Whilst Sitting In Sisterz Last Night With Tom

I mentioned that the character Popeye's girlfriend Olive Oyl, had a brother, so here are some little known facts about Popeye and family! On March 26, 1937, a statue was erected in Crystal City, Texas, to honour Popeye for all he had done for the local spinach industry. 1. Popeye was the first cartoon character to have a statue made of him. 2. The statue now on display in Crystal City is not the original but a copy. The original is in safekeeping elsewhere. 3. Another bronze statue of Popeye stands in Chester, Illinois, the hometown of Popeye’s creator Elzie Segar. Vandals have pulled it down at least once. 4. Popeye himself first appeared in the daily comic strip Thimble Theatre on January 17, 1929. 5. In Spain, the name of Popeye’s girlfriend Olive Oyl is seen as an insult to the olive tree and she has been renamed Rosario. 6. Originally, the comic-strip Popeye gained his strength in 1929 by rubbing the head of the rare Whiffle Hen, spinach only came into the story in 1932. 7. Olive Oyl had an elder brother called Castor Oyl, their parents Nana and Cole, Castor's sometimes wife Cylinda Oyl, and Olive's beau Ham Gravy flourished in the 1920's 8. Sammy Lerner who wrote the Popeye-the-sailor-man theme song, aSammy Lernerlso wrote the lyrics to Falling In Love Again, as sung by Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. 9. There is a tourist attraction called Popeye Village in Malta, where the film Popeye was filmed in 1980. 10. In 2004, the Empire State Building was lit up in spinach green to honour Popeye’s 75th birthday. so now you know! and as an aside Tom informed me that only recently it has been discovered that spinach does not have any iron in it as at first thought.