In the 80s, Popeye, who had originally appeared in Elzie Segar's Thimble Theatre comics as a supporting character in 1929, was at the peak of his popularity, with a new wave of cartoons, a movie starring Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, his own line of canned and bagged spinach, and even a licensing deal with the otherwise unrelated Popeyes fried chicken chain. An awful lot of American, and Japanese, children had grown up with Popeye over the preceding few decades. With that in mind, Nintendo wanted to use the Popeye license to create a video game. At first, however, King Features Syndicate refused to license Popeye to a then-unknown Japanese toy and game company, and instead, Nintendo would be forced to develop its own characters, which would lead to the creation of Donkey Kong, and Mario. As Garth Brooks once said, some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.
Still, once Donkey Kong became a mega-hit, King Features finally granted the Popeye license to Nintendo, and the Popeye arcade game was born. This game will likely never be seen again in an official form due to the messy licensing behind the Popeye IP, which will be 100 years old in six years, but it's an interesting game.
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If only I felt like Popeye after eating Popeye's chicken ...
Yeah, I love Popeyes, but sometimes it makes me feel more like Wimpy than Popeye. Wimpy, incidentally, has a hamburger chain named after him in Commonwealth countries, primarily in Britain and South Africa now.
Popeye 100. Not likely as fantastic as Disney 100.
Probably not, Popeye's popularity began to peter out in the late 80s and has never really recovered. A lot of people attribute this to the poor reception of the Popeye movie. There was a 3-D Popeye game on Switch that was supposed to be a homage to the arcade game, but it mostly made the news for being really bad. When you say "Popeye" nowadays, people think fried chicken, not spinach.
Maybe they could do a dark take on Popeye like Pinocchio or this film I saw the trailer for the other day, which I thought was a dark live-action take on Pinocchio, and now can't find.
As long as it's better than "Velma."
I heard that was pretty terrible.
I'm actually a pretty big fan of newspaper comic strips, so I find Popeye's comic strip history more fascinating than anything else. Also Wimpy is my favorite character. I used to know a Disney animator who wanted to do Popeye cartoons so he moved to work for Famous Studios. But since he worked for Disney and was typecast as a 'cutesy' animator, they had him work on Casper instead.
None of the papers I've read ever ran Popeye strips. I watched all of the old Popeye shorts on afternoon syndicated TV, where it was easy to find them until the 90s when they replaced those with contemporary Fox Kids cartoons, and I watched the newer Popeye stuff. A lot of the older Popeye cartoons I watched had him dressed in his Navy whites and dixie-cup hat instead of his traditional merchant marine shirt and hat with jeans, and Bluto was called Brutus (or "Brutusk") because King Features wasn't sure if they owned the trademark to Bluto (they found out later that they still did, and they changed his name back). There was also "Private Olive Oyl," where Olive and Alice Goon joined the Army just like Laverne and Shirley did.
On the comic strips, it's kind of funny that Olive existed several years before Popeye did, dating a guy named Harold Hamgravy.
Popeye wasn't run in our newspaper comics section either, but years later I got a hardcover Popeye comics collection at Half Price Books. That's also where I got my Little Nemo in Slumberland collections.
