I still frequently hear the movie Popeye mentioned as one of
the worst films of all time, but I actually thought the film was well done. IMO Shelley Duval’s and Robin Williams’ performances were delightful to watch, and everything about the sets…especially little details like the floating boxing ring were great. I thought the director did an excellent job in preserving the cartoon feel in the context of a live film. Yet most critics seem to hate it.
I should point out, however, that I wasn’t ever a huge fan of the original cartoons when I was a kid. Could that be why I’m missing something here?
I haven’t seen Popeye, but this seems like a safe place to admit for the first time that I really like the movie Cabin Boy. Same theme, anyway. Sailors.
Robin Williams was a pretty good Popeye, and Shelley Duval was dead-on as Olive. The two problems with the movie were:
The crappy script. C’mon, Popeye is a sailor! Let’s see a sea-faring adventure! The writers could’ve taken several sequences from the comic strip’s heyday in the 1930’s and turned it into a great story.
2.The lousy songs! Making “Popeye” a musical was a novel idea (I guess), but the songs better be good!
I, too enjoyed Robin Williams in Popeye. The movie was basically a cartoon done with live actors. Sure, the plot wasn’t the best, but it fit the basic concept.
If I could change one thing, it would be Pappy’s cursing during the chase scene. The movie was meant for the younger generation, tho adults could enjoy it, too. But Pappy’s cursing (him saying “Haul ass! Haul ass!”) as they give chase to Bluto was wrong for the children. Something a bit tamer was needed there.
Freyr-
When “Popeye” was a popular comic strip in the 1930’s (it was called “Thimble Theatre” then), parents wrote to the syndicate complaining that Popeye’s course language was bad for children. The artist E.C. Segar, was annoyed that he had to tone down Popeye’s cussing, so he created the Pappy character as an outlet for it. So you see, in the movie the Pappy character was just doing what he was born to do!
I thought the film was pretty good overall. A lot of people didn’t understand that Jules Feiffer’s script was taken from the Segar comic strips and not the Fleischer cartoons (they wised up for “The Addams Family,” I guess, partly because Charles Addams’s cartoons were still available). A lot of people commented that Shelly Duvall was the perfect Olive Oyl, but no one noticed that Richard Libertini was the perfect George W. Geezel. But the sets and style were a duplicate of Segar, which confused people who had never seen him.
Count me in on this one. I thought the movie was quite good, actually. Turned me on to the Segar Popeye instead of the goofy-ass King Features Syndicate crud the TV fed me on weekends. Actually made me go out (well, not immediately, but it had its effect) and find original E.C. Segar strips to check out what the whole thing was about.
