What Would Popeye Do?

It would be honest of me to say, a great deal of my intellectual development was forged in the furnace of cartoons.  I love animation of all genres.  My first television memories are of The Mickey Mouse Club; watched at my grandparents’ home in Sterling, Colorado when I was three years old. My mother and I were living there while my dad was serving our country in the Western Pacific.  Each afternoon, before American Bandstand (if you don’t know American Bandstand, now would be a good time for you to ask an authority figure to change your diaper), all us wee tykes would gather ‘round the tube to share in the frivolity that was The Mickey Mouse Club.  

Then being too young to appreciate the attributes of (I have been led to understand I was not a breast-fed baby) Annette Funicello, I considered the live action portion of the program just a waste of time.  But if my memory serves, each episode presented two animated shorts which made all of the singing and dancing tolerable.  The cartoons of course were theatrical release short features that accompanied Disney films to movie houses.  While the presentation quality of television did not begin to match that experienced in the local Odeon, it was good enough for this little myopic tot and I didn’t have to sit through two feature length movies (if you are old enough to remember double features, now would be a good time to ask someone in authority to change your Depends) to get my Donald Duck fix.

My next memory of cartoons coincides with our return to San Diego.  Hanna-Barbara ruled the airwaves with mindless drivel like Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear.  What I remember most about these production line offerings is that they afforded no avenue for real cerebral growth.  Once you learned Huck was inevitably going to be trounced by an escaped gorilla and Yogi would never enjoy the epicurean delights that promised to be in the pilfered pic-a-nic basket, you had mastered the course.  Today, if I try to watch any of these “classics” on Boomerang (that’s the Cartoon Network’s retro channel), I usually fall asleep before the first screech of tires or the discordant sound of a guitar being broken over someone’s head; “El Kabong!”

Once I started school (coincidently, I don’t believe there was any kind of a communist plot involved), I discovered the genius of Jay Ward.  “Who?” you ask: The creator of Rocky and Bullwinkle; Dudley Do-right; George of the Jungle (“Heh, heh, heh; Chicken ala king!”); Super Chicken; et al. While silly enough to keep a kid entertained, these cartoons were equally appealing to the adult funny bone.  Their second tier of humor could be quite ribald to the tuned ear.  

I would identify the most valuable lessons as: how to be discreetly sarcastic; and the absurdity extant in imminent horrific possibilities; to wit, Boris and Natasha were Eastern Bloc spies plying their terrorist trade during the height of the Cold War!  The one problem with some of the Jay Ward cartoons we their episodic, cliff-hanger style.  When I am lucky enough to run across an airing I am challenged to understand the goings on; another similarity to real life.

I think everyone will agree that the crème-de-le-crème of short subject theatrical cartoons came from Warner Bros. studios.  Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Tweetie Bird, Sylvester: there is just not enough time or paper to complete the list.  Unfortunately, in my early youth, they were only available at the cinema.  But in 1960, ABC aired a weekly, prime-time series, The Bugs Bunny Show, each episode of which featured three selections from their Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes theatrical cartoons.  

Unfortunately for true aficionados, their library did not include offerings from prior to 1949, which had the highest level of artistic and production quality.  I guess when you are six of seven years old, you can’t appreciate the difference.  But if you have the opportunity to screen some of early product from the Leon Schlesinger (producer) era you will find they hold up artistically (story telling, character design) and technically (animation, background, music track) as well as anything produced digitally today.

There were other studios as well:  MGM produced the likes of Barney Bear, Tom and Jerry, Droopy et al: good artwork but repetitive stories.  I remember Woody the Woodpecker from Universal Pictures (Walter Lantz Studios) along with Chilly Willy, Andy Panda and a truckload of other nerve touching animals that taught us being louder than the other guy was the secret to success.  But among all of these studios, perhaps the most culturally significant was Fleischer Studios (renamed Famous Studios, then Paramount Studios) because they gave us Popeye the Sailor.

To be fair, Popeye was not a creation of the animation college, but rather claimed a higher pedigree from the more sophisticated world of print comics.  He was an added character to the long-popular strip, Thimble Theatre created by Elzie Segar (popularly known by just his last name and pronounced for effect as “see-gar”, like a cheap cigar).  In 1933, Fleischer Studios transformed the comic strip into a series of theatrical cartoon shorts released by Paramount Pictures.

What sets Popeye apart from other period cartoons was his deeply engrained sense of right and wrong.  He always conducted his own affairs in an honorable way and expected the same of those around him.  He paid respect when due and demanded the same in return.  His moral philosophy or “Tao” could be summed up in his theme song:

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man. I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.

I'm strong to the finich, cause I eats me spinach.

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.

I'm one tough Gazookus, which hates all Palookas.

Wot ain't on the up and square.

I biffs 'em and buffs 'em and always out roughs 'em

but none of 'em gets nowhere.

If anyone dares to risk my "Fisk", It's "Boff" an' it's "Wham" un'erstan'?

So keep "Good Be-hav-or", That's your one life saver

With Popeye the Sailor Man.

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man, I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.

I'm strong to the finich, cause I eats me spinach.

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.

It is an approach to personal relationships that I adopted at an early stage of my own life.  Fortunately for me, I was built more like Bluto and less like Popeye so I was rarely tested.  But times have changed considerably since the beginning of the Twentieth Century and such strong-armed behavior is no longer tolerated.  The age of enlightenment (somehow attributed to Aquarius) taught us peace is the ultimate goal.  Today society mandates we rely on officialdom to resolve our differences.  We can see by looking at the world around us how effective that approach has been.

While I am now too old and damaged to go around challenging people to do the right, courteous thing I sometimes long for a more self-regulated society and when tried by the ill behavior of others wonder to myself (because these kinds of thoughts are best not shared with the population at large) ,”What would Popeye do?”

And I believe the truth is, he’d do about twenty-five to life.  Unless the script was being written by Oliver Stone, in which case he would probably be doing Wimpy.