YMMV / Popeye

As a Whole

• Archive Panic: 232 theatrical cartoons, an equally large number of made-for-TV cartoons, and decades' worth of newspaper comics and comic books. Good luck.
• Fridge Horror: If you know a little about the chemistry of spinach. Spinach and its relatives are high in compounds called oxalates, which when ingested repeatedly over a long enough period of time, precipitate calcium from the blood to yield calcium oxalate, the main component of kidney stones. Ouch. Interestingly, the supposed reason for Popeye's super strength was the amount of iron in spinach. The oxalates would still negate this by binding to the iron to form iron(II) oxalate.
• Growing the Beard:
  • The theatrical cartoon series got off to a strong start, but the series really crystallized when Jack Mercer took over the role of Popeye from "King of the Mardi Gras" and onward.
  • For the Segar comics, Popeyes introduction was where Thimble Theatre truly found its footing, and in turn Its run with Popeye reached its creative peak with the critically acclaimed "Plunder Island" story arc.
• Memetic Badass: Popeye, of course! There's an image making the rounds on the Internet that describes many of the amazing feats of strength and intellect Popeye has achieved during his heyday, and several of them rival the feats of Greek Gods, Asura and even Superman. Some of the listed feats include:
  • Lifting the entire Earth, matching Atlas the Titan.
  • Using a lasso to pull the Grand Canyon together just so he could reach Bluto.
  • Punching Bluto so hard it distorts the flow of time and de-ages Bluto back into a baby.
  • Leaping to the clouds to punch out jet fighters with his bare hands.
  • Chewing up steel girders and spitting the metal fragments out as bullets, nails, and rivets.
  • Punching a mountain, utterly shattering it and reducing it into a hill, because it was obstructing his view.
  • Punching several wild animals, including alligators and leopards, so hard, they are reduced into fur coats and leather products instantly.
  • Built seven battleships from scratch in a matter of seconds.
  • Breaking the fourth wall. Once a boy in the audience threw some spinach to him through the screen. He promptly used his strength to hit Bluto so hard that the poor man was sent through the Fourth Wall and landed in the audience.
  • Bill Blackbeard, in an essay reprinted in Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson's All In Color For A Dime, declares Popeye the first comic superhero. His main characteristic when he first appeared was his indestructibility.
  • The Bobby London Popeye comics take Popeye's Nigh-Invulnerability up to eleven in the "Popeye's Apocalypse" story arc, where Popeye survives all of existence being wiped out by the Supreme Jeep. His only explanation for this is "I eats me spinach."
• Values Resonance: Popeye's love of spinach and the way it gives him super strength to beat up baddies has been used by many a parent as a way to encourage children to eat their vegetables.

Comic Strip

• Fair for Its Day: While Poopdeck Pappy's grouchy misogyny towards Olive Oyl would never fly in a modern comic, this is mitigated by the fact that it was never portrayed in a positive light in the original Segar comics.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In his first adventure in the comics, after Popeye had saved everyone, Olive notes to herself that she would kiss him if he wasn't so funny looking. ^note At the time, Popeye was never intended to be a regular character, and Olive was dating another guy named Ham Gravy Of course, she eventually does later, and the rest is history.
• More Popular Spin-Off: Popeye didn't appear out of the blue in 1929, he appeared in Thimble Theatre (which dates back to 1919), and eventually superseded that strip.

Cartoons

• Adaptation Displacement: Of the comic strip, which continues to this day.
• Audience-Coloring Adaptation: The animated cartoons are far more well known than the source material, in spite of being gag romps that don't have the comic's story arcs or continuity.
• Awesome Music: The basic theme music has been the same since the 1930's, and it's never lost its awesomeness.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In "Morning, Noon and Night Club," Bluto is going around punching out Popeye's face in posters of him and Olive's nightclub routine. He does yet another one after Olive turns down his date offer — and as he walks away, a goat suddenly sticks its head out of the hole and bleats as Bluto tells it off. What a goat was doing behind that wall is never explained, and the goat never appears again in the short.
• Bizarro Episode: Several:
  • The short It's the Natural Thing to Do, as well as the later Famous Studios short The Hungry Goat, which feels more like a Tex Avery cartoon with Popeye thrown in as an afterthought.
  • The short Wotta Nitemare, although the bulk of that short was one big Dream Sequence.
  • There's also "Popeye Meets William Tell", which for no discernable reason decides to throw our hero into medieval Europe and have him encounter a William Tell who looks and acts more like a Looney Tunes character. And it only gets stranger from there.
  • Similar applies to the episode "Popeye Meets Rip Van Winkle", "Sinbad The Sailor" and "Ali Baba's Forty Thieves".
  • "Be Kind to Aminals" would have been a standard Popeye outing, if not for the bizarre recasting of Popeye with his radio voice actor, Floyd Buckley, who sounds like an even older Popeye with a bad head cold.
• Broken Base: Some hate the 1960s shorts for relying on limited animation and not having the charisma of the Fleischer and Famous shorts, while others like it for being more faithful to the comic strip.
  • The Genndy Tartakovsky animation test for the aborted CGI movie received a positive reception from fans, but Popeye not having his pipe and tattoos really caused a stir.
  • The All New Popeye Hour is perhaps the most hated incarnation due to heavy Bowdlerization (see the main page for details), making Olive into a complete ditz and lacking the wit of the classic theatrical shorts.
  • Are the Famous Studios cartoons any good compared to their Fleischer predecessors? Some might say they degrade overtime, while others say they were they doomed from the start. Others find that they have their merits all the way through despite their increasingly repetitive nature.
• Can't Un-Hear It: Just try reading any of the original Segar newspaper comics without hearing the voices of Jack Mercer, Mae Questel, Gus Wicke, or Jackson Beck for their respective characters.
  • Jack Mercer's Popeye voice holds an iconic status that most of his successors can't really match. Billy West described Popeye's voice as exceedingly difficult and damaging, which means it takes a unique voice to manage it.
• Designated Hero: In "Weight For Me", Popeye and Brutus return from a naval tour of duty to find that Olive Oil has put on a lot of weight in their absence. Popeye is openly appalled at her size and demands she loses weight immediately, even though she repeatedly tells him she doesn't want to and that she finds his exercise routines exhausting. The episode presents his actions as loving but he comes off as a shallow jerk. Compare this to Brutus, who is just as, if not more, attracted to her fat as he was when she was skinny, spends the day trying to do romantic things for her and rightfully tells Popeye that if Olive didn't want to lose weight then he had no right to try and make her. That being said, no one can argue that Olive might be dangerously overweight and could have health complications if Popeye haven't forced her to exercise.
• Designated Villain: In "What — No Spinach?" Bluto is running a diner and not being villainous about it. He only picks a fight with Popeye due to a misunderstanding Wimpy causes.
• Franchise Original Sin: Zig-Zagged with the cliches of Popeye and Bluto's love triangle with Olive being a plot point, as well as Popeye eating his spinach as an 11th-hour power-up in the animated cartoons. Many fans consider them honored series traditions that make for a variety of funny situations and exciting climatic fights (and having shorts with variations on the formula certainly helped—as well as the fact that more than half of the Fleischer era Popeyes had shorts where either Bluto, the spinach, or sometimes both, were absent), while critics, particularly fans of the Segar comics (where the spinach and Bluto barely ever appeared)^note To be specific, there are 49 Fleischer cartoons where Bluto doesn't appear and 19 where spinach either isn’t used or doesn't appear at all, deride the former as tired and formulaic, and the latter as a predictable Deus ex Machina.
• Genius Bonus: From one of the later theatrical shorts, "Insect to Injury" (1956), one gag involves the termites eating Popeye's piano, revealing a harp hidden inside it. Music history fans will take note that the harp was in fact a direct precursor to the piano.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In "How Green is My Spinach" Bluto destroys the world's spinach supply with a powerful herbicide made from DDT. What it's called in the cartoon, Drop Dead Twice, proved to be an appropriate name for the real DDT, at least with regard to birds.^note In all fairness DDT was first synthesized back in the 1870s, and its environmental effects were not fully publicized until the release of Silent Spring
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In "It's the Natural Thing to Do," Popeye, Olive, and Bluto receive a telegram from their fan club to cut out the rough stuff every once in a while and act etiquette. They proceed so, only for them to go back to their fighting routine shortly later. Decades later, newer iterations of the franchise (as soon as 1978's The All New Popeye Hour) were forced to remove any form of physical contact between Popeye and his enemies due to Executive Meddling forbidding to show any form of realistically imitable violence.
  • In "Shakespearean Spinach," Popeye and Olive perform Romeo and Juliet. Decades later, Paramount would produce a critically acclaimed adaptation.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Everybody knows at least the first verse of Popeye's iconic theme song and its many parodies, even if they only have passing knowledge of the cartoons. Note that it was a meme well before the internet came about.
  • Popeye's love of spinach has also become a cliche that's ripe for parody and references.
  • "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."
• Most Wonderful Sound: The musical sting that plays whenever Poyeye eats spinach.
• Narm: The live-action segments in the 1935 short "The Adventures of Popeye", where a little boy wearing what looks like a blouse is picked on by a bully who calls him a "sissy', are unintentionally hilarious enough to make up for the fact that it's a Clip Show episode. Particularly hilarious is the badly-dubbed voice of the child bully, who sounds more like an adult. It becomes obvious that the Fleischers were much better at directing animation than live-action.
• Rooting for the Empire: Some fans' reaction to the racist episode "Big Chief Ugh-Amugh." The Chief, though expressing his desire for a bride earlier through song, didn't actually say anything to Olive about it or make her stay. Instead, he gave her some gifts. She wanted to stay, and it was Popeye who appeared and started picking fights and insulting people.
• The Scrappy:
  • Popeye's four nephews, who are generally considered to be annoying and shrill, and don't have any real personality going for them other than being Popeye's bratty wards. Fortunately, their appearances are mostly exclusive to the Famous shorts (and still rather sporadic in that case) and a handful of the later Fleischer Popeyes.
  • Shorty, a botched attempt at a new buddy for Popeye in the early Famous shorts, is also disliked by fans, mainly due to him being an unlikable, annoying character and being a constant nuisance to Popeye due to his sheer incompetence. He only appeared in three shorts, and was mercifully abandoned afterwards.
• Seasonal Rot: Both the Fleischer and Famous shorts were hit by this:
  • The Fleischers moving their studio to Miami in 1938 is considered a negative turning point by fans. Olive and Bluto's voices were recast, as Mae Questal and Gus Wickie refused to move to Miami, the 3-D setbacks stopped being used for backgrounds, and the influence of Disney animators imported for Gulliver's Travels took the series into a Lighter and Softer direction with Popeye often being written out-of-character.
  • By the mid-1940s, the Famous Studios Popeye shorts became increasingly formulaic and stale, and the timing and animation took a hit in quality. By the 50's, the series went through such a clear budget crunch that they were forced to make an excessive amount of clip show episodes or remakes of older shorts. Roughly 17% of all Popeye theatrical cartoons from both Fleischer and Famous Studios were either remakes, semi-remakes or clip shows, that's roughly 38 cartoons in all! However roughly only 3% (4 total) of the Fleischer cartoons qualify, whereas a whopping 28% (roughly 34) qualify for Famous Studios.
• Signature Scene: Any time Popeye eats a can of spinach to power up and save the day.
• So Bad, It's Good: The made for TV Al Brodax Popeye cartoons, which are usually regarded as being embarrassingly cheesy and cheap cartoons, even for the sixties. "Popeye and the Giant" particularly stands out, not only for its lousy animation and outrageous bloopers, but its incomprehensible story ideas and truly terrible film editing. One animator, Frank Gladstone, was even quoted saying he watched them to learn how not to make cartoons.
  "They stylized down the characters, which is ok—I actually used to watch the cartoons to figure out what not to do—how not to time, how not to handle the different levels of cels, don't cut that corner because it's gonna be too obvious, 'cause the corners they cut were unbelievable."
  • To give an idea of just how helter skelter the Al Brodax cartoons are, here's a rundown; the Paramount episodes are considered decent (considering they were done by the same staff who animated the Popeye cartoons for decades) despite the shoestring budgets, but the Jack Kinney episodes (such as the aforementioned "Popeye and the Giant") tend to be considered the absolute worst of the series. The Larry Harmon episodes are so cheap that they often have almost no animation at all. The two episodes with Ozzie Evans animating are considered the sloppiest—In one or another of the Popeyes he animated, you saw "speed lines" on stationary characters, scenes reversed left-to-right to change the direction, but forgetting it also reversed the lettering on the background, and Brutus's voice coming out of Popeye's mouth and vice versa! The Gene Deitch episodes are all over the place—for example, in "Sea No Evil", there's a blooper where Popeye is swimming to make a boat go faster, and the background isn't even moving!
• Special Effect Failure: In the recoloured version of Goonland, the scene with the film break completely removes all but the film being repaired, creating an image that looks like the film is magically knitting together.
• Take That, Scrappy!: The creative team seemed aware how obnoxious Shorty was, since he usually got his comeuppance in every short he was in. "Happy Birthdaze" is one of the darkest, with it very heavily implying Popeye took his gun and blew his brains out.
  • Earlier shorts with the nephews seemed similarly aware of how annoying they were. In "A Jolly Good Furlough", after being the victim of the nephews' pranks for the whole cartoon, Popeye gives up shore leave early and reports back to the Navy, preferring an active war zone to the bratty mischief of his nephews.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: As the years have progressed, Popeye has regularly been made Lighter and Softer to adapt to the changing times and appeal to younger audiences. This has backfired horribly with the web series, "Popeye's Island Adventures", which takes the lighter and softer feel up to eleven. Popeye, Olive and Bluto all appear to be younger, but it's unclear how much younger (yet for some reason, Swee'pea is still around), Popeye's pipe has been replaced with a whistle, Popeye and Bluto no longer fight. Instead, Bluto tries to steal Popeye's spinach, which instead of super strength, just gives Popeye other strange abilities depending on the situation, and Olive is no longer a Damsel in Distress, and instead invents items to help out Popeye, and none of the characters actually speak, and instead do incoherent grunts, groans, and mumbles. The shorts were so poorly received, the Popeye youtube page, which had them posted up, was forced to disable not only the comment section, but the like and dislike feature as well.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: While most Popeye shorts had Olive Oyl in need of rescue, the short "Hill-billing and Cooing" reversed the roles by having the female Bluto stand-in, later named Possum Pearl, be after Popeye while Olive Oyl is the one doing the rescue, even eating the spinach. This is the only short to ever have Popeye be the only sought after with Olive being the one to save him, and Possum Pearl, the closest thing Olive had to her own Bluto-type rival, was never seen again (outside of a failed attempt to give her her own series of cartoons, but the first one proved unpopular with viewers).
• Ugly Cute:
  • Popeye in the later cartoons became more round-looking and genial, all while still mostly retaining his earthy appearance and personality.
  • Popeye as an infant, of which we get a glimpse in Goonland.
• Values Dissonance: Being a series of cartoons from the 1930's-40's, there's bound to be some cartoons that are no longer politically correct in today's world. And Popeye has more than two handfuls of these.
  • Shorts such as "I Yam What I Yam", "Big Chief Ugh-Amugh-Ugh", and "Wigwam Whoopee" portrays Native Americans in a very racist light. Popeye and Bluto are also frequently quite sexist in their treatment of Olive Oyl, who usually doesn't seem to mind.
  • Most of Popeye's Wartime Cartoons depict Japanese people in an extremely offensive manner. Especially, "You're A Sap, Mr. Jap". "Jap" itself is a horrible ethnic slur. At the time, this is actually quite the opposite of what it is now, being a progressive and patriotic way of letting people know about the Imperial Japanese Army and the racist Kamikazes, who condoned Nazism and ultimately followed Hitler, letting people know they should buy war bonds and sign up for the draft to defend their then-under-attack country. However, due to them referring to the villains as "Japs" instead of "Kamikazes", gives off the implication that all Japanese people are hateful, bigoted Nazi-enthusiasts. Of course, ALL wartime cartoons back then had the Japanese portrayed that way.
  • Really, all of Popeye's WWII cartoons are out-of-place today. Back then, it was important to let children know about their own country being at war, but the war has long since ended, so to remind kids of Hitler and Nazism today would probably just be a bit of a downer unless of course, it's done for the purposes of historical edutainment, in which case, it's aged beautifully.
  • Several cannibal tribe episodes, especially "Pop-Pie a La Mode" would lead to controversy if it aired today, featuring Blackface caricatures of Afro-Caribbean islanders and depicting them as the primitive and barbaric villains of the episode, wanting to eat Popeye alive.
  • Certain episodes just have blatantly sexist plots, like "Wimmin Hadn't Oughtta Drive", where Popeye objected to Olive driving for being a woman. At no point in the episode is there any self-awareness, calling out Popeye on his misogyny. In fact, the episode ends with Olive crashing the car and learning the valuable lesson that "Wimmin Hadn't Oughtta Drive."
  • To a much lesser extent, Popeye's killing of animals can come off as more disturbing than funny today, especially when they're animals like elephants or rhinos who are endangered species now.
  • Popeye's refusal to fight women, regardless of how dangerous they are, to the point where it ends up becoming a handicap for him. Back in the day there was a strong taboo against men hitting women regardless of context, meaning Popeye's unwillingness to fight a woman would be seen as one of his heroic virtues. These days, the rule has been changed from "A man should never hit a woman under any circumstance" to "A man shouldn't hit a woman, unless it's absolutely in self-defense ^note  A man and woman hitting each other in a friendly way, such as in sports or roughhousing, is also allowed as long as both consent to being hit.". Meaning that to modern viewers Popeye would be justified in fighting dangerous female opponents, and his hesitation to do so would be a character flaw.
• Vindicated by History: The Famous Studios shorts were up until recently considered to be uniformly inferior to earlier Fleischer Studios shorts. After the earlier Famous shorts were released on DVD and Blu-Ray by Warner Bros., they enjoyed a critical reappraisal. Shorts that Jim Tyer directed and animated, such as "We're On Our Way To Rio" and "Rocket to Mars", are now considered to be just as good as the Fleischer shorts.

Live-Action Film

• Anti-Climax Boss: Considering all the abuse Bluto puts the main cast through, you'd think it would be building to an epic brawl ending (source material notwithstanding) or at least a well deserved pummeling. Yet, in the final confrontation, Popeye punches him... once. Just once. It's Played for Laughs but you can't help but feel underwhelmed.
• Cult Classic: Nobody is going to call this a timeless masterpiece, but it's still received some notice for its surprisingly catchy music and the rare sight of Robin Williams in a singing role.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Popeye attempting to commit suicide because he lost Swee'pea is a lot sadder when Robin Williams hanged himself in 2014.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: At one point, Popeye says "I ain't man enough to be a mother." 13 years later, Robin Williams would star in Mrs. Doubtfire about a man cross-dressing so he can be a nanny for his children after a divorce.
• More Popular Spin-Off: The Sweethaven set used in the film later became a popular Maltese tourist attraction called Popeye Village, which is still in business today.
• Narm Charm: Popeye's singing and dancing probably couldn't be pulled off by anyone but Robin Williams without inducing frightening amounts of Narm.
• Presumed Flop: The film is remembered as a flop, despite making three times its budget. This might be due to its mixed reviews, Robin Williams' distaste for the film's production, and the fact that Disney wrote it off as one publicly.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Bill Irwin as Ham Gravy in the live-action movie; he was an absolute nobody in 1980.
  • Also, Dennis Franz as Spike, one of the toughs in Sweethaven.
  • Fans of garbage cinema might recognize Bluto (Paul L. Smith) as the groundskeeper in Pieces.
  • Robin Williams himself. While Mork & Mindy put him on the map, he wasn't yet the huge star that massive smash hits of the late 1980s such as Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society turned him into, and the Popeye film remains fairly obscure.
• Special Effect Failure: The octopus — the climax was shot late in production, by which time the whole movie had gone well over budget, and Paramount wasn't willing to lay out more money for more convincing practical effects work.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: While the movie has major issues, many agree that Robin Williams nailed the role of Popeye, voice included. Ditto for Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Needless to say, Popeye's tumor arms do not transition well into live action.
• Vindicated by History: The film saw a resurgence in popularity with streaming services providing access to the film, and giving the movie a new lease on life. Robin Williams' take on Popeye helped, with fans feeling he nailed the role. It also helps that comic book and video game films had easily reached wide-spread acceptance at the end of The New '10s, helping draw attention to the film.

Arcade Video Game

• No Problem with Licensed Games: One of the few to boast the direct involvement of Shigeru Miyamoto, of all people.

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