It’s Christmas Eve 1979, and I’m in Bedford town centre with my Mum. Not sure what she’d forgotten to buy at this late stage but I’ve got the Christmas issue of TV Comic in my hand, and there’s either rain or sleet or snow in the streetlights around the big old church in St. Paul’s Square, meaning everywhere must be about to close and I’m guessing we’re on our way home, being at that end of town. It’s weird how these split-second memories of nothing in particular can stick with you for forty-five years! Anyway, TV Comic was my thing aged seven, and would be for a couple more years before Beano or Whoopee or Whizzer & Chips or the occasional copy of Look-in or TV Tops took over for a while. It had been around since 1954, when early television favourites like Muffin the Mule got the comic strip treatment, and that format would continue until 1984, constantly evolving with current tastes and taking in the likes of Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Doctor Who, Basil Brush, Laurel and Hardy, Rod Hull and Emu, Charlie’s Angels and Sooty along the way… If it was on the telly and popular it was in – even stuff from adverts like The Milky Bar Kid and Buzby!

I think I’d moved on by the time cool stuff like The Dukes of Hazzard and The A-Team arrived in there but it’s the likes of Pink Panther, Scooby Doo and Popeye I remember most fondly, especially when they got the colour treatment or even had their own Holiday Special! And I remember those three in particular because I absolutely loved the cartoons at the time too, which I imagine is exactly why TV Comic outlasted (or sucked up) so many imitators across so many generations of kids. That probably also applies to all three of those I’ve just mentioned themselves, although none more so than Popeye, who’s been reinventing himself to keep up with popular culture – pretty much to this day – since he first appeared in the New York Journal newspaper’s Thimble Theatre comic strip back in 1929, although his love interest, Olive Oyl, actually dates right back to its beginnings ten years earlier!

Popeye the Sailor might have changed with the times but from the outset he’s always been a bit of a slow-witted, bad-mannered superman, with crazy strength (and sometimes superhuman intelligence!) originally brought on by rubbing a lucky chicken but that soon turned into guzzling down a can of spinach! More often than not, that will come out when he’s in some life-threatening peril with his love rival Bluto (or Brutus), who I think has also been around for almost as long as Popeye, and has an endless supply of madcap plans to keep him away from Olive. Which reminds me, Popeye also has his pipe in his repertoire, which might not see much smoking action nowadays, but will also serve as a blowtorch, helicopter rotor, jet engine, periscope or whatever else is needed to escape Popeye’s latest predicament, including, of course, sucking spinach out of somewhere when his hands are otherwise occupied. Makes a catchy “toot, toot” sound too!

As we’ll come across a few more old faces in the game shortly, I’ll quickly mention a few well-known other faces from Popeye’s past, most of which are the ones I remember from the cartoons we used to get on TV in the late seventies and early eighties but I think are almost all close to being originals too. There’s the baby, Swee’Pea, who Popeye found in the mail and adopted; Wimpy, a lovable down-and-out who’ll “gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today”; Eugene the Jeep was a weird magic dog-thing; Sea Hag (my favourite!) is a pirate-witch; then Alice the Goon was Sea Hag’s unfortunate-looking henchwoman and then Swee’pea’s babysitter; and finally for now, Poopdeck Pappy is Popeye’s ne’er do-well father. It took a few years for this lot to move from comic strips to comic books, and I think TV Comic might have been the first back in 1960, but Popeye would soon get many of his own, and for many decades to come – in fact, as I write, there’s a new manga called Eye Lie Popeye, right here in 2024!

Also in 1960, Popeye the Sailor got his first TV cartoon series by that very name, and while the two hundred and twenty of those that followed are the ones we’d see repeated forever after, there’d also already been what seems to be hundreds of Popeye cartoons from Paramount Pictures shown in cinemas since 1932, including quite a few World War II-themed ones ten years later! They’d run until 1957, although until recently haven’t been quite as readily available. Then there was a cartoon special in 1972, as part of The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie, and in 1978 The All New Popeye Hour, which ran until 1981 when it was repackaged as The Popeye and Olive Comedy Show, which would continue until late 1983. Popeye and Son lasted a single season in 1987, then Cartoon Network created a new version of The Popeye Show in 2001, which lasted forty-five episodes, and I’ve also come across a special called Popeye’s Voyage: The Quest for Pappy in 2004 and Popeye’s Island Adventures, which was a web series launched in 2018. Mustn’t forget the live-action Popeye (which I saw at the cinema!) starring Robin Williams as the man himself in 1980, and I think there’s another one in the works as I speak, but aside from ancient radio series that are now, sadly, mostly lost, that’s probably a good point to jump into Popeye video games!

If I’d have thought of this beforehand, when we eventually get into arcade and Atari 2600 Popeye’s in a second, you might not have been reading about them here at all, but the 1985 ZX Spectrum game by Don Priestley instead… I started with random memories, and there’s another one attached to this – I borrowed it from a friend one Friday afternoon, when every week we also went to my grandparents’ house shortly after we got home from school, so I had to wait to try it but took it with me all the same, and I remember staring in wonder at these impossible screenshots while I sat in the back of my dad’s car! Maybe not such a random memory in this case though – anyone who saw that thing for the first time in 1985 would never forget about it! Unfortunately, it looked way better than it played though, but those huge, full-colour sprites were all that really mattered! Popeye 2 wasn’t quite so impressive, especially coming as late as it did to the 8-bit platforms in 1991, and even more so the proper stinker that is Popeye 3: Wrestle Crazy from the following year! And over on the the handheld front, I do remember playing the Popeye Game & Watch when that came out it in the early eighties but I’m not so familiar with the later Game Boy, Game Gear and Famicom games that arrived through the first half of the nineties. I am very familiar with Popeye: Rush for Spinach from 2005 though, which is a cool narrative auto-runner (also involving my favourite Sea Hag!) for the Game Boy Advance!  

And I think that just about covers everything I wanted to before talking Nintendo arcade games from 1982! Actually, we really need to start a year earlier because that’s where the Popeye story begins, with a guy called Shigeru Miyamoto, who was trying to make the best of a huge unused stock of cabinets originally designed for a failed pseudo-3D take on Space Invaders called Radar Scope. In parallel, Nintendo was after the license for Popeye, and he had a perfect concept to use it on, involving a familiar-sounding love triangle, until ongoing legal issues caused them to rethink the use of Popeye, Olive Oyl and Brutus, so, inspired by the old movie King Kong, Bluto became a giant ape, Olive Oyl became Pauline, and Popeye became a little Italian plumber called Mario! Might not have been what anyone wanted but from what I understand, it seems like what they got did alright for Nintendo too, so having finally got hold of the rights to Popeye in the background after all, they decided to piggy-back the success of Donkey Kong and set Miyamoto and Genyo Takeda (of Punch-Out!!, Donkey Kong Country and general Wii fame) loose on a Popeye-themed platform game!

It’s a three-screen, platform and steps and ladders game, and you’ll be getting plenty of use out of those too because unlike the game it inspired that inspired it, Popeye can’t jump! What he can do, though, is run around collecting whatever Olive Oyl is dropping from the top of the screen, which varies depending on which screen you’re on. I’ve always thought of the first screen as the docks, given the sea at the bottom and the little hut with Popeye’s name on it at the top looking like one you might find in one! Anyway, she’s chucking hearts down from there, and you need to collect twenty-four of them to move to the next screen, which is more obviously a seaside apartment block this time, where she’s now dropping musical notes that maybe form a lullaby for Swee’Pea, as the moon is out. Whatever, collect sixteen of them and you go to the third screen, which is a big sailing ship, where Olive is now in her usual state of peril thanks to Sea Hag and her pesky pet vulture, so she’s throwing down letters from the crow’s nest that spell “H-E-L-P” several times over because you need to catch twenty-four of these bad boys to rescue her, then it’s back to the start again for a more frantic next loop!

I think Bluto is Brutus in this incarnation, and obviously he’s out to make all of this as difficult as possible, which by now he’s clearly very well versed at! From the very outset, he’ll make just getting off your starting position on the first screen a total nightmare by patrolling up and down the platform below until you make your move! And every move needs to be quick and decisive as far as he’s concerned because if he sees you on the same platform as him, he’ll rush you or chuck a stream of beer bottles at you; if he sees you on the one above, he’ll jump up and grab you; and likewise, if you’re below him he’ll reach down and do the same, so you need to forget hearts until he’s far enough out of the way for you to safely catch one. In that respect, I think the general gameplay loop is far more akin something like BurgerTime than Donkey Kong, where your first priority is always buying yourself some time before you worry about love hearts (or trampling dirty bits of meat on the floor)! I reckon Brutus is way more relentless than Mr Hot Dog or whatever he’s called in BurgerTime though – more like the Tyrant in Resident Evil 2 – but like with those guys, there are ways of getting the briefest of reprieves, and in this case, it obviously comes in a can, in the delicious, iron-rich form of spinach!

Even that isn’t straightforward though! Once per level, a can of spinach will appear on one of the screen’s platform levels, of which there’s more or less four on each level, although the layout does get a bit more complicated after the first. Manage to grab it, and you’ll have a few seconds of super-strength to chase after Brutus (like chasing a ghost when you grab a Pac-Man power pill) and if you catch up with him, you’ll send him packing into the sea for what seems like even fewer seconds, but there is a big bonus score for doing so! You also score big if you manage to punch Sea Hag’s vulture when that appears, or use Wimpy’s seesaw to get a boost up to Swee’Pea (if you time it right) on the second screen, but for regular points, you’re punching beer bottles and catching hearts, notes and letters. You want to grab those quick though because they’re worth less the further down the screen you let them travel, and if you let them get all the way to the bottom, they’ll be worth nothing as they sink beneath the waves. The action really is not-stop breathless, and that’s before you throw in Sea Hag’s regular appearances, sometimes on both sides of the screen at once, to chuck her beer bottles at you, or on the second loop, also throw some bouncing skulls into the mix!

Where it is similar to Donkey Kong, though, is in its difficulty curve, which might be set a little bit higher at the beginning, but once your familiar with the mechanics and the timing and what you can get away with and where, you’ll be making progress and you will eventually be seeing that second loop (sometimes!), but you’ll also be getting greedy for high scores by now, which, also similarly, is where the longevity really lies. Admittedly, it doesn’t quite have that top tier, one-more-go addictive quality of Donkey Kong – or at least it wears off a bit quicker – but it’s not far off. And despite having fewer screens, there’s as much variety, with irregular platform patterns adding further opportunity for strategy while also being one more hazard to overcome, and there’s moving platforms and moving ladders to consider, as well as new enemy attacks like Brutus’ ability to jump gaps where you can’t, or leap down a level wherever he chooses, while you still need find some stairs! And that stupid vulture on the ship screen… There’s always so much going on, and it’s such a test of both reflexes and concentration, especially when everything gets so much more aggressive when you’ve been around once!

If you’re a Popeye fan, the presentation is going to elevate the gameplay even further – the characterisation couldn’t be more authentic, with all the right details and all the right colours, and there’s animation for everything, which might be bounded by the era it comes from but it also goes way above and beyond expectation for 1982! It’s all so expressive too, with Olive simpering away at the top, marching back and forth with helplessly clasped hands and exaggerated blinking eyes, while Brutus does a great lovelorn look at the start before going into all forms of angry, both facially and in his demeanour as he struts around – he’s even got an angry for when he’s doing his triumphant strongman routine when he’s just done away with you! Popeye himself, on the other hand, walks around blissfully unaware of any danger until it hits him in the face, when you get a suitably slapstick life lost animation! He’s got quite the punch too! There are loads of other little slapstick touches to look out for as well, like the big plopping splash when Brutus hits the water, and on the first screen there’s a punchbag hanging from the uppermost platform that – in the unlikely event you get time to do so – can be smacked into the conveniently positioned bucket hanging next to it, which will then drop right down into the sea, taking anything that happens to be wandering by below out with it!

Other characters look just right when they turn up too, with everyone drawn and dressed and coloured just like you want them, and while they tend to get up to less on the screen when they are there, Sea Hag always looks suitably sinister and Wimpy suitably lazy! I guess the only thing I have mixed feelings about are the environments themselves because while they do work fine in setting a series of recognisable and varied scenes in a believable Popeye context, they can be a bit sparse and blocky, in a bit of an Atari 2600 way. And we’ll be able to compare and contrast that claim properly in a minute! It’s all very vibrant though, and the level designs are clearly very well thought out, and it’s only 1982 so let’s give it a break! Before we move on to some of those other versions, let me quickly close on the arcade game with its sound. As you’d expect, there’s a simple but jaunty chip-tune version of the Popeye the Sailor Man theme on the title screen, which returns later with an animated toot-toot at the end, should you deserve one! In-game, you begin with a slightly more flamboyant burst of the same theme, which then transitions to something more plodding and generic as you play, although as I was taking notes about it, if you don’t do anything it will transition again into something more urgent! Sound effects are exactly what you’d expect from an arcade machine of this era – every step, fall and action has its own sound but it’s all regular blips and beeps, and it’s all perfectly functional but little more.

Earlier on, I (half!) joked about switching what you’re reading to the ZX Spectrum version but it did actually start out as the Atari 2600 conversion instead! I have huge nostalgia for that system, and that version of Popeye is the one I’ve been enjoying for a very long time, so while I do remember the arcade game from what’s now a relatively similar time, and have played it sporadically ever since, when I decided I wanted to write about Popeye, until very recently, the one I’ve played the most was going to be the headline act! The thing is though, as you can tell, I’ve really got into the original of late too, and realistically that’s where the most interesting story also lies, but even so, having now played them at some length back-to-back for the first time ever, I think it’s also given me an even greater appreciation of how good the 1983 Atari 2600 port from Parker Brothers really is! Obviously, there’s no escaping the fact that big concessions have been made for the hardware, particularly in how it looks… Apart from those platform designs, some of which I now definitely maintain look arcade perfect! Popeye looks kind of like Popeye too, in a very monochrome way, and on the basis your imagination has been prompted to fill in a few gaps by the time you see him, although Olive and Brutus are a bit more of a stretch again!

The concept is exactly the same though, and all three screens are recognisable and more or less intact. Sea Hag is still chucking beer at you but sadly we don’t get to see her doing it here, and we’ve lost the punchbag, but spinach is still mysteriously moving up and down the stairs, and I think the gameplay might just be even more brutal! The sailing ship on level three is particularly impressive, where we’re missing the vulture but I can’t imagine how rough things would get if we weren’t! The second screen is probably the one that suffered the most in transition – it’s visually similar to the first but with altered platforms, and there’s no sign of Wimpy or Swee’Pea either, although the seesaw has been replaced by a trampoline, and that serves the same purpose solo! Otherwise, it certainly plays like Popeye, and in the chaos of the cat and mouse, you’ll soon forget about what’s missing and get exactly the same kick out of chasing high scores as you did in the original with what’s there. Decent sound too, and I might even prefer this slightly richer version of the in-game music!

I’m not going to go too wild on other home conversions but I have played a bit of the Atari 5200 one in the past, and it’s a bit of a halfway house between the two versions we’ve just looked at, although I’ve always thought it sacrificed a bit of excitement for more sophisticated presentation. And while I think of it, although the planned official port was cancelled in 1988, there’s a 2020 Atari 7800 homebrew by Darryl1970 who you’ll find via Atari Age that’s definitely worth a look! Elsewhere at the time, it also got releases on the Atari 8-bit computers, the Commodore 64, TI/99 4A, Intellivision and ColecoVision, and there was a cool NES version too. And an official board game! I’ve still got unfinished business with my old 2600 version though, so I’ll probably stick with that for the time being… And as I alluded to, that arcade effort really isn’t bad either, so we’ll see! Either way, while those licensing problems and Miyamoto’s subsequent change of direction back at Nintendo HQ must have been a nightmare at the time, things worked out alright in the end. He got his Donkey Kong, I got my Popeye, and I reckon everyone is happy after all… Toot! Toot!

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