MARLOW NEWSLETTER - Marlow Navigation

4th Issue
June 2009
POPEYE THE SAILOR - Cartoon Character / Animated Character
Born: 17 January 1929
Birthplace: The Comics
Best known as: Fist-fighting, spinach-loving sailor of comics and cartoons
Popeye the Sailor has been well-known to comic strip fans since his first
appearance in the newspaper strip Thimble Theater in 1929. The
hot-tempered old salt with bulging forearms and a fractured vocabulary was at
first a minor character, but he grew to dominate the strip as readers fell for
Popeye "the sailor man."
F e a t u r e s
A comical cast of characters grew up around him: skinny flirt Olive Oyl,
origin-free orphan Swee'pea, tattered hamburger-lover J. Wellington Wimpy, and
the bewhiskered brute Bluto, Popeye's perennial rival for Olive's attention.
Popeye loved a good brawl, and would eat a can of spinach to give himself enough
strength to secure victory. In 1933 Popeye made his way to animated cartoons
(appearing first in a Betty Boop short), and that's where his supernatural spinach
habit really became famous, along with screwball sayings like "I yam what I yam"
and "That's all I can stands, I can't stands no more!" Hundreds of Popeye short
subjects were made, and Popeye cartoons were a fixture in movie theaters and
television well into the 1960s. The comic strip continued right into the 21st
century, handled by a succession of artists. (Popeye's creator, Elzie Segar, died in
1938.) Popeye was played by Robin Williams in the 1980 feature film Popeye,
which co-starred Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl and was directed by Robert Altman.
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