The All-New Popeye Show

THE ALL-NEW POPEYE SHOW
Made by: Hanna-Barbara
Shown on: BBC
Years shown: mid-late 1980s

By the time I watched this, and then saw the repeats approximately a week later, the title of this programme was a lawsuit waiting to happen. Here we had all the usual Popeye/Olive Oyl/Bluto shenanigans, plus a couple of spin-offs, including the pseudo-Bilko/Private Benjamin adventures of Olive Oyl’s stint in the army, Private Olive Oyl. Memorably, there was a squat, screaming, female drill-sergeant, always trying to impress the kindly old major who dropped by every so often; and also Alice, possibly the weirdest, most inexplicable thing to ever be spawned by kids’ TV. What was Alice? She was seven-and-a-half feet tall, spoke her own private garbled language, and appeared to have hairy coconuts attached to her wrists and angles. Was she a military experiment gone awry? A Roswell crash survivor? The missing link? Anyway, ‘she’ and Oyl always triumphed, mostly inadvertently, over their sergeant, and won the approval of the major. If you thought this was bad, it was nothing compared to the later Popeye and Son (Hanna-Barbara, 1987), which featured Popeye’s blond, all-American teenage son, who possessed the same spinach-induced powers as his old dad (but not his ugly mug, of course). Bluto’s fat, bullyboy offspring also appeared as the antagonist, as well as the usual round of cutesy girls and a best friend with a big quiff. This was the kind of show you’d swear you wouldn’t watch the next time it was on, as it was only mildly better than maths homework.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 3/10