Bluto vs Brutus: 11 Weird Facts You Didn’t Know About Popeye’s Greatest Enemy!

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]If you grew up watching Papey cartoons, you probably called him Bluto. Or maybe your family called him Brutus. Maybe you watched the Saturday morning shows and heard one name, then saw the older Fleer cartoon and heard another and just assumed somebody had made a mistake somewhere. Somebody had, but it wasn't you. The story of why Popeye's greatest enemy has two names, two different faces, and a legal history built on a mistake that took decades to untangle is one of the most genuinely strange chapters in the history of American animation. Here is all of it. Fact one, his full name was Pluto the Terrible, and he was created to kill Popeye. Pluto made his first appearance in the Thimble Theater comic comic strip on September 12th, 1932 in a story line called The Eighth Sea. He was introduced not as a romantic rival, not as a bully competing for Olive Oil's affection, but as something considerably darker. A bloodthirsty pirate who was the leader of a group of stowaways aboard the same ship as Papey. All of them hunting for the same treasure. His full name, as Sear wrote him, was Pluto the Terrible.

[00:01:02]And his plan was not to humiliate Papey or steal Olive's attention. It was to kill him. He found a treasure map, told his men that Popey would be dead by dawn, and meant every word. This was not the cartoon Bluto that audiences would come to know. This was a genuine threat built for a single story conceived as the most dangerous thing Popey had faced in the strip. And after that story ended, Cigar had no plans to bring him back. Fact two, Cigar only used him once. The Flechers made him famous in the entire run of EC. Cigar's Thimble Theater comic strip. Pluto appeared in exactly one story line. Cigar introduced him, used him as the villain of the eighth sea, and moved on. There was no indication that Pluto was intended to become a recurring presence. He was one of many antagonists Segar created, used for a purpose, then set aside. What transformed Pluto from a single appearance comic strip villain into the most recognizable enemy in Popeye's universe was a decision made not by Segar, but by the Fleer Studios animator, who began producing Popeye theatrical shorts for Paramount in 1933.

[00:02:05]The first Fleer Popeye cartoon featured Pluto as the heavy. So did the second and the third. The formula, Bluto threatens Olive, Popeye eats spinach, Bluto loses, proved so reliable that the studio kept returning to it. Seagar's one-time villain became Fleer's permanent fixture. But before the cartoons arrived, the original comic strip fight between these two men was unlike anything the animation ever captured. Fact three, their first fight lasted weeks in the comic strip and ended with Popeye's most unusual finishing move. The initial confrontation between Papey and Bluto in the September 1932 Strips was not a six-second spinachfueled knockout. It ran for weeks in the daily newspaper strip, a prolonged brutal fight that Segar depicted in escalating detail across multiple installments. According to documented accounts of the storyline, the two men fought for hours within the story's internal logic, their clothes getting progressively destroyed, neither one willing to stop. The fight scene eventually devolved, as one source describes it, into a scribbled visual mess of pure chaotic combat. Popeye won using what Cigar called the Twisker sock, his signature finishing blow, a specific punch that appeared throughout the strip's early years. The Flea cartoons compressed this dynamic into six-minute shorts with a guaranteed spinach resolution. The original Sega version was longer, harder, and considerably less tidy. And when those Fleer cartoons arrived, one specific piece of music told the audience exactly who was coming before he even appeared on screen. Fact four. Blow the man down was his signature warning. In the Fleer Studios Popey theatrical shorts, the animation team developed a specific musical language for each major character. Popey had his theme song.

[00:03:49]Olive had her own musical cue. and Bluto had Blow the Man Down, the traditional sea shanty that became his personal signature played instrumentally whenever the big villain was about to enter a scene. Animation historians and dedicated Popeye fans have noted consistently that if you were watching a Fleer Popeye short and heard an instrumental version of Blow the Man Down, you knew immediately that Pluto would soon appear on screen. The musical cue functioned as an announcement, a warning almost that the threat was incoming and the conflict was about to begin. It gave Bluto a presence that started before his first frame, building anticipation in the audience that the animators then delivered on. It was one of the most effective character building tools in the entire Fleer catalog achieved entirely through borrowed music. The voices that gave Pluto his specific menace came from unexpected places, including the man who had just voiced one of Disney's most beloved character. Fact five, the voice of Pluto was once the voice of Goofy. After a falling out with Walt Disney, voice actor Pinto Kulvig found himself without work at the studio where he had spent years performing. Kulvig was the original voice of Goofy, the distinctive, good-natured, bumbling Disney character whose laugh and vocal personality Kvig had built from scratch.

[00:05:05]When Kulvig left Disney between 1939 and 1943, Flesher Studios offered him work.

[00:05:11]He became one of the voices of Pluto during that period, which means that for a specific window of time, the man who had given Goofy his laugh was also providing the voice for Popeye's most dangerous enemy. The contrast could not be more complete. Goofy was Disney's most harmless, most accidental, most lovable character. Pluto was Fleer's most threatening, most aggressive, and most deliberately menacing one. The same voice, the same person, two completely opposite personalities separated by the distance between Manhattan and Burbank.

[00:05:42]And the voice that most audiences remember as the definitive Pluto came from a man with a remarkable second career. Fact six. Jackson Beck voiced Pluto for almost two decades and was also Superman's narrator. Jackson Beck took over the voice of Pluto in the mid 1940s during the famous studios era and held the role for nearly two decades, making him the most enduring voice actor associated with the character across the theatrical shorts. His deep, aggressive, unmistakable delivery became what most people hear when they think of Pluto's voice. What most people don't know is that Beck was simultaneously building a separate and equally significant career in radio and animation. He was the announcer, the authoritative narrator's voice. On the radio program, The Adventures of Superman, the same man who voiced Popeye's brutal, scheming enemy, was also opening every Superman radio broadcast with the words the audience tuned in to hear. Both Guswiki and Beck were also noted for their ability to sing while voicing the character, a quality that came through in the cartoons where Bluto performed musical numbers as part of the story. And then in 1957, something happened that gave the character a completely new identity based on a legal mistake that nobody caught for years. Fact seven. The name change to Brutus was based on a legal mistake. When the studios theatrical cartoon series ended in 1957, King Features Syndicate began developing new Popeye television cartoons for the 1960s. At some point during that process, someone at King Features became concerned that Paramount Pictures, the distributor of the original Flecher and Famous Studios cartoons, might own the rights to the name Pluto. To avoid a potential legal conflict, the decision was made to rename the character Brutus.

[00:07:25]The name Brutus first appeared on Popeye related products in 1960 and in the actual cartoons in 1962. There was only one problem. Paramount had never owned the rights to the name Bluto. King Features owned it because Pluto had been created for the comic strip and the comic strip had always belonged to King Features. Nobody had checked. A legal concern that turned out to be completely unfounded produced one of the most confusing character decisions in the history of American animation and it stuck for years before anyone bothered to verify the original assumption. And the character that appeared under the new name looked noticeably different from the one audiences remembered. Fact eight. Brutus looked completely different from Bluto. The name change wasn't the only thing that shifted in 1960. The physical design of the character changed significantly as well.

[00:08:13]The original Bluto, as designed for the Fleer and and Famous Studios cartoons, was large, muscular, and physically imposing in a way that made him a credible physical threat to Popeye. The Brutus, who appeared in the 1960 King Features television cartoons, was drawn as morbidly obese rather than muscular with a noticeably different body type that changed the visual dynamic of his confrontations with Popeye. He also wore a blue shirt and brown pants and as noted in documented descriptions of the character, appeared without socks. The redesign reflected the different production approach and budget constraints of television animation t compared to theatrical shorts. But it also meant that a generation of children who grew up with the 1960s cartoons had a fundamentally different visual impression of the character than their parents who had seen the Fleer originals in theaters. And the question of whether Bluto and Brutus were the same character or two different people eventually got a specific bizarre answer. Fact nine.

[00:09:12]Pluto and Brutus were eventually made into twin brothers. Rather than simply acknowledging that Brutus was a renamed version of Pluto, which was the straightforward truth, some creative decisions in later Popeye productions went in a completely different direction. An Ocean Comics Popey special comic book presented Pluto and Brutus as twin brothers, two separate characters who happened to look almost identical and both harbored the same hatred for Popey. Bobby London, who drew the Popeye Daily Strip for 6 years, wrote and illustrated a story line called The Return of Pluto, in which the original 1932 version of Pluto returns to find that multiple fat, bearded bullies have been calling themselves Brutus, each one a different version of Popeye's rival.

[00:09:56]Then, in the December 28, 2008 and April 5, 2009 editions of the Popeye comic strip, Bluto appeared again in the capacity of Brutus's twin brother. The legal mistake had become mythology. The confusion had become canon. Eventually, the original name came back, but the story of its return was not as clean as it might seem. Fact 10. The name Pluto came back, but Brutus never fully disappeared. The 1978 Hannah Barbara series, the allnew Popeye Hour, brought the name Bluto back along with a visual design closer to the original muscular version. The 1980 liveaction Robert Alman film starring Robin Williams as Popeye used the name Bluto. The 1987 Hannah Barbara series Popeye and Son also used Pluto. By the 1980s, King Features had apparently confirmed what a simple check of the original records would have revealed in 1957. They owned the name and always had, but Brutus hadn't vanished. In Spanish-speaking countries, in Brazil and in the Philippines, the character had always been known primarily as Brutus, and in those markets, that remained the name in use regardless of what American productions were calling him. The current Popeya comic strips by Randy Milh Holland continue to feature both names within the same continuity, treating the brothers as distinct characters 90 years after Segar created a one-time villain named Pluto the Terrible. The argument about what to call him is still technically unresolved. And the legal story around the character has one final unexpected chapter. Fact 11. His first comic strip appearance is now in the public domain with a catch. The copyright to Pluto's first appearance in the September 12th, 1932 comic strip was never renewed, a situation identical to what happened with Wimpy's first appearance in 1931.

[00:11:42]Under the copyright law that applied to pre-1978 works, renewal was required to maintain protection, and the renewal for that specific strip was never filed.

[00:11:52]This means that Bluto's debut appearance belongs to no one and is freely available. However, King Feature Syndicate retains the trademark for the name Pluto, meaning his name can only appear in the interior of a story, not on a cover or title without permission.

[00:12:08]And while many of the Fleer theatrical shorts featuring Pluto are in the public domain due to their own unrenewed copyrights, other elements of those productions remain under copyright for the full 95-year term from their original release dates. The villain who arrived on September 12th, 1932, ready to kill Popeye by dawn, has spent the nine decades since then, navigating one legal complication after another. In that sense, he never really stopped fighting. He was supposed to appear once. One story, one villain, one fight that ended with Popeye's twisker sock and never needed to be revisited.

[00:12:43]Instead, Bluto or Brutus, depending on which era you grew up in, became the most reliable formula in animation history. Threaten Olive, face Popeye, lose to Spinage, repeat. He did it under two names, two different body types.

[00:12:56]Voiced by the man who played Goofy and the man who announced Superman, and he eventually became two people in the same comic strip. The character Cigar created to die in the eighth sea is still appearing in print today. That is by any measure a remarkable career for a man named the terrible.