The following is my entry in The 1st and 10 Blogathon, being co-hosted by Jonathan and Quiggy at, respectively, the blogs Dubism and The Midnite Drive-In. Click on the above banner, and read bloggers’ tributes to some of their favorite TV episodes and movies about football!
Popeye and Olive Oyl attend a football game where Bluto is the game’s star attraction. Bluto instantly wins Olive over (surprise!), to the point that she becomes an instant cheerleader and does an enthusiastic rendition of the title song. (Even if you don’t know the song by name, you’ll recognize it during the opening credits. It was written in 1933 and is one of the most performed football anthems ever.)
Popeye is so chagrined, he goes right out and signs up to play on the rival team (no time to bother performing for scouts!) — but Wimpy’s the coach and is busy nursing some hamburgers, so Popeye has his work cut out for him. (Great running gag: Wimpy keeps running out to an injured Popeye with a bucket of water, but Wimpy’s so distraught at the sight, he drinks the water himself.)
Mostly it’s football spot-gags, rather along the lines of the climactic football game in the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers (1932). As soon as Popeye manages a post-spinach rally, Olive does her quickest Bluto-to-Popeye transformation ever: “Er, I’m changing my mind…Go, Popeye!” Sheesh, college women!
So, would you like to know how technologically inept I am?
One weekend in Feb. 2019, my computer had an Internet connection, but I couldn’t get anything to come up on my computer screen. As is the way of all non-savvy computer nerds, I quickly deduced that the best way to get everything going again on my screen was to purge everything I could think of. By mistake, that included the user ID and password of my WordPress account.
When I tried to get back into my WordPress account, WordPress asked me for my user ID and password. I had forgotten my password long ago (I only use a few thousand of them), and the user ID was an email account that I had deleted long ago after it got hacked. WordPress informed me that, unless I could send them an email message from my user ID’s account, they would not be able to send me a new password, and therefore, I would be locked out of my own account.
And so it went. My access to four-and-a-half years of blogging and several hundred blog subscribers were suddenly locked behind bars. (I imagined hearing a loud “cha-ching!” from the TV series “Law & Order.”)
So I’ve decided to try and make lemonade out of my WordPress lemons. I am resuming my blogging career on this “sequel” blog.
Of course, I still have a “history” of previous blogging that I’d like to reference on occasion. So be forewarned that now, I will often hyperlink to my previous blog. For example, if I’m writing about Charlie Chaplin, and I want to reference a Chaplin movie review from my old blog, I will link to it like this. So please note that, obviously, if you go to that hyperlink, you will have to press the “Back” button on your computer keyboard in order to return to this “sequel” blog.
If, by chance, you know anyone who followed my previous blog but is not aware of my current situation, please let them know so that I can restore some of my old readership. And of course, please feel free to return to and reference my previous blog, whose URL is listed on the masthead of this blog.
Thank you for bearing with me through a quite troublesome situation.
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2 thoughts on “Popeye in YOU GOTTA BE A FOOTBALL HERO (1935) – Spinach-boom-ba!”
I didn’t know this existed, but thanks for contributing it to this blog-a-thon. Every time I hear that song, I only think of the prisoners in drag in 1974’s The Longest Yard.
I’ve always been impressed with Popeye’s ability to produce a can of spinach out of thin air and simply squeeze it open. I was also impressed by his ability to play football without ever once dropping his pipe.
I hadn’t seen this one before, so I was glad you posted it. 🙂
MovieMovieBlogBlog II 
I didn’t know this existed, but thanks for contributing it to this blog-a-thon. Every time I hear that song, I only think of the prisoners in drag in 1974’s The Longest Yard.
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I’ve always been impressed with Popeye’s ability to produce a can of spinach out of thin air and simply squeeze it open. I was also impressed by his ability to play football without ever once dropping his pipe.
I hadn’t seen this one before, so I was glad you posted it. 🙂
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