Popeye

I remember seeing this in the theaters 25 years ago. Since it was relatively cheap, I scored it for Somara’s graduation visit.

The musical movie opens with a storm and a sailor, obviously Popeye, rowing into an odd little island village called Sweet Haven (stated and explained in the first song). The residents are an unfriendly collection of archetypes (the mailman, the mayor, the barber, etc.) along with the characters everyone knows; Olive Oyl, Bluto and Wimpy. The entire village is also dominated by a tax collector and Bluto who represent Sweet Haven’s actual ruler, the mysterious Commodore. Popeye comes to this desolate rock in search of his father and this is the last remaining place he hasn’t checked. Meanwhile, he gets entangled in Olive’s on-again/off-again engagement to Bluto, adopts Sweet Pea and alienates the village with demonstrations of his great strength against the local bullies.

Even after two decades this movie still holds up despite being a weird musical (rather weak material by Harry Nilsson). The make-up job on Robin Williams’ arms is still credible too. Poor Shelly Duval didn’t need as much work to be Olive. The real clincher for me was the attention to detail. All the people of Sweet Haven have the same oversized feet and shoes from the E C Segar strips. There’s also the cartoon-level of exaggerated action reminiscient of the great silent movies. It’s hard to believe this movie was directed by Robert Altman since most of his movies have never interested me.

It is still one of the best comic-strip-adaptation movies made during the early 1980s run of them (Superman, Flash Gordon, Swamp Thing). Writer Jules Feiffer (yes the cartoonist) went with an “origin” story in which the characters start off as strangers and through their personalities, the story and its subplots all come together with an ending in the same style as a standard Popeye cartoon.

I found it in the kids section so the burning question is, will children like it these days with all the CGI-based competition? I sincerely think so, especially when they hear Popeye curse near the end of the film.