When I was a kid I watched Popeye Cartoons like crazy. I’m guessing it was because of my grandfather. He loved Popeye and made a big deal about him. Like Popeye he fancied himself a sailor, and for a while he was. He also ran tugboats which is I guess a Popeye type gig.
Anyways… something that always bugged me about Popeye was that he acted a fool with Olive.
She was a bad apple if ever I saw one.
One week she’d be playing the victim with Bluto chasing her all over and screaming to have Popeye rescue her, and the next week the cartoon would open with her and Bluto hanging out at a restaurant being all smoochie smoochie flirtatious until Popeye comes in and gets jealous.
Basically she played these two sailors against each other for attention and always acted the innocent victim.
This scenario bugged me a bit until I got the gist of what sailors were like stereotypically and realized that both Popeye and Bluto probably had other girls in every other port they visited.
That thought held me over for a while because I figured even though Popeye and Bluto acted the fool with Olive they had better things happening elsewhere.
Maturity and additional world knowledge destroyed that for me too. I’d guess I was about nine when I realized that if Popeye and Bluto were such fools with Olive they probably didn’t do much better at any port. These two guys were not lady’s men. These were a couple of sailors with ZERO game that where desperate and needy. They’d obviously swoon over any girl at all that threw even the slightest bit of attention at them.
I wondered why two employed guys were such losers when it finally all came together. These were some ugly and stupid individuals.
Bluto was an extremely overweight (especially for the times) guy with not much to say that grunted and groaned when he exerted himself in any way. He also had an anger management problem and blatant disregard for the law so was mostly abusive to any women he was around and scared women off.
Popeye was a tiny little 90lb guy with little man syndrome, a deformed body, fucked up eye, and no ability to speak coherently. Though smoking was not socially taboo at the time this guy had his corncob pipe in his mouth so often he must of stank like tobacco to a degree that would make one dizzy.
Both these guys shared one problem… their attire. Sure their little sailor outfits showed they were employed and all, but every once and a while switching it up to something a bit less salty sea dog would have done them well. When shown as Navy shipmates maybe it made sense, but often these guys played as civilian sailors. Why still keep the Navy garb then? Hmmm… never did figure that one out.
Whatever the case, Olive… the skinny attention whore found her marks with these losers for sure.
Isn’t like she was a great catch, but for a couple of guys with no options she was the bee’s knees.
You can get prints of this painting HERE via Fine Art America.
You can also get prints HERE via RedBubble along with T-shirts, greeting cards, coffee cups, tote bags, and a super cool pencil skirt option just in-case you’d like to play at being a flirtatious minx yourself.
Then we have a slightly modified version available via Society6 that is available as a large print, a super cool all over print shirt, regular shirts, hoodies, mega awesome wall clock, an almost overly righteous shower curtain, a rug, and even more.
F’n options galore I tell you!
Here is some trivia for you.
Originally Olive Oyl was an engaged gal who was set to marry a feller named Harold Hamgravy. Popeye wasn’t even thought of yet when Olive was already a famous cartoon character. Popeye eventually made his first appearance as a side character when Harold Hamgravy hired him to captain a boat for a treasure hunt. Olive and Popeye didn’t get along, but Olive was a flirt (I think I mentioned that before) and eventually there was a love triangle type thing. After a while Popeye and Olive become such a big thing that poor Hamgravy gets dumped permanently.
Yep, trouble causing minx from the start!
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