“Farting in a wind tunnel”: Understanding Robin Williams’ biggest movie regret
Comic book adaptations are all the rage these days and have been for two decades, but things weren’t quite the same more than 40 years ago when Robin Williams dipped his toes into waters that were still relatively uncharted for major studios and big-name stars.
Although Richard Donner’s Superman had been released just a couple of years previously and enjoyed monstrous success, the floodgates hadn’t been opened for bringing comic characters to the big screen. This was a time before just Tim Burton’s Batman and Marvel’s Howard the Duck, with the subgenre hardly having a solid foothold in cinema.
Williams was a known commodity at the time, with Robert Altman’s Popeye entering production during the peak of Mork & Mindy‘s popularity on the small screen, but he was far from being a bankable star. In fact, it marked just his second-ever feature film appearance after his debut in the anthology comedy Can I Do It… ‘Til I Need Glasses? with added pressure being placed upon his shoulders by taking top billing, playing the title character, and attempting to embody a globally-recognised figure.
The uniquely proportioned protagonist didn’t translate very well to live-action, but Williams did his best by maintaining a constant gurn to replicate Popeye’s signature facial expression, while prosthetic biceps gave the illusion of a flesh-and-blood person who regularly succumbed to the benefits of consuming enough spinach to kill an elephant.
Having been a fixture of animation since the early 1930s, everybody knew what Popeye sounded like, too. That proved to be a monumental challenge for Williams, especially when his early attempts at mimicking the sailor man’s distinctively garbled vocal range didn’t quite go to plan. In fact, he admitted that he “had to dub that movie over twice because people couldn’t understand what I was saying,” comparing his work on set as being akin to “a killer whale farting in a wind tunnel”.
As was to be expected from such an energetic performer, Williams had the necessary physicality and slapstick stylings of Popeye down pat, but the voice was a constant thorn in his side. There were also repeated clashes with Altman and studio executives to contend with, and shooting ended up being halted early when it became in danger of exceeding its agreed budget, which saw the powers that be instruct Altman to draw things to a close and cobble together an edit with whatever footage he had.
When Popeye was eventually released in December 1980, nobody was really sure what to make of it. Altman’s reputation had been built on completely different kind of films, with Williams’ improvisation and constant mugging tending to split opinion straight down the middle. Of course, going off-script would eventually become a key part of his persona, but things weren’t quite the same for the untested, untried, and unproven movie star.
The comedic adventure did at least manage to recoup its production costs three times over at the box office, so it was far from being a flop, while Malta continues to reap the rewards to this day, having turned the Sweethaven sets into a popular tourist attraction rechristened Popeye Village. However, the effect on Williams’ standing in the industry could be described as negligible at best.
He did have Mork and Mindy to fall back on, which was midway through its third of four seasons when Popeye landed on the big screen, but it would be a long time before he was the top-billed name in a major motion picture that truly hit big. The World According to Garp was two years removed from the spinach-munching curio, and Moscow on the Hudson came in 1984, but they both did little better than OK critically and commercially. The Best of Times and Club Paradise both bombed in 1986 before Barry Levinson’s Good Morning, Vietnam finally elevated Williams’ career to the level it deserved to be on the following year.
He won a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy’, was nominated for ‘Best Actor’ at the Academy Awards, and the pathway to sustained cinema success had finally been cleared. Popeye wasn’t quite an insurmountable misstep, but it didn’t serve as the breakthrough Williams would have been hoping for. He got there in the end, of course, but the bizarre cult favourite nonetheless failed to see him definitively shake off the potentially stigmatising shackles of being a sitcom star trying their hand at movies.
