Vintage 1975 Popeye Bicentennial Stickers 🎆 King Features Patriotic Set

Why Did Popeye Salute the Bicentennial? 🎆 A Vintage 1975 Popeye Patriotic Sticker Pair, Let Freedom Ring and Be a Yankee Doodle Dandy, King Features

Size: 3 1/4" x 2"

With America's 200th birthday coming up, everything in the dime store went red, white and blue - even Popeye. This is a pair of flat paper stickers. On the first, on red, Popeye winks with his corncob pipe going beside a Liberty Bell, over Let Freedom Ring. On the second, on red and white stripes, he's walking along with a white money sack slung over his shoulder under a starred blue circle reading Be a Yankee Doodle Dandy. Both say POPEYE and © KING FEATURES 1975, and the backs are plain split paper liners. Every pair I have is unused.

🎆 A Bicentennial series

These two belong to a whole 1975 run of cartoon Bicentennial stickers in the same size and colors - Dick Tracy had 'Tis the Star Spangled Banner and Proclaim Your Liberty, and Bozo had Stand Up and Salute - all getting ready for July 4, 1976. Nothing on them names who made or sold them; King Features is the copyright on Popeye.

👑 King Features

King Features Syndicate was set up in 1915 for William Randolph Hearst's newspapers, run by Moses Koenigsberg. Old-timers in the syndication business used to point out the tidy bit of trivia behind the company's very name - King was simply the English for the first syllable of Koenigsberg's own surname, a quiet little joke tucked into the corporate letterhead, and too good a piece of lore to let disappear. King Features went on to launch Flash Gordon and Mandrake the Magician in 1934 and The Phantom in 1936, and it's still in business.

⚓ The sailor man

Popeye came from Elzie Crisler Segar, born December 8, 1894, in Chester, Illinois, a river town on the Mississippi. Segar started Thimble Theatre for King Features in 1919, built around Olive Oyl and her beau Ham Gravy. Popeye walked in ten years later, in January 1929, as a sailor hired to crew a ship - and stole the whole strip. Collectors and Segar biographers have long passed down the story that the gruff, one-eyed sailor was modeled on a real man from Segar's hometown of Chester, a tough local named Frank Rocky Fiegel. Segar died in 1938, only 43.

🥬 Two towns, two statues

Chester put up a Popeye statue in 1977 and started its Popeye & Friends Character Trail in 2006, with a new figure from the strip nearly every year since, and locals there have long taken quiet pride in being the real hometown of the world's most famous spinach eater. Down in Crystal City, Texas, the Spinach Capital of the World, growers credited Popeye with a big jump in spinach eating in the 1930s and put up their own statue of him in 1937.

🎨 Made to be stuck down

Stickers like these were cheap and meant to be used up - pressed on a lunchbox, a bike fender or a bedroom window and forgotten. By 1975 Popeye was pushing fifty, comfort food for the parents and Saturday morning reruns for the kids, which made him a natural for the Bicentennial rack. An unused pair still on its backing is the one that got away.

🎆 About these

Each sticker is about 3 1/4 by 2 inches. Frame the pair for the Fourth of July, a cartoon shelf or a kid's room. The supply is finite - nobody's printing 1975 Popeye Bicentennial stickers again, and once these last pairs are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.