`Muskels'

Kids accept whatever they’re given as the canon. Linn Sheldon’s television name was Barnaby. For 42 years he appeared on KYW, Channel 3, Cleveland’s NBC affiliate. For much of that time he hosted children’s shows, a combination of ad-libbed in-studio skits and Popeye the Sailor cartoons. It occurs to me that the children’s shows we most enjoyed in the nineteen-fifties and –sixties -- Popeye, Little Rascals, Three Stooges – dated from our parents’ earliest decades, including the Great Depression, and share some of that era’s values and mood.

My kids and I have been watching Popeye, the Sailor: 1933-1938, a four-disc set of the earliest Popeye cartoons. The character first appeared in E.C. Segar’s newspaper comic strip “Thimble Theatre” in 1929, and made the transition to the movie screen, directed by Max Fleischer, in 1933. For those who judge vintage animation by the great Chuck Jones/Mel Blanc/Carl Stalling Looney Tunes, the cartoons produced by Warner Bros. (we bought the 20-DVD “Golden Collection” last year for Christmas), Popeye will seem primitive and grim. The id-laced plot is virtually identical from cartoon to cartoon: Someone (often Bluto) clashes with Popeye (often over Olive Oyl), they fight, Popeye eats his spinach and whips his antagonist. Social class, as in the Little Rascals and Three Stooges, is a recurrent theme, and the settings are true to the Depression – empty streets and factories, horse-drawn wagons, jobless men. The wealthy, well-dressed and “cultured” are always under suspicion. If a live-action Popeye can be imagined (I don’t count Robin Williams), the role would require equal parts Wallace Beery (strength, crudity) and W.C. Fields (voice, wit). I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Popeye and by how many of the cartoons I remembered.

Jules Feiffer, in his introduction to Popeye Vol. 1: `I Yam What I Yam,’ published in 2006 by Fantagraphics Books, writes of him:

“On the wrong side of an argument he was perfectly capable of misusing his powerful muscles (muskels, on radio) and readers would love him nonetheless. Popeye, in Segar's vision, was the flawed common man as Walt Whitman might have imagined him, Frank Capra directed him, and Samuel Beckett mixed with Eugene Ionesco were hired to write his dialogue.”

Feiffer, as usual, is glib and pretentious but I think there’s something to the “common man as Walt Whitman might have imagined him” business and to the Beckett connection. The Irishman’s debt to movies, especially silent comedy and Laurel and Hardy, are documented. There’s a similar fusion of comedy and pathos, and a roughhousing disregard for the human body. Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, has said, “I think of Thimble Theatre as blue-collar Beckett.”

For me, one of the joys of watching Popeye again is his voice. We’re always missing something in his guttural mutter, and as kids we suspected he was saying something dirty, as with W.C. Fields. In Watt is a passage in which Beckett might be describing Popeye:

“When Watt spoke, he spoke in a low and rapid voice. Lower voices, voices more rapid, have been heard, will be heard, than Watt’s voice, no doubt. But that there ever issued from the mouth of man, or ever shall again, except in moments of delirium, or during the service of the mass, a voice at once so rapid and so low, is hard to believe. Watt spoke also with scant regard for grammar, for syntax, for pronunciation, for enunciation, and very likely, if the truth were known, for spelling too, as these are generally received.”