“I’ve got some really strong ideas for Popeye and I’m really excited about it as well as my original (project with Sony Animation),” he said.
When asked about whether a well known actor would play the role, Tartakovsky said he wasn’t sure: “There’s a lot of great voice actors who could do Popeye and nail it so we’ll have to see… and also, Olive Oyl is one of my favorite characters in animation. It’s definitely going to be tricky. I’m kind of scared of it, like with ‘Star Wars,’ we’re definitely scared of translating something people love so much into a new medium. If you take a tattooed, pipe-smoking sailor into 2012 and how is that contemporary? At the same time, you don’t want to change everything that’s worked about him.”
Created by E.C. Segar, Popeye first appeared in the already established “Thimble Theater” comic strip in 1929. Introduced as a walk-on character, Popeye eventually became the strip’s star. In 1933, The Fleischers began to produce animated Popeye cartoons which through the 1940s. The sailor man also came to the big screen in 1980 with Robert Altman directing and Robin Williams in the lead.
