Popeye the Sailor Biography

Cartoon Character / Animated Character

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." 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.

Extra credit: According to the King Features website, "Spinach growers credited Popeye with a 33 percent increase in U.S. spinach consumption and saving the spinach industry in the 1930s!"... The Popeye's Fried Chicken restaurant chain is named not for Popeye the Sailor, but rather (according to the fast-food company) for the Popeye Doyle character played by Gene Hackman in The French Connection... Bluto was called Brutus in some later animated cartoons... Wimpy was an incorrigible moocher whose regular promise was, "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."

Two other popular cartoon characters from Popeye's era are Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse.

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