1970s Era Popeye the Sailor Is Here to Give You Career Advice
Unlike actors and Ashton Kutcher, cartoon characters cannot decide what products or ideologies they support in their free time. Snoopy can’t say if he sells MetLife. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are definitely getting high – they eat pizza with sword collectors named after artists – but they still have to warn children against drugs. And Popeye, a cursed and cocky sailor, had to learn a whole new vocabulary in the 1970s in order to educate children about their career opportunities in a series of educational comics .
Cultural writer Alan Sherstool explores one of these comics, Popeye and Consumer and Homemaking Careers , on his comic history blog Gone & Forgotten. According to Sherstul, even with Popeye’s boosterism, the comic makes the employment situation grim. It doesn’t help that Popeye speaks as an educational film commissioned by the government and not Popeye. “Decorators and interior designers are creative people,” he tells Olive Oyl, rowing a boat in Central Park. “Their work is connected not only with people, but also with ideas.” These long speeches sound odd, emanating from the abstract half-pipe of Popeye’s mouth.
Scherstuhl have carried the Popeye educational torch for years; he wrote about the 2010 comic strip for LA Weekly, inserting a naughty cut where a worriedly worded Popeye narrates: “Maids don’t have to be high school graduates. Most girls learn the skills they need for this job when they grow up in their own home. ”
Sherstukhul compares them to the original comic, where Popeye punches his friends in the jaw and recites lines such as “I’ll wear it until I wheeze, then poke it in the eye with my spirit.” and has not died yet. “
Because of this dissonance, Popeye’s presence only heightens the absurdity of the comic’s claims, undermining their portrayal of the world of Richard Scarry, where every housekeeper can move up the corporate ladder, where service workers are polite and grateful and treat them well in turns, where anyone can do it in America. unlike those poor Soviet bastards. This is as realistic as the world in which Popeye is a qualified career counselor.