ROBIN WRITES: Cartoon crush
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From the first time Popeye strode across the boards of a black and white pier, his blimpy forearms and clenched fists gyrating in piston motion, I was hooked.
Popeye was a balding man. Short as a shot of whiskey and explosive as a belch. A corncob pipe hung between his lips; he chomped it tight like a grudge.
He wore his sailor suit most of the time, only changing to a top hat and tails for a special night out with Olive (which got shredded in a fight every time he wore it).
But Popeye’s most distinguishable characteristic was this: he muttered. Every episode of the cartoon was laced with his loutish, pessimistic commentary, like barnacles on a rotting hull.
Olive Oyl was my first female TV role model. Her figure was a perfect 19-19-19. Watching her flat chest flail in female hysteria made me wonder about her female magnetism, but men were crazy for Olive, so I wanted to look like her.
Miss Oyl’s whiny voice could penetrate the thickest pea-soupy fog ever found floating above the seven seas. She squawked a command and the men in her life jumped to comply. Swizzle-stick Olive was the only gal in town, and she knew it.
Bluto (or was it Brutus?) was Popeye’s nemesis and Olive’s other suitor. When he lumbered across the screen, headed for Olive’s house, my pupils dilated for a closer look. Bluto’s hammy fists strangled a clump of flowers and his face wore a Jack Nicholson grin of fiendish intent. He was bad-boy beautiful.
How could Olive resist a man who could sweep her onto the dance floor, fling her body into the air like a javelin and catch her in one meaty palm? Like she said: “HUBBA, HUBBA!”
But he always went overboard. He clenched Olive too tightly and squeezed a bagpipe screech of protest from her reedy vocal cords. That was Popeye’s cue.
He’d take a hit of his spinach-filled pipe or crush a can of the vegetable that always seemed to materialize just in time, and throw his bowlegged body into action.
After minutes of mayhem, underscored by the jaunty tune that always played during the fights, scrawny GOOD prevailed. Popeye beat Bluto to a burly pulp.
Olive, sporting size 16 saddle shoes (or kitten heels on date nights), ran to her hero and sighed like a leaky radiator: “OOOooohhh Popeye!!!”
I dated Popeye boys. But I secretly lusted after Blutos. Like Olive, I struggled with the inner conflict of wanting what wasn’t good for me. When the episodes of my cartoonish life started wearing thin and tattered on the reel, I married my husband, John—a balding man who loves spinach and mutters more each year.
But I still retain those five o’clock-shadowed memories of Bluto’s burly-buff bravado and I have fantasies of fistfights for my affection, instead of fumbling grabs for the last biscuit on the breakfast plate at our kitchen table.
Popeye cartoons stained my gray matter with inkblots that shaped the woman I grew up to be. And just like him, I yam what I yam.
I don’t know whether to toot a corncob pipe or bake a spinach soufflé.
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■ Robin is a freelance columnist who lives and writes in Quincy, Illinois. Contact her at [email protected].
