Rescuing Popeye

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Well, blow me down..

It's Popeye's 75th birthday. And a fat lot of respect the old tar gets, too.. Once, he was more popular than Mickey Mouse. Today, he's relegated to a 2 a.m. Sunday time slot on the Cartoon Network.

"But they can run a 'Scooby-Doo Marathon' in prime time," says Fred Grandinetti, co-founder of the Official Popeye Fan Club. "Isn't it sad?"

Yes, that squinty-eyed, spinach-snarfing, pipe-smoking sailor first swaggered into the newspapers -- and America's hearts -- on Jan. 17, 1929.

In his heyday, Popeye spawned an animated cartoon franchise that went head-to-head with the Disney studios. When repackaged for TV, these early black-and-white features gained a new generation of fans and ultimately inspired a live-action movie starring Robin Williams as the well-muscled mariner. When the film flopped, however, Popeye almost vanished from public view.

King Features Syndicate seems to be making a concerted effort to revive Popeye's fortunes this year with loads of PR and a new animated feature on tap. But die-hard Popeye fans are still wondering whatever happened to all those classic cartoons they used to love.

It's partly a matter for the lawyers. Warner Bros. owns most of the animated cartoons, according to Mr. Grandinetti. Yet King Features owns the rights to the actual character. "For years and years, nobody has been willing to do anything to rescue the cartoons from legal limbo" and issue a collectors' DVD set, Mr. Grandinetti complains.

Jerry Beck, a noted expert on animated features and president of Cartoonresearch.com, also blames the demands of the contemporary marketplace. "There hasn't been a lot of urgency. Most media companies today are interested in the latest marketable thing, like the Powerpuff Girls and SpongeBob," he says.

Popeye first appeared as a bit character in "Thimble Theater," a newspaper comic strip penned by cartoonist E.C. Segar. A native of Chester, Ill., Segar introduced the strip to the New York Evening Journal in 1919 and filled it with a cast of eccentrics largely based on people he had known while growing up.