Popeye
Popeye the sailor man is a cartoon figure and comic strip created by Elzie Crisler Segar in 1929 and syndicated by the Hearst newspaper's King Features syndicate. He is a sailor who, when in trouble, eats spinach that gives him superhuman strength, usually to save his sweetheart Olive Oyl from his nemesis Blut/Brutus.
Popeye originally appeared as a minor character in Segar's newspaper cartoon strip Thimble TheaterOlive OylCastor Oyl1938Max Fleischer1933Betty Boop) and continued by Paramount Studios. Over 600 cartoons were produced in the next
four decades. In the cartoons, his nemesis was sometimes named
Bluto and other times Brutus; no explanation is apparent in the cartoons for these vagaries (the results of a copyright dispute over the character's name) .
A Popeye TV cartoon was made in the USA during the 1960s. The characters were substantially simplified (as is all too common in TV cartooning) and altered further from Segar's original designs.
Robert Altman used the character in a 1980 feature film starring Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall. It was mainly influenced by the cartoon, but drew on some of the style of the original strips.
Nintendo created a video arcade game based on the Popeye characters in 1982. The game was fairly popular, and home versions of this game also appeared on various home game consoles of the time.
The reference to spinach comes from the publication of a study that, because of a misprint, gave spinach ten times its iron content. Another regular character in the strip was Wimpy, who, despite the name, may have played a significant role in popularizing the hamburger in the United States. The Wimpy chain of hamburger restaurants was not the first (White Castle is generally recognized as that), but was the first to go overseas.
Later on, Popeye would have a fried chicken chain named after him.
Table of contents
2 Quotations
3 External Link
Characters in Popeye
Quotations
External Link
