Nope, nope, nope. The star of the movie is the village of Sweethaven:
“Sweet… Sweethaven! Goooooooood must love us!”
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The music is fantastic, which is to be expected since it was all written by Harry Nilsson…
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And what is Popeye’s favorite food, anyway?
Man, that movie came out 40 years ago, and was based on a cartoon from the early 1930’s (and a comic that predates that.) I’m impressed that enough people (and not all of them old fogies like me) still fondly remember the character to bring tourists to the old movie set.
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Agreed. We were the first family I knew that had a VCR, but the relative dearth and incredibly high price of titles meant that initially we had only two movies—bootlegs of Star Wars and Popeye. So I’ve seen this dozens of times and it triggers a lot of nostalgia for me.
Although I am still thrown off when I see it today and there’s no shake of the frame as the bootlegger adjusted the camera in the opening seconds.
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I love Popeye, always have…the Thimble Theater comics, the Fleischer Brothers cartoons, the comic books. I have always loved Popeye!
I hate this fucking movie. As far as I’m concerned, everything that was fun about Popeye The Sailor (and there is a LOT of fun in Popeye The Sailor) was removed to make this boring film. I didn’t understand then and still don’t how Hollywood managed to turn one of the 20th century’s most fun characters into an endless vehicle devoid of any Popeye magic.
Boo hiss.
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Sorry for the Amazon link but there’s a really good book about the making of the film. I grew up fairly obsessed with Popeye and having all this additional detail about the production made me watch it another 20 times or so.
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He absolutely was. There are several subplots going on just with the background characters…who were mostly circus performers.
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Another bit of absolutely perfect casting in that film. Also: Richard Libertini’s Geezil.
“Phooey!”
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The current weekday popeye strip by Bud Sagendorf seems to capture the original style.
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Ndidi Onukwulu has a cover of “He Needs Me” that just blew me away when I first heard it.
There’s also a separate digital-only Popeye strip titled Popeye’s Cartoon Club at Comics Kingdom | Popeye's Cartoon Club by Various. It originally showcased a variety of strips from many artists for Popeye’s 90’th birthday last year, but the latest run was taken by Randy Milholland of Something Positive fame.
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We used to rent the laser disk and the laser disk player from the local IGA, and it was one of four movies available. We loved everything about it, the cheesy costumes, the fun music, the sad moment with Olive’s father Cole.
But we were a strange family.
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People liked this movie? 23 year old me back in 1980 thought it was garbage.
The only reason I went to see it was because Robin Williams was in it. My friend and I left the theater extremely disappointed. I’m more of a 1940s era Popeye fan. This movie was nothing at all like those cartoons.
‘Spinach’ was a slang term for marijuana.
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Thanky! I hadn’t realized there had been another release of the soundtrack.
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Bookmarked, 
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