This is one of the final frames from the astounding Arabic opening to the rarely remembered 1978 pop pop pop pop Pop-eye cartoon. Unfortunately, I can no longer find the video online, and at the time when I could I had not yet gotten into the habit of saving such things for later viewing. What’s important right just now is this picture and the important question it raises. Do we really need six Popeyes? It is not as if there are six Blutos! Certainly never at the same time, the Brutus factor notwithstanding (I think I used that word right). And yet somehow that is the amount of popeyes present.
Though a wise man once said “Once you pop, you can’t stop,” therefore explaining how, we have yet to determine why there must be so many Popeyes. Two-thirds of the characters on this program are Popeye! That is not good. There’s regular Popeye, old Popeye, an astounding four miniature Popeyes, who will, unless we act, one day be fully grown Popeyes, and… while Sweepy (akadaka “Swee’ Pea”) is not biologically related to Popeye, he has spent nearly his entire life under the influence of regular Popeye, and has been known to emulate that Popeye’s habits and behaviors. So really, there are six and a half Popeyes. This is more than my mind can comprehend.
Additionally, I will assume, by the distance, that the three popeyes on the left are nephews and that the one small popeye in the middle is a direct descendant, delivered by stork (or more likely pelican) to normal Popeye. However, any Popeye scholar knows, just to show he’s better than Donald Duck, that regular Popeye has four nephews, one of which is merely estranged. Somewhere in the world is a seventh Popeye, bitter and resentful, looking for revenge. I’m scared.
A homewrecker sez:
My sister enjoys Die Prinzen, for some reason. Personally, I find them a little bit too goofy for my tastes (and I enjoy They Might Be Giants). Plus their music has a certain washed-out, bleach-stained-sheet-hanging-on-a-clothesline-in-the-too-bright-sun feel, much like The Beach Boys, even though the two don’t sound anything alike.
I tried to persuade her to listen to Wir Sind Helden instead, as they sound better and have clever wordplay, aber es war mir nicht gelungen.
Rinslid sez:
I was looking for the song “Pop Musik,” with a space, by something called “M,” and found Popmusik first, which I could not help regarding as simply hilarious the first few times I heard it. It was on one of those youtube “videos” where there actually is no video and there was just some dorkish picture of five guys wearing blue suits with sneaker-shoes sitting on a white lump in a white room and I assumed they were the German N*Sync and totally serious. I caught up with two other songs by them which I didn’t like much, due to their lack of stupid filters and voices saying “pop” for no reason (I also discovered the fopes don’t dance at all). And that video which I did link to, it’s horrible. Even a blond fish-eyed Burt Reynolds trying to seduce a random customer at his store by saying “tiddly pop pop” couldn’t save it.
Have you and/or your sister spent time in a place where it’s considered normal to hear songs with non-english lyrics?