Fairy Tale Spotlight: Popeye

I've been watching a lot of the really old Popeye shorts on Boomerang lately. We're talking the really early ones done by Max Fleischer, the same guy who gave us Betty Boop. I am not a fan of the later Paramount ones, which seemed to fit a formula so strictly that every episode really felt like I was watching the same one over and over. Also, Popeye didn't mumble. Huge loss for the franchise, in my opinion.

The early Popeye cartoons were hilarious. Every character in the series was pretty much ugly. Popeye was ugly. Bluto/Brutus was ugly. Olive Oyl was basically a living noodle. Yet all these characters were alive and had hopes and dreams that inspired us to watch and laugh.

One of the things that really stood out to me with these old cartoons was how much abuse Olive took from both Bluto and Popeye. She was constantly manhandled and even punched square in the face. I was even startled by some of this, but not really offended. The cartoon characters of Max Fleischer were well-known for being strange creatures from an inkwell imbued with life by the imaginations of a great man. She was never really in pain because she was not really human to begin with.

I began to enjoy how she was treated because she really could not truly be hurt. I mean, she obviously didn't have any bones under that skin. You could put her through a ringer, and she'd come out perfectly fine. Popeye and Bluto seemed to know this and would take advantage of it as they fought over her like a fancy spaghetti dinner.

As I said, the later cartoons seemed to put aside a lot of this humor to fit a formula, but a lot of what made the original Popeye cartoons great returned for the movie. I actually consider the 1980 film to be the best casted movie in history. Every actor in this film was perfect for the part they played. Nobody else could have done it better.

This movie also seemed to give great respect to the original source material known as Thimble Theater. This was the original comic strip that focused on Olive Oyl and her Jewish family. The movie took the original stories and brought in Popeye as if they had never met. From there you bore witness to a live action Max Fleischer cartoon that has never been accomplished since. It was magical.

And Olive took about the same amount of abuse in this movie that she did in the original shorts. As gangly as she was, she was the trophy woman of two unsightly males. In many ways, Popeye has always been the story about how ugly people tend to settle... or perhaps they really did see something in that noodle that I don't see. Either way the battle for her was always a lot of fun.

I know I haven't been talking about the spinach thing. I think that plot point rather speaks for itself. It was always the characters of Popeye that made it work. It is a great series that simply had some low points. But that movie... That movie is freaking brilliant. Watch it. Just watch it. It's so good!

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