“One thing I remember about me pap was that he always used to throw me up in the air. Yeah, heh heh … but he’d never be there when I come down, you know. Heh heh heh. Boy, he had a sensek’a humor, didn’t he? Yeah, that was me pap. I remember the time he gave me a electric eel as a toy. Hah, yeah, that was fun. Or, or he’d rock me cradle real, real, real hard and I’d lose me formula. And then he’d say “One day, you’ll be a sailor.” Heh that’s … that’s what I yam today, yeah. Hm. Yeah. Sometimes he’d bounce me on his knee. Heh, most o’ the time he’d miss, though, ‘cos he couldn’t see too well with one eye … heh, oh, me pap, yeah …”
It all started with, of all people, Dustin Hoffman. He had a desire to make something that was very kid-friendly.. His original idea was maybe a clown version of Dracula or Frankenstein, and he took the idea to producer Robert Evans. Evans thought the horror comedies were a terrible idea, but in the conversation it came up that the theme from Popeye cartoons was still pulling in over $75,000 in royalties after decades since the last cartoons were made. So the idea of a musical based on Popeye was born. He went to King Features Syndication, who hold the Popeye rights, and bought the film rights. He hired writer Jules Feiffer to write the script on spec. It took almost two years for a finished script to be written. Dustin Hoffman was signed to played Popeye, and Lily Tomlin was set to play Olive Oyl. The biggest surprise was getting a director like Robert Altman to direct the film. It was all set to go in the mid 1970’s.
Hoffman didn’t like the script and became engaged in a very public fight with writer Feiffer, and he went to Evans demanding that Feiffer be fired or Hoffman would walk. Another surprise: he kept Feiffer and fired Hoffman. To find his replacement, Evans wanted someone without a big library of work behind him. They found Robin Williams in the middle of the Happy Days spin-off Mork And Mindy, where he was first brought to the world’s attention. When Williams, who had not yet been in a feature film, was hired, Lily Tomlin quit. With these changes, the film sat for another two years. During that time Williams started to beef himself up for the role but still required some make-up f/x to get those big Popeye arms. As the film started to get going, Gilda Radner was tapped to play Olive Oyl but decided to stick around for another season of Saturday Night Live. But the delays meant losing their choreography team and other members of the crew. Paramount no longer wanted to bet the farm on the movie, so a very rare alliance of Paramount and Walt Disney pulled together to finance the movie. Paramount would get domestic distribution and Disney would get the global distribution. In the summer of 1979 locations were found, and sets started to go up. Those sets are still up as a Malta tourist attraction, and you can visit that seaside town today and eat a hamburger at Wimpy’s.
1980 would be an eventful year for Shelly Duvall. Stanley Kubrick starred her in his Stephen King film The Shining, and she took on the role of Olive Oyl for Popeye. It was a bad year for her mentally. She would later claim Kubrick exposed her to some mental terror to get his performance for The Shining, and Olive Oyl was a character she had often been mocked with as a child, and she considered the film as a way to exorcise those demons.
In a bit of a surprise for me Alliance has come together to release the 1980 Popeye on UHD Blu-ray in 4K. It’s an opportunity to see it again after a lot of years being a dirty secret in Hollywood. It’s been almost 50 years, and it’s a film most people I’ve talked to don’t even know existed. Now is your chance to see it for yourself in the best presentation possible.
Popeye (Williams) arrives at the port town of Sweethaven looking for his pappy. He’s a bit oblivious to the things that happen around him, and he ends up stumbling through his visit there pretty much unaware of what is going on. He rents a room from the Oyl family and ends up at an engagement party for young Olive (Duvall) and Bluto (Smith). But Olive doesn’t want to marry Bluto, who is the muscle behind an unseen boss who taxes everything from asking questions to walking on a pier. He’s a brute, and Olive wants no part of the wedding. She wanders off to find Popeye sitting by himself at the dock, and that’s when a baby is found abandoned. They name the kid Sweetpea, and it brings the couple together. Of course, this puts Popeye at odds with Brutus and the unseen bad guy who happens to be … would you believe … his Pappy, played by Ray Walston. Father and son would be played by two actors who are renowned for playing television aliens, with Walston best known as Uncle Martin the Martian in My Favorite Martian. It’s actually a perfect combination, and one wishes the two had found each other earlier in the picture. Alas, that wasn’t meant to be, and the awkward musical numbers and odd story pretty much sunk this boat before it ever made it to land.
The port’s citizens were played by actual circus performers who each work their own trademark routine into the film. There’s a lot of physical comedy, and Williams goes way over the top. This Popeye hates spinach until his climactic fight with Bluto. The routines are often amusing, but it’s soon easy to see why it all doesn’t really work together as a film. The cast also includes a young Dennis Franz as one of the town thugs. Most of us remember him from Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue. Wimpy is played by Paul Dooley, who is today the oldest active actor at 99 years old and working quite a bit.
The sad thing is that both Robert Altman and Robin Williams would go on to distance themselves from the movie. Williams said on an interview that it did actually have a plot if you watched it backwards. But it would be his first feature film and led to a lot of good years for both men. An audience can be a fickle thing. “You give them everything they want, and what do you get back in return? You get nothing!”
