Hacker Cinema
Popeye
1980 · Film · 114 min
Directed by Robert Altman
Popeye is a super-strong, spinach-scarfing sailor man who's searching for his father. During a storm that wrecks his ship, Popeye washes ashore and winds up rooming at the Oyl household, where he meets Olive. Before he can win her heart, he must first contend with Olive's fiancé, Bluto.
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11 comments on Hacker News
When Popeye entered the public domain, a slasher horror movie was made on the IP.
Sure - Parents should pay attention and the trailers would make it obvious.
However - under your regime, there is no loss to such movies. They get some extra views from an audience segment they weren’t targeting at all.
Replicate this case ad infinitum - people should check and review a multitude of things. Medicines, cosmetics, food, contracts, games etc.
Firms use this as a way to offset risk onto the purchaser.
I hope we can both agree - that the burden of review of regular folk is now impossible.
I don't watch many movies, but I 100000000000% agree that this is happening on streaming music platforms.
It's straight up impossible to get a non-remastered version of many titles on any platform, and having albums that you stream but don't own yanked out from under you at any time is common. Triply so if you're into niche stuff.
Shit, even the mono recording of Beach Boy's _Pet Sounds_ is the 2001 remastered one!
This is problematic when producers or studios decide to conveniently remove or replace tracks in re-releases, though I fortunately haven't run into this too often.
Those albums were made with the equipment that was available at the time. In most situations, listening to remasters of those is like watching old movies with motion interpolation (or whatever it's called) on. It's _technically_ the same movie (or album), but it's also not.
Try watching Popeye or any classic animation movie on a modern TV with its default settings. It's unwatchable (at least for me).
The other frustrating element about this is that TVs were not designed with backwards-compatibility in mind. While I get that there are differences between CRT and LCD technology, you shouldn't have to buy a ton of hardware to use S-Video or RCA inputs these days. It's understandable for this to get cut in a market where cost matters more than anything else, but it still sucks shit that I can't "just" buy an old VCR and plug it in.
Fortunately, audio hasn't changed very much in the last 50 years and audio equipment _was_ designed with backwards compatibility in mind. I can plug in some old big box speakers from the 70s into my Sonos Amp because it takes copper input, for example. Because of this, it's easy to get a record/cassette/CD player and get vinyls/tapes/CDs of important albums.
Regardless, it's a shame that streaming became what it is today (ultra convenient, but easy to manipulate and alter), and complaining about details like this feels like screaming into the void and it sucks. (Audio quality is at the bottom of the list of things that people listening to 10s samples on TikTok through their iPhone/Galaxy/Pixel front speaker give a shit about)
Both of the mentioned movies probably wouldn't have had any problem releasing while the copyright to the characters remained in-tact under fair use. If someone is trying to make a movie with existing well-known characters, people aren't too interested in non-transformative work, and distributors probably wouldn't distribute something due to the general lack of audience interest.
The main benefit that public domain brings to a work is that you can make small edits or changes to a work without violating its copyright. Imagine if you wanted to go through all the episodes of Spongebob, change the colors to make it clearer to watch for colorblind viewers[a], and then sell those edits as a box set or otherwise sell access to them via some accessibility-focused streaming service. Under copyright this would probably not be seen as transformative, and something non-transformative then has an incredibly high bar to clear for fair use to apply to it.
I also think that making new episodes that aren't super transformative would probably not have met the burden for Fair use: for example, making a new episode of Popeye that otherwise follows the same script beats as existing episodes would probably be seen as copyright infringement by the courts. However, once you get into the territory of making a sequel/prequel movie where you really flesh out his character, it starts getting into the realm of qualifying for transformative under fair use (depending on how the judge sees it).
But the mentioned movies really seem like they're so different from the source material. For Pooh Blood and Honey, it doesn't affecting the market for the original, given the works are so different in what they do (and there is likely 0.1% or less overlap between the audience of the slasher genre and the children's programming genre cohort), it did not use almost any of the original copyrighted works to tell its story, just its characters, and the content is transformative enough to where it's not like it's just another episode of Winnie The Pooh.
This popeye film seems to use the same approach as Blood and Honey: it's just Popeye killing people with stuff like "look, it's the Spinach from the original episodes!".
a: not sure if this would actually be beneficial, but it's the best example I can think of for a barely-transformative work other than putting sunglasses on the characters' faces or putting Subway Surfers next to it.
Popeye was the first thing I saw her in, and after that, I could never unsee her as Olive Oyl. Personally, I think that movie is absolutely wonderful (especially the “Everything Is Food” number, but all the songs are great).
For whatever reason, the Fairy Tale Theatre episodes are hard to come by. They’re not on any streaming service although there have been DVD releases. The first episode featured Robin Williams as the frog prince with Eric Idle directing.
It was only in the last couple years that I learned that not only is she not Robert Duvall’s daughter,¹ they aren’t related.
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1. Actually, it turns out she is Robert Duvall’s daughter, just not that Robert Duvall.
I really liked the Popeye movie; I rewatched it recently and still like it. It gets a lot of things wrong, but it gets other things really right. Among them Shelley Duvall.
> Olive Oyl from the Popeye movie
I recently (randomly!) listened to the "What Went Wrong" podcast episode about Popeye. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/popeye-1980/id1512847066?i=1000498061719
It was _hilarious_ . But the one thing that went perfectly was the casting of Shelley Duvall. The podcasters said "If you gave god a bunch of popeye cartoons and told him to make a real human version of Olive Oyl, you'd get Shelley Duvall." And Shelley herself said that she grew up being called Olive Oyl, and hated it because of all that it implied- but now that it got her cast in a big budget movie, she said the comparison doesn't hurt anymore!
I remember her primarily as Olive Oyl from the Popeye movie and the series Faerie Tale Theatre. She was amazing as an actress with a very unique look. Seeing her as a metal and physical wreck in more recent years was heartbreaking. I will miss her, but am glad she is no longer suffering.
Thanks for sharing this. This month there was a interesting Retronauts podcast episode [0] about Popeye in which not only this version, but also Don Priestley spectrum version was discussed
[0] https://retronauts.com/article/2013/retronauts-episode-513-popeye
I'll gladly pay for some trees that will remove my carbon over the next 25 years if you you let me fly today.
In 1932, this then became the famous "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today". Rough House explains why Wimpy is able to get away with this tactic in one strip, stating that "He never comes around on Tuesday". Rough House once suffered a mental breakdown from Wimpy's shenanigans, and demanded that Wimpy be kept out of his hospital room. Wimpy disobeyed this command, resulting in a rare altercation with Popeye. The phrase was also slightly altered in the episode "Spree Lunch" to "I'll have a hamburger, for which I will gladly pay you Tuesday." This phrase is now commonly used to illustrate financial irresponsibility and still appears in modern comedies such as The Drew Carey Show and The Office. The initial part of the phrase was even the title of Episode 6 of the fourth season of Cheers "I'll Gladly Pay You Tuesday."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Wellington_Wimpy
Looks to be a different source from the OP, but let's go down the chart for 1980 past the top ten:
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/1980/
Kramer vs. Kramer (book)
Ordinary People (book)
Popeye (comic)
The Shining (book)
Cheech and Chong's Next Movie (sequel)
Caddyshack (original - franchise starter)
Friday the 13th (original - franchise starter)
Brubaker (book)
The Jazz Singer (remake)
Flash Gordon (sequel/remake)
Bronco Billy (original)
Raging Bull (book - biopic)
Maybe you should go back a few decades until you can find a time when the top 20 were mostly originals. Would have to be before the Star Wars/Jaws blockbuster era, probably.
I presume as you suggest the Canadian company couldn't release in the US without a license.
Not sure about a US company releasing abroad. The US copyright holder could probably argue they violated their copyright during production if the film was produced in the US. Then again if the filming was done in London but paid for by the US company they would be alright I guess? Popeye may be an interesting case as he's still copyright in the US but not most other places.