r/popeye

Yeah, it's usually a fool's errant to ask about the strength of a CARTOON CHARACTER, but here's the thing. Everyone talks about how powerful POPEYE is, what with him surviving the universe's Jeep-esque overarching god turning the universe off and Popeye himself breaking the universe himself while fighting against Native Americans... But Bluto?

Typically in the old Paramount cartoons, any competition between Bluto and Popeye is a competition between someone who's normally strong and someone who's cartoonishly strong respectively. Of course Bluto had always been able to exploit the fact that, without Popeye's spinach, Popeye is basically a glass cannon, but otherwise, he's usually about what you'd expect from someone with superhuman strength. I believe there was even a cartoon where Bluto masqueraded as Superman, where they were basically straight-up like "yeah, Bluto wouldn't have been as strong as Superman anyway..." Of course at the time, the only frames of reference they had were the 1940s Superman theatrical cartoons and the Golden Age comics, so uh, I dunno.

Maybe it'd be more fair to compare Bluto to Superfriends Superman, who's pretty much the most entry-level version of Superman you can get... I dunno. How strong is Bluto anyway?

There's an episode of Illinois Backroads set in Chester which is dedicated to Popeye.