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I Yam What I Yam: The Impact of Popeye

It's interesting how Popeye effectively upstaged Ham Gravy, the main character, to the point where Ham faded into the background and the strip was renamed.

Something kind of similar happened to Barney Google, whose strip was hijacked by comical hillbilly Snuffy Smith, but Google's name remained in the title and Google himself started to become a more recurring character again in 2012 for some reason.
 
It's interesting how Popeye effectively upstaged Ham Gravy, the main character, to the point where Ham faded into the background and the strip was renamed.

Something kind of similar happened to Barney Google, whose strip was hijacked by comical hillbilly Snuffy Smith, but Google's name remained in the title and Google himself started to become a more recurring character again in 2012 for some reason.
I wonder if Interesting Copyright Things have ever happened with that strip as the search engine has risen in prominence and corporate power.
 
I wonder if Interesting Copyright Things have ever happened with that strip as the search engine has risen in prominence and corporate power.

The word 'Google', though popularised as a nonsense word by that strip, first appeared in a kid's book from 1913 written by one of the governors of the Bank of England, in which 'The Google' is a strange and horrifying monster living in a pool in a garden. The use of it in the strip may have inspired the use of 'Googol' submitted by Milton Sirotta as a name for 10^100, and thus the misspelt (and back to the original) name of the monopolistic search engine. Bringing things full circle, the first text scanned by Google's book-scanner was a copy of the original kid's book, The Google Book.

Oh, and there's a song about Barney Google as well, a novelty record from when the character was at the height of his popularity:

 
It's going to be very interesting seeing the effects of copyright expiry finally hit US stuff from the 20s in the next few years (yes we could see the usual extension, but we're ticking closer and the usual congressional buttering-up hasn't started yet).
 
Popeye entering the public domain inspired this strip by Boulet:

EN-Strip01.png

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(Follow the link for the rest)
 
It’s interesting that the first Wimpy bar is yet another example of the slightly off cartoon characters, made famous by ice-cream vans.
Heh, good point - Edward Gold just took it to a whole new level than the ones @Lord Roem and I like to point out.

As I mentioned in the article, though, the UK Wimpy's abandoned any sense of connection when they invented the Mr Wimpy mascot:

Mr._Wimpy_Coverart.png
 
I wonder if Interesting Copyright Things have ever happened with that strip as the search engine has risen in prominence and corporate power.
This reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) story that the musician Sting pays a (very nominal) license fee to the wrestler Sting for use of the name.
 
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