Frank Figl – Popeye the Sailor Prototype, 1920s.
Popeye first appeared in comics in 1929. The character was originally a minor character, but readers loved her so much that author Elsie Chrysler Segar created her own story for her.
Segar’s friend Frank Feagle, a fireman on the battleship Rodney, becomes the prototype for Popeye. Popeye’s nickname was not chosen by chance either. It is a derivative of the word “pop-eyed”, which means “pop-eyed”.
In 1933, the first cartoon appeared about Popeye, whose miraculous powers come from eating a can of spinach. Spinach was chosen as a tonic because of the flawed research of Dr. Ivan Wolff. According to the scientist, there is a lot of iron in spinach. But later it turned out that the scientist was wrong in the calculation. Instead of 3.5 mg of iron in 100 g of spinach, everyone was talking about 35 mg.
Despite this, spinach consumption in the US increased by 33% thanks to the Popeye cartoon.
