We are in danger of losing Popeye as a cultural icon forever!

Well blow me down! I's be hearin' da saddest thing I's evah's be hearin'! Does that sound familiar? No? How about this one: I's taken all I can take and I can'ts takes no more! Still only barely ringing a bell? If you're under 30, it's no wonder you're scratching your head in puzzlement.

That's because Popeye The Sailorman, the hilarious sailor-humor based comic which once had a fan base that spread through almost every major culture, has almost completely disappeared from the nation's consciousness.

Ay-ga-ga-ga! Say it ain't so! For Generation X'ers like myself, Popeye represents either a really dismal, unfunny cartoon that was wedged in between Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda, a clunker of a 1980 movie featuring the ever-annoying Robin Williams and equally-annoying Shelly Duvall, or a semi-playable old Atari video game that isn't nearly as fun to revist as nostalgia might have you believe.


Dumbest. Popeye. Ever.

For the younger generation, the awareness of Popeye only extends to the title character, who made a half-hearted attempt at being a window-sticker icon in the early 90s before Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes stole that crown. Olive Oil? Bluto? Who? If you don't think Popeye's legacy is slipping that fast, just walk up to any school-aged kid and declare, in a nasally voice: "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today." and watch their blank reaction.

Part of the problem may lie in the fact that it's harder to identify with a tough, tatooed, fighting, cussing sailorman today than it was when Popeye was created in 1874. In 1910, at the height of Popeye's popularity, 72% of all Americans either worked on a tuna fishing vessel or in a fish cannery near the sea. Today, that number has dropped below 15%. One must puzzle, then, why Hagar the Horrible has held up so well since it was introduced in 1526. Clearly, Popeye is in need of an update and a reintroduction to American culture.

Popeye briefly came back into popularity during the 1940s with the advent of cheap, creepy, colorized animated films. Many Popeye fans consider some of the Sweissen Studio shorts to be the finest examples of Popeye in cinema. These cartoon shorts, put out during the start of WWII, however, featured less-than-PC titles such as "Popeye vs. the Slant-Eyed Japs" and "Popeye vs. the No Good Krauts", and are filled with racially charged violence against other cultures and peoples.


The funnies pages without Popeye's humor won't be funny!

Can Popeye be saved from pop-culture extinction? I believe the younger set in this country would embrace a new Popeye, with a couple of tweaks. I'm currently working on a screenplay where Popeye is an office worker instead of a sailor. His smelly pipe is gone, too. Also absent will be the endless fisticuffs with Bluto over Olive Oil-- Olive Oil will be free to chose for herself who she wants to be with. Instead, the emotional context of Bluto and Popeye both being in love with the same woman will be explored deeper. The spinach thing will be gone as well. That never made any sense.



Concept for new, revamped Popeye cartoon