Popeye the Slayer Man is not your father’s Popeye. Gone are the days of Popeye transforming into Superman after downing a sodium-rich sealed metal can of spinach, and rescuing the whole town from local troublemaker and human trafficker Bluto. You don’t want to invite “The Sailor Man” aboard your houseboat unless you want it to turn into Jason Takes Manhattan.
Why has Popeye taken the turn from American hero Hulk Hogan to American nightmare Michael Myers? Copyright. That’s right – copyright. Over the past few years, several children’s cartoon characters from the early 1900s have slipped out of copyright, down the chute of ownership death, and directly into the bloodbath known as Public Domain. And guess who’s waiting at the other end of that bath? Bathory herself – ie, Indie filmmakers with a thirst for bloo… I mean, IP. When these popular characters become public domain, it means that anybody and everybody can use the characters without having to worry about copyright. Copyrights from the early days of film don’t last nearly as long as they do now.
Being a filmmaker myself, one thing I don’t want is the corpse of Popeye showing up at my door like zombie Jake at the end of John Carpenter’s The Fog, demanding his IP back. This is why I leave the public domain IP stuff to these other brave souls who have no fear of supernatural copyright retribution.
“…characters want to make a documentary on the legend of The Sailor Man...”
Robert Michael Ryan’s Popeye the Slayer Man attempts a (mostly) serious approach to an alternate backstory to the character of Popeye the Sailor Man. In Ryan’s world, The Sailor Man (Jason Robert Stephens) is a local boogieman legend of an inhuman monster who lives in an old abandoned spinach factory (get it?). Our characters want to make a documentary on the legend of The Sailor Man by spending the night in the off-limits factory that he supposedly haunts. In your mind, this may trigger the trope of the found-footage documentary film crew going into an old asylum. Lucky for both of us, though, this isn’t a found-footage film, so it is a bit different from the expected.
We get many cameos of other Popeye characters. Some are jokes, some are more serious parts of the new lore. In fact, you may recognize the similarity between our main character, Olivia (Elena Juliano), and a character from the original Popeye.
What I like about this particular children’s cartoon character, Public Domain horror/comedy is that our writers (Cuyle Carvin, John Doolan, Jeff Miller, Robert Michael Ryan, E.C. Segar) didn’t take the lazy approach of simply writing a slasher film and putting a Popeye mask on the killer… like some others in the same genre. They actually developed a new lore behind the character himself. With Popeye the Slayer Man, you get an actual Popeye story, not just Friday the 13th with a new mask. This alone allows “Popeye…” to stand above the vast majority of other Public Domain cartoon character horror films.
"…not just Friday the 13th with a new mask."
