The very idea of making a live-action version of the cartoon character Popeye wain itself a head-scratcher but when the film was in the planning stages, producers Paramount and Walt Disney (pooling their resources) made a decision just as baffling. Who better to direct a musical based on a cartoon character from the 1930s who in turn was based on a printed comic strip version than… Robert Altman? A marvellous filmmaker no doubt, but there was little on his filmography to suggest that a comic-strip musical was the sort of thing he’d be interested in. The resulting film is often remembered as a box-office disaster though in fact it did well financially, tripling its budget on its initial release.

Popeye the sailor man (Robin Williams) arrives in the small town of Sweethaven, looking for traces of his missing father. Taking a room at the guest house run by the Oyl family, he takes a shine to their daughter Olive (Shelley Duvall) but she’s about to become engaged to the town bully Captain Bluto (Paul L. Smith). Olive runs away from her engagement party and, with Popeye in tow, finds an abandoned baby that they decide to adopt and name Swee’Pea (Wesley Ivan Hurt). The baby can predict the future and inveterate gambler J. Wellington Wimpy (Paul Dooley) uses his abilities to win at a mechanical horse carnival horse race game, much to Popeye’s dismay. Popeye later learns that the mysterious Commodore, who appears to be running Sweethaven, is really his missing father, Poopdeck Pappy (Ray Walston). When Bluto kidnaps Olive and Swee’Pea and sets off to find some buried treasure, Popeye, Pappy, Wimpy and the Oyl family give chase, arriving at the remote Scab Island where Popeye fights both Bluto and a gigantic octopus.

In the merits column, the film’s casting is exemplary. Shelley Duvall was born to play Olive Oyl and does so brilliantly, as does Smith as Bluto, an equally obvious casting choice. Robin Williams, making his first feature film since taking a bit part in his first big screen outing, I. Robert Levy’s anthology comedy Can I Do It… ‘Til I Need Glasses? in 1977 (he’d spent the intervening years becoming a household name in the television sitcom Mork & Mindy (1978-1982)), was an inspired choice for the title role though the character’s mumbling malapropisms, vaguely amusing in three-minute bursts, grow very tiring stretched over 114 minutes. And therein lies one of the key flaws with Popeye – it’s far too long for such a slight story. It’s essentially the same old Popeye vs Bluto struggle for the attentions of Olive but stretched out to interminable length.

Another positive is the extraordinary set designs by Wolf Kroeger. His version of the coastal town of Sweethaven was built full scale at Prajjet Bay/Anchor Bay, near Mellieħa in Malta. It was built on such a scale that parts of it were never seen on screen, and it housed a recording studio and enough accommodation to house the cast and crew for the duration of filming. The set still exists today as a tourist attraction renamed, what else, Popeye Village.

But everything else about the film is a disappointment. The songs were written by Harry Nilsson, who had previously written and/or performed songs for Skidoo (1968), The Point (1971) and Son of Dracula (1974), as well as scoring a hit with his cover of Fred Neil’s Everybody’s Talkin’ prominently featured in Midnight Cowboy (1969). His ditties here are a miserable and eminently forgettable collection of flat and uninspired pieces, performed with little enthusiasm by the cast and leading to plodding musical numbers.

Strangely, Jules Feiffer (who also disliked the songs) opted to play down the importance oof spinach to the title character, though his screenplay was rewritten several times during production so this idea may have come from someone else. Sure enough, spinach was also absent in the earliest of Popeye’s appearances in E.C. Segar’s original comic strip but was so synonymous with the character by 1980 that having him hate the vegetable for much of the film – which plays like that scourge of the comic strip/book adaptations, an origin story – seems a little odd to say the very least.

Altman’s trademark semi-improvised dialogue results in an awful lot of noise and often incomprehensible dialogue – ironically the director frequently clashed with Williams whose own affinity for the ad lib caused problems of its own. Altman does what he can with the film and there are a few standout sequences but it’s clear from very early on that he’s not as engaged with the project as he had been on his more personal films. His elliptical style of storytelling and often experimental directorial techniques were a poor match for a big budget studio, family-friendly film like Popeye and it’s certainly a far cry from his most interesting work.

It’s beautifully shot by Giuseppe Rotunno and initially there’s some fun to be had from the sheer busyness of the backgrounds in Sweethaven but they soon get a bit much. The plot meanders and never finds a point to get to, the action scenes are dreary (the climactic (very slow) boat chase accompanied by Walston’s incessant ranting is just torture – not even a late appearance from a giant (growling) octopus can save the day) and the humour all too often favours slapstick over wit – not even Altman can make a pratfall seem funny.

As noted, the film was a box office success though over the years, Chinese whispers, half-truths and gossip have magically transformed it into a flop. A $55 million worldwide box office take (per Box Office Mojo) against a $20 million budget (and that was far greater than either production company had allowed for – they finally pulled the plug on Altman and told him to make the best of what he’d filmed, recalling him to Hollywood when he ran three weeks over schedule) is no-one’s idea of a flop. And yet, perhaps fuelled by it earning a place in James Robert Parish’s book Fiasco: A History of Hollywood’s Iconic Flops, it has a reputation for being a financial disaster – it’s opening weekend was certainly slow but it went to more than make back its budget around the world and it retains a hardcore cadre of fans even now.

In March 2010, Sony Pictures Animation announced that there in the early stages of a computer-generated feature film version of Popeye but a decade on, after many announcements and rejiggling of schedules, there’s still no sign of it though it’s been noted that director Genndy Tartakovsky was attached to a Popeye film for King Features Syndicate – he’d also been attached to the Sony version – in the summer of 2020.