This paper makes reference to a
developed version of the notion of networks
of remediation outlined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in the book Remediation. As an example of networks
of remediation I chose the case of comic strip character Popeye the Sailor Man
because it represents a case where the process of remediation and translation
across old and new media is being applied through many decades as repurposing,
borrowing and adaptation of originally paper-based content. The case of Popeye
is complex and it is not a linear replacement of a previous medium format with
a new medium but the meaning is made with reference to chains of remediation.
In particular the comparison will be between the content of comic strip Thimble
Theatre and the live action film musical Popeye, with some references to the
various groups of televised animated series. Fictional character Popeye was created and drawn by E.
C. Segar for his comic strip series Thimble
Theatre in 1929. E. C. Segar loved puns as attested through his homophonic
signature Ci-gar accompanied by an
image of a smoking cigar. Part of the content of comic strip Thimble Theatre together with its
successful character Popeye immediately spread and further developed into other
media formats. The most famous remediation of comic strip The Thimble Theatre is the televised
animated cartoon series Popeye the Sailor Man featuring simplified and
repetitive stories with fewer characters in episodes lasting 8 minutes.
The visual part of the animated cartoons is also
revealing of changes throughout time in what is to be considered a social
practice no longer acceptable by the media in the English speaking
countries. The animated cartoon Poopdeck Pappy aired in 1951 presents some
racist stereotypes, which were absent in the original comic strip story and
will completely disappear in the updated version of the 1937 comic strip story
adapted to a musical action film in 1980. The
1952 animated version of Poopdeck Pappy could be judged as racist because the original goon
protecting Poopdeck Pappy is replaced by funny dark
skinned natives who worship King Pappy. They are represented in a
satiric and distorted way: they are cannibals
trying to cook Popeye, they are called savages, and they express
themselves with non-linguistic sounds like oogla boogla ooga booga. All young women are
wearing grass skirts and they dance for Poopdeck Pappy treating him like a
superior being. At the end Poopdeck Pappy frees kidnapped Popeye, stacks the
black men on spears and hangs a sign on them that says cheaper by the dozen which likens the black men of the story to
steaks for sale. A less known remediated product is the 15 minutes radio programme Popeye introduced by a repetitive song refrain I’m Popeye the Sailor Man (twice), I yam what I yam ‘cause I yam what I yam. Both the expression I yam what I yam and the complete name Popeye the Sailor Man that compose most
part of the introductory refrain had already appeared as titles of two
theatrical animated shorts. The radio program the Gang at the Zoo (1930) is a dialogue characterized by the
presence of several synonyms of amazed:
I am surprised, I am flabbergasted, and the expression blow me down so distinctive of the
character to become the title for another theatrical animated cartoon short
(1933). In this radio program Popeye eats four bowls of cereal to enhance his
muscle strength, instead of reaching out for the usual can of spinach. The
language is unmistakably Popeye’s idiolect previously portrayed through the
written mode of the language inside comic strips speech bubbles. In the audio
format it is not the spelling but rather his pronunciation that reveals that it
is Popeye. An example is a devoiced velar \k\ allophone, either added to some
words as in mouskey or musckles or used as substitute of dental /t/
in final position as in \ˈeləfnk\for elephant
and \ˈpēnəks\
for peanuts and some
mispronunciations as \pˈkülər\ for peculiar that are not found in the
original comic strips. He uses reduced forms typical of standard spontaneous
spoken dialogue, as attested by the omission of the voiced fricative \th\ in \əm\
in uttering the locution feed them. This pattern is then erroneously
applied to the locution with others
resulting in \ˈwitˈətərs\. He then uses the non-standard auxiliary form ain’t for both is not and haven’t,
colloquialism as me think, and
ungrammatical inflectional morphology as in: has yous, I says, and they is.
A videogame spin off followed the film version and it
was released by Sony for Nintendo in 1982. As every videogame the background
story is borrowed from the film version and the new medium environment offers
the user the possibility to perform as Popeye in the double task to capturing
Olive’s hearts or musical notes and at the same time avoid his antagonist
Brutus. A can of spinach enhances the avatar strength but grabbing it is made
difficult by the wicked Sea.
Popeye across
media
Popeye is characterized by his physical and verbal
distinctive features and his honest behaviour despite his love for fighting.
The visual mode allows the viewer to recognize him through his bulgy forearms
with a tattoo, a very big chin and a lazy eye. His outfit is the suit of a
sailor and the last distinctive trait is his corncob pipe that he does not
smoke but keep it in his mouth anyway.
The verbal mode
has many variants at the phonological, morphological, syntactical levels and
many contradictions at the semantic level. His idiolect is a mumbled,
mispronounced, colloquial language with some catch phrases such as: blow me down. The most salient features
that represent social actors in the 1980 live action musical film version are
their distinctive physical appearance as well as their verbal and kinetic
behaviour. In the case of Popeye it is his bulgy forearms, his squinty eye, his
corncob pipe, his sailor suit, and the scripted mispronounced colloquial
English full of grammatical errors. Popeye’s spoken mode of the language
follows a pattern of elisions as well as substitutions of phonemes and
additions of extra grammatical sounds. Popeye’s
creative language follows a pattern of substitution, addition and elision at
the morphological and phonological level. He then uses colloquialisms and makes
some grammar mistakes.
Spoken language
across media
Modified words
are created through morphological substitutions or modifications or by adding
extra sounds and by dropping others. There are morphological modifications of
affixes. Colloquialisms are used in
abundance as for example the
random elision of auxiliaries and the use of non-standard contraction ain’t for the whole declension of
the verb to be: am, is, are, not; the pronoun me is given an
extensive syntactic and semantic coverage
that includes the adjective my so that he may say me Olyve. Grammatical errors are morphological as for the
use of wrong verbal paradigm, for example:
I catched for I
caught, or the use of a colloquial incorrect morphological suffix as in I knows for I know. In a complete
sentence of a 1929 comic strip, Popeye adds morphological errors to syntactic
errors, to mispronunciations so that the grammatical sequence if I'd known this, I'd have stayed ashore.
I’m only human becomes If I’da
knowed this, I’da stayed ashore. I’m only hooman.
This last pattern of substitution is later found in the radio broadcasted
spoken conversational turn that says: Well, blow me down, has yous ever seen the likes of
such a pecooler \p’kuler\ animal.
In a small
extract from the film Popeye, a dialogue between Popeye and his dad Poppa, some
patterns that are repeated throughout the film emerge.
The dialogue is:
Popeye: Poppa!
Pap! Ik's me, yer orphink son!
Poppa: I hates snktiment
! I yam disgustipated! Gnats to you! Phooey!
In the above quoted conversational exchange between
Popeye and his father the word orphink
is a morphological blend of orphan
and infant pronounced \infink\ because of the substitution of
dental \t\ with velar stop \k\.
The word disguastipated
is again a blend this time between disgusted
and constipated.
In the same
film, always Popeye’s idiolect attest the following linguistic phenomena:
addition/insertion, substitution, elision.
The elision or omission of auxiliaries in the
ungrammatical question - You know what I done? Where
the grammatical version is: - Do you
know what I have done? The constant
use of wrong declensions is exemplified in the sentence - When he catched me and
thrung me which contains a substitution of caught with catched and
of throng with the throng. The technique of substituting sounds or
phonemes and suffixes is particularly productive as it is revealed in the
following word variants: inf[i]n[k] for infant; depressi[gan] for depressed; intelligen[sk] for intelligent; phy-sci-kisk instead of
physicist. The technique of
inserting extra sound or extra phonemes is sometimes used by the same character
as it appears in the invented word humili[gr]ation. The scrambled
word annualversity is the result of modified morphology
of the original noun anniversary.
The comic strip has sometimes even more complex variants at the spelling
level that go beyond the possibility of phonemic variants. The modified words octIpus and octipussuses are so hard to
pronounce that a character in the story comments: -Would it be easier to say octopuses? Popeye’s answers is: I
always gets too many syillilables in that word. The word
offspring is spelled with many variants:
oxprinf, exsprinf and orfspring but the original offspring is never there. In the
comic strip the wrong declension is also used as for example in I gived for gave or for given in
Popeye’s sentence: Ya gived me yer ship, I ain’t used to havin’gived things to me
for the grammatical sentence: You gave me
your ship, I am not used to be given things.
Some variations
are probably attesting a defect in the way Popeye talks. Examples are the
substitution of s with x that transforms the verbal form asking in the variant axking where there is a switch of
the sound sequence \sk\ with the sequence \ks\. Other common substitutions
Popeye’s idiolect are: the substitution of voiceless fricative \θ\ with plosive
bilabial \p(h)\ in sumpin’ \sʌmpn\ or for standard
\sʌmθɪŋ\ something and with alveolar
occlusive \t\ in munts /mənts/ for standard months /mʌnθs/. There are
also substitutions where variation appears only at the level of spelling as in sum
\sʌm\ which is homophone of the original some
\sʌm\. There are of course some elision typical of non-standard spontaneous
conversations such as the elision of final alveolar stop \t\ in the adjective just resulting in jus’ \dʒʌs\ and the
elision of nasal (ŋ) in \sʌmpn\ for
\sʌmθɪŋ\. The substitution of one words with another such as sedimental
for sentimental which is also a
distortion of the geological term sedimentary.
This phenomenon happens both in the film and in the comic strip and it has a
reference to some kind of uneducated spoken English that often confuse and
mispronounce or misspell Latin-derived words.
Most of the animated cartoon shorts series
follow the same creative rules by adding extra sounds and by substituting
suffixes. Examples are found even in the titles of the animated cartoon series:
STUperstition instead of superstition;
OUT to P-UNCH instead of out for lunch;
insect to injury instead of insult to injury; I don’t Scare instead of I
don’t care; immaginIMation
instead of imagination, Aminals instead
of Animals. A trait of Popeye’s idiolect that is a constant in the his verbal
representation across media is the phonemic substitution of the voiceless
dental alveolar stop or occlusive \t\ with a voiceless velar stop or occlusive \k\ at the end of a word. The following examples
illustrate the variation phenomenon: renk instead of rent in the utterance
room
for renk; ya knot insulk me poppa instead of do not insult my Papa (or Pappy or Pop).
Recurring
resources across media
Carmen Maier’s analysis of short videos for marketing
purposes that also promote a specific values and social practice is based on
the identification of recurring resources and of the process of legitimation
among other things.
In the case of
84 years old character remediated in many different media a recurrent resource
across all media is its counterfactual humor and nonsense. This resource for
meaning making is definitely affecting the semantic level of the language as
well as all other linguistic resources such as spelling, morphology, syntax,
and the phonological levels.
In the musical
film the counterfactual humour is consistent with the comic strip style.
Examples of consistent across media counterfactual humour and nonsense, are
present in the following conversational exchanges taken from the 1980 live
action musical film:
Popeye: I ain’t man enough to be no mudder (meaning
mother)
Popeye: If I was going to be SweePea’s mother, I
should’ve at least let Olive be his father. Or viska versa.
Popeye: We got the same squinty eye
Grandpa: what squinky eye?
Popeye: that’s going to be hard for you to SEE.
Popeye: We even got the same pipe, Pap.
Grandpa: You idiot, you can’t inherit a pipe.
Popeye’s
legitimation
Other recurring resources and borrowed content are: the can of spinach which is central
part of every story in the animated series. In the radio series the can of
spinach was substituted by the sponsor’s product: Wheatena breakfast cereal.
In the film the can of spinach
undergoes a verbal legitimation when Popeye’s father invites pushes
Popeye to eat his spinach to win the fight against Bluto. It undergoes a visual legitimation because a can of spinach
is part of Popeye’s father’s buried treasure. A kinetic legitimation is present
across media because Popeye acquires his super strength as direct effect of
eating spinach.
Bluto’s actions
delegitimize him: he is a kidnapper and he acts out of greed. Evidence of his
wrong doing comes from both kinetic and visual modalities. Olive Oyl verbally
delegitimizes Bluto when she claims she would not be engaged again with him,
not for the third time. Her role is that of evaluator of human behaviour and
she often telling men what they are as a result of what they do.
Popeye is
legitimized by acclamation on the part of the people of the village in the live
action film because he hits the tax-man, he defeats Bluto and he gets rid of
the giant Octopus who was trying to eat Olive. In the live action film the
finding of Popeye’s father and the presence of a Giant octopus are part of
borrowed content. Both storylines are very much simplified from their original
version of the three stories of the thimble theatre 1936: Popeye and the Jeep,
Popeye and the Mystery Melody, and Popeye's Search for His Poppa.
The story and
the characters are legitimized or de-legitimized through their actions and
their behaviour according to the social values of the time. A handful of Popeye
cartoons during the war years were racially offensive towards the Japanese. The
delegitimation is verbal as, for instance, in cartoons where Japanese are
referred to as jap-pansies and it is also visual because they were portrayed
with vicious, buck-toothed faces. Japanese soldiers are beaten up in a now
banned racist World War II Popeye cartoon called Seein’ Red, White‘n Blue. Parts of Popeye cartoons are now edited
out because of their rather offensive representation of African-Americans. On
the other hand some early Popeye cartoons are maybe surprisingly against violence
toward animals as it can be seen in 1935 Be
Kind to Animals and other similar cartoons of the same years.
Conclusion
A comic
strip character can live 85 years and still be in good shape when the meaning
making of its stories is constantly re-adjusted to the current social behaviour
and when the re-contextualization across media can be effective. Popeye was not
a good videogame maybe because the verbal language disappears in videogames and
I would say that maybe it is this mode that offered the funniest real element
in a surreal world. Today the character appears to appeal only nostalgic
readers and Popeye makes his cameo appearance in animated cartoons such as the
Simpson next to famous actors, singers and politicians like Hillary Clinton.
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