeye theme, "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man", was meant to be a placeholder song, but it ended up becoming so liked, that they used it as his real theme anyway.
• The Pete Best: William Costello was Popeye's original voice until his firing. He was replaced by Jack Mercer who would voice the character for nearly fifty years afterward.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: For many years it was believed that Bluto's voice actor Gus Wickie died in 1938 sometime after his final role in "Big Chief Ugh-Amugh-Ugh". In reality, he was among those in the Fleischer alumni (alongside Mae Questel) who didn’t come during Flesicher Studios’ move to Miami. He went onto do steady work in theatre and stage shows until his ACTUAL death in 1947.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • Popeye's voice actor Jack Mercer was married to Margie Hines, one of Olive's voice actors.
  • In the live action film, Swee'Pea is played by Wesley Ivan Hurt - Robert Altman's grandson.
• Saved from Development Hell: Genndy Tartakovsky's Popeye film adaptation has been stuck in development since 2016. On May 22, 2020 King Features announced that they will team up with Tartakovsky on continuing the animated film.
• Screwed by the Lawyers:
  • The All-New Popeye Hour^note Except for the Dinky Dog segments, which are an original Hanna-Barbera creation., and Popeye and Son are two of the few shows that are not part of the Hanna-Barbera library. The rights are owned by Hearst Entertainment, who owns the rights to all original TV productions that feature King Features Syndicate characters.
  • This also applies to the previously mentioned arcade game (as well as its NES and home computer ports). While Nintendo owns the rights to the source code of the NES version^note The arcade version is another story entirely., King Features owns the characters.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: According to historian Thad Komorowski, King Features Syndicate charged Paramount a fee for the use of each individual Thimble Theater character. This is why both the Fleischer and Famous Studios cartoons made limited use of the comic's supporting cast and focused mainly on Popeye, Olive and Bluto. Ever cost-conscious, Famous would go as far as to use Bluto lookalikes in some cartoons to avoid paying King Features to use the actual Bluto.
• Short-Lived, Big Impact: E.C. Segar's pioneering run of the Popeye comics (unless you count the preceding Thimble Theater comics) didn't even run for a decade before his death in late 1938. But he ultimately created one of the most beloved cartoon franchises of all time, which is still running to this very day.
• Throw It In!: Much of Popeye's signature mumbling in the Fleischer cartoons was ad-libbed by Jack Mercer (after the animation had been completed!) Mae Questel was no slacker in the ad-libbing department either.
• Troubled Production: The live action film was hit by this.
  • The script went through rewrites during the production, and writer Jules Feiffer expressed concern too much screen time was being devoted to minor characters. He also found fault with Harry Nilsson's songs, feeling they weren't right for the characters.
  • The original inflatable arms designed for the muscle-bound Popeye did not look satisfactory, so new ones were commissioned and made in Italy, leaving Robert Altman to film scenes not showing them until the new ones arrived. Altman also had the cast singing their musical numbers live — contrary to standard convention for a movie musical where songs are recorded first in a studio and lip-synched — causing sound quality problems.
  • Robin Williams also had to re-record his dialogue after running into trouble with his character's mumbling style, a by-product of talking with a pipe in his mouth, and his affinity for ad-libs also led to clashes with the director.
  • Producer Robert Evans was arrested for trying to buy cocaine, and as a result was removed from the final stages of production.
  • During filming the scene at the end where Pappy throws Popeye the can of spinach, Ray Walston hit Williams in the head so hard, that he required several stitches in his scalp and delayed filming for several weeks.
  • Paramount co-producing the film with Walt Disney Productions (which handled marketing and the international release) put pressure on the production to keep the film family-friendly, including cutting a fleeting profanity uttered by Williams in one scene.
  • The final battle involving the octopus led to more headaches when the mechanical beast failed to work properly. After the production cost rose beyond $20 million, Paramount executives ordered Altman to stop and return to the U.S. with what he had.
  • While the movie was able to more than make back its budget upon its release at the end of 1980, critical response was extremely mixed (though over the years it's noticeably improved). Between that, the out-of-control production, and the straight-up disaster that was H.E.A.L.T.H. (which sat on The Shelf of Movie Languishment for two years) Altman's career was badly damaged; he spent the remainder of the 1980s working primarily on small-scale stage adaptations and the occasional television production before making a comeback in 1992 with The Player. Williams bounced back fairly quickly from the disappointing response to his first starring vehicle, but would joke about the movie for the rest of his life.
• Typecasting:
  • Shelley Duvall is the only actress on Earth who could nail the role of Olive Oyl. One reviewer called her "eerily perfect". Robert Altman even told her it was the role she was born to play when he offered it to her.
  • As Ham Gravy, Bill Irwin's miming skills come in handy as he looks like he's actually getting cartoonishly pummeled by Bluto.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Shamus Culhane, during his brief tenure on Popeye, proposed making an episode entirely about Wimpy, exploring his personality and obsession with hamburgers. Max Fleischer shot down the idea as "too psychological".
  • The Fleischer Studios Popeye cartoons came dangerously close to having every one of their shorts becoming a Missing Episode; when Fleischer signed the contract for the series, the negatives would be contractually obligated to be destroyed by the end of their run on it (namely 1942, the same year Famous Studios took over the series). Fortunately, by some fluke of fate, the cartoons were all spared, and ended up airing on TV for decades, and eventually all of their cartoons got released on DVD by Warner Bros..
  • Regarding the 1980 film, the parts of Popeye and Olive Oyl were originally intended for Dustin Hoffman and Gilda Radner. Lily Tomlin was also considered. Hal Ashby was the first choice to direct (he left after Hoffman dropped out). Jerry Lewis, Louis Malle and Mike Nichols was also considered. Randy Newman, John Lennon and Leonard Cohen were in the running for the composer slot before Harry Nilsson was hired. And the character of Eugene the Jeep was originally going to be in it, but was written out because the special effects would have been too expensive. The script was rewritten so that Swee'Pea took over Eugene's role of a Living MacGuffin with telepathic powers.
  • Nintendo's Super Mario franchise, probably the most significant in video game history, was essentially made with original characters because the company couldn't secure the rights to make a Popeye arcade game as they hoped and had to retool what they already had into Donkey Kong... The success of that game is what convinced King Features to allow Nintendo produce a Popeye video game a year later, which was a moderate success.
  • Originally there was going to be a claymation TV Special directed by Will Vinton, but due to him losing his studio in 2002, the film was given to Rainmaker Entertainment who made it into a CGI direct to DVD film, Popeye's Voyage: The Quest for Pappy.
  • The sailor, nemesis and love interest were all supposed to briefly cameo in the universally acclaimed Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The scene had to be dropped due to producer's inability to secure the rights to the characters.
  • Some sources claim that the Popeye franchise only exists because a scientist Misplaced a Decimal Point when reporting the amount of iron in spinach. This claim is false. There was no erroneous decimal point. Segar created Popeye and later added spinach.
• Write Who You Know: Would you believe that Popeye was based on a real person whom E.C. Segar knew in his younger days, a local vagrant named Rocky Fiegel? Olive Oyl was based on Segar's schoolteacher (with her cartoon voice taking inspiration from actress ZaSu Pitts), and Wimpy was based on William Schuchert, the manager of the Chester Opera House where Segar worked, and a nice man who shared Wimpy's fondness for hamburgers. Wimpy's full name was inspired by Wellington J. Reynolds, one of Segar's art instructors. In the cartoons, Dave Fleischer wanted Bluto's voice to resemble that of the character Red Flack in the 1930 film The Big Trail, played by Tyrone Power Sr.

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