Popeye the Sailor Inspired Dog Names

At the surface level, the sprawling cast of Popeye’s characters mostly looked to be human. Popeye, Olive Oyl, Brutus and even recurring villains like the Sea Hag were all based in humanity, as were a vast majority of Popeye’s friends, Olive’s family and a wide range of baddies that came and went throughout its history. 

Upon closer inspection, however, Popeye also had a knack for the strange, taking others to the limits of what we might consider normal. There were also goons, pygmies and burrowers, amongst others. Considering the anthropomorphic characters they included as well, from the more conventional, like Axle and Cam the talking robots, to the truly outlandish, like the aptly titled Big Cheese, the cartoons and comics certainly took their liberties with creative freedom when fleshing out bodies to carry their narratives. 

But one of the strangest to date actually came from the original comic strip (originally titled Thimble Theatre before Popeye). Small, yellow and full of strange features that were anything but obvious in terms of origin, Eugene the Jeep was actually considered a dog, though the average reader, without context, would have absolutely no idea given his look, as he sported an oversized pink/red nose, bear-like ears, a monkey-like tail and mostly featureless limbs. 

In the context of his introduction, however, he actually proved to have a pretty interesting background. His first appearance came six or seven years after E. C. Seger, the genius creator behind Popeye, rolled out the first Thimble Theatre. The technical definition of a Jeep was actually given a few months after the character was introduced by Professor Brainstein, who, in no short explanation, essentially says that Jeep life cells came from a fourth dimension and happened to have the same electrical vibration frequency as an African Hooey Hound which they then merged with, creating the “three-dimensional” figures we know as “Jeeps”. 

Given that Popeye was more brawn than brains, his explanation to Olive Oyl, when first gifting it to her (though the first time it was given to her by Uncle Ben), was much more simple: "The Jeep's a magical dog and can disappear and things.” He first gifted Eugene to both her and Swee’Pea in 1938 but in 1940, the narrative was reversed, as she had him delivered to Popeye via a special delivery man, complete with the premise that he had never seen the creature before but happily accepted it as “a baby puppy” anyway.