Popeye: The Strange Movie Audiences Didn’t Know What to Do With

You walk into a movie theater in December 1980 expecting Mork from Ork to eat a can of spinach and punch some poor bully into the stratosphere. You’ve got your popcorn, you’ve paid for your ticket, and you’re ready for the same explosive, hyperactive Robin Williams you’ve been watching on television every week. Instead, Williams shows up with one eye taped shut, a prosthetic jaw and a pipe, mumbling his way through conversations in a voice that sometimes makes you wonder if he’s speaking English at all.

When Paramount and Disney brought Popeye to the big screen, they were making a major live-action musical with Robert Altman behind the camera. What they got was something much stranger. Altman wasn’t interested in making a conventional family blockbuster, so he built a crooked, melancholy little world where cartoon characters could sing Harry Nilsson songs, argue about their families and wander around a giant wooden village that looked like it had been pulled straight from a newspaper strip.

That was always going to be a tough sell. Audiences knew Popeye as the spinach-eating sailor who settled arguments with his fists, while Altman gave them a lonely man dealing with an absent father, falling for Olive Oyl and suddenly becoming responsible for a baby. Williams’ familiar television energy was largely restrained, replaced by a much quieter performance that fit Altman’s deliberately strange rhythm. If you walked into the theater expecting Popeye to behave like a Saturday morning cartoon, this must have been one very confusing afternoon.

The critics weren’t nearly as united in their dislike as the movie’s reputation sometimes suggests. Roger Ebert gave Popeye 3.5 stars and admired the fully realized cartoon world Altman had created. Gene Siskel also gave it 3.5 stars, although he found the opening portion tedious before the movie became more entertaining with the arrival of Swee’Pea. So while audiences were divided, this wasn’t exactly the critical disaster that later mythology made it out to be.

The production itself was an adventure. Filmed in Malta, the movie required an enormous physical village called Sweethaven, complete with crooked buildings, docks and all the strange little details that make the place feel alive. The set was so impressive that it survived the movie and eventually became Popeye Village, a tourist attraction that still exists today.

Then there was the sound. Williams’ deliberately muffled delivery was already unusual, and Altman’s overlapping dialogue meant that characters frequently talked over one another. It was part of the director’s style, but it wasn’t always the easiest thing to follow, especially if you were expecting the broad, clean dialogue of a typical family movie.

The bigger problem was probably expectation. People wanted Popeye. Altman gave them Robert Altman’s Popeye. Those aren’t quite the same thing, and that difference is what makes the movie so fascinating now.

Look at Sweethaven and it becomes obvious why the film has aged differently from many of the blockbusters that surrounded it. There is almost nothing weightless about the place. The buildings are real, the docks are real, the costumes are physical and the entire village has a wonderfully handmade quality that modern digital filmmaking rarely tries to reproduce.

Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall fit into that world beautifully. They aren’t simply dressing up as Popeye and Olive Oyl. They somehow look as if E.C. Segar’s newspaper-strip characters have stepped off the page and started walking around in three dimensions. Duvall, in particular, seems almost genetically engineered to play Olive Oyl.

Williams is just as interesting because Altman refuses to turn him into the Robin Williams television audiences expected. Instead of unleashing the comedian’s manic energy, he makes Williams play Popeye as an awkward, vulnerable sailor who slowly finds his place in this bizarre little community. It is an unusual performance, and it becomes more interesting the less you expect it to be Mork.

That may be the secret to Popeye. Once you stop waiting for the movie to become the Popeye you remember, you can start appreciating the movie Altman actually made.

It isn’t a conventional Hollywood musical, a straightforward cartoon adventure or even a particularly traditional Robert Altman movie. It is a strange collision of comic-strip characters, live-action sets, Harry Nilsson songs, oddball humor and a director who clearly had no interest in playing it safe.

The audience in 1980 wanted Popeye to eat his spinach and punch somebody. Altman wanted to build the world around him and see what happened. Forty-six years later, that strange decision is probably the reason we’re still talking about it.

Recommended Reading

More from Sandbox World

• The Art and History of Popeye – A look at Popeye’s history, comic-strip roots and the Robert Altman film.
• The Art of Popeye Artists and Comic Strippers: Versions of the Spinach-Eating Superhero – A look at the many artistic interpretations of Popeye.
• Popeye Enters the Public Domain With Two New Slasher Movies – A very different chapter in Popeye’s long history.
• Popeye Variations – A collection exploring different artists’ takes on the character.

Further Reading

• Roger Ebert: Popeye – Ebert’s original review of Altman’s film.
• D23: Popeye – Disney’s reference entry for the 1980 film.
• Popeye Village Malta – The official history of the Sweethaven film set and its life as a tourist attraction.