When I was a young kid, Popeye the Sailor was my favorite cartoon character, especially the cartoon shorts of the 1930s by Max and Dave Fleischer.
While the character has been around over the succeeding decades, and the quality of the cartoons diminished, yet the characters were kept true. Even the Robin Williams Popeye movie was palatable and the Bud Sagendorf newspaper comic strip was good.
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Now, Popeye is being revived as "Popeye's Island Adventures" as a YouTube channel. Just looking at the re-vamped characters (above) tells me to stay away.
Cartoon Brew said it best:
Unfortunately there’s not much positive to say about this miserable misguided attempt at resurrecting the character, though one can’t help but be impressed by how wildly they’ve failed at capturing the spirit of the character. It’s almost as if King Features sat down and wrote a list of everything that makes Popeye fun and entertaining to watch, and then systematically eliminated those elements one by one from this new production.
Popeye is now younger, though King Features doesn’t seem to be exactly clear on how many years they’ve shaved off, which is not a good sign considering that they’ve commissioned Wildbrain to make 25 two-minute shorts. “He’s younger, but you can’t tell how old he is,” C. J. Kettler, president of King Features, told the New York Times. “He’s not an old guy, he’s not a young guy, he’s somewhere in between.”
Instead of sporting a pipe in his mouth, Popeye now carries a whistle. (Perhaps he’ll referee a football game in a future episode.) And spinach gives him superpowers, like ear-flying, which is probably intended as a substitute for the physical comedy of the classic cartoons from the 1930s and ’40s.A freaking whistle?! Egads!
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