I Yam What I Yam What I Yam: Altman and the Transpositional Poetics of Popeye

Participating in a cycle of nostalgic Hollywood renovations of iconic pop culture characters, Robert Altman’s Popeye (1980) brought the Hollywood Renaissance auteur into the era of the New Hollywood blockbuster. Not since his breakthrough, M*A*S*H (1970), had Altman joined a project so late in its development, with producer Robert Evans, screenwriter Jules Feiffer, composer Harry Nilsson, and star Robin Williams already attached. Together, they aspired to craft a blockbuster musical out of the characters created by E.C. Segar. Popeye, then, provides a novel opportunity to examine the interaction of Altman’s hallmark on-set transpositional strategies – his collaborative departures from and elaborations upon the pre-production script – with the iterative processes of transmedial franchising and the negotiation and integration of multiple authoring perspectives. Taking as its jumping-off point Altman’s claim that the filmmakers’ approach was primarily influenced by Segar’s comic strip, this chapter considers how the design and medium-specific features of Segar’s strip provided a justification and opportunity for Altman to intermingle his own distinct elaborative practices with the emergent formal strategies of the Hollywood blockbuster.