POPEYE-The sailor Man

Popeye the Sailor has been well-known to comic strip fans since his first appearance in the newspaper strip Thimble Theater in 1929. The hot-tempered old salt with bulging forearms and a fractured vocabulary was at first a minor character, but he grew to dominate the strip as readers fell for Popeye "the sailor man." A comical cast of characters grew up around Popeye: skinny flirt Olive Oyl, origin-free orphan Swee'pea, tattered hamburger-lover J. Wellington Wimpy, and the bewhiskered brute Bluto, Popeye's perennial rival for Olive's attention. Popeye loved a good brawl, and would eat a can of spinach to give himself the sudden strength needed to secure victory. In 1933 Popeye made his way to animated cartoons (appearing first in a Betty Boop short by Max Fleischer), and that's where his supernatural spinach habit really became famous, along with screwball sayings like "I yam what I yam" and "That's all I can stands, I can't stands no more!" Hundreds of Popeye short subjects were made, and Popeye cartoons were a fixture in movie theaters and television well into the 1960s. The comic strip continued right into the 21st century, handled by a succession of artists. (Popeye's creator, Elzie Segar, died in 1938.) Popeye was played by Robin Williams in the 1980 feature film Popeye, which co-starred Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl and was directed by Robert Altman.