Grab your canned vegetables and your questionable licensed tie-ins, because this week on Play Comics we’re diving headfirst into Popeye: Rush for Spinach on the Game Boy Advance—the game that looked at a classic comic strip about a gruff sailor punching his problems and said, “Actually, what if everyone just… ran a lot instead?” This is a world where the Sea Hag steals the global spinach supply, the solution is apparently time-traveling track meets, and Popeye, Olive Oyl, Bluto, and Wimpy all agree that the best way to settle things is to sprint through history like someone off-screen yelled “last one there buys lunch.”

Helping us untangle this leafy green disaster is the wonderful Ryan Estrada from the comic-making side of the internet, a man who knows exactly what it looks like when characters escape the page and do something absolutely no one asked them to do. Ryan’s here to help figure out how a comic icon who started life in newspaper strips, got famous selling spinach, and spent decades punching sea monsters somehow wound up in a handheld racing game that feels like it was brainstormed during a very strange lunch break.

So power up that tiny GBA screen, flex those forearms, and get ready for an episode that’s equal parts comic history lesson, adaptation autopsy, and incredulous laughter at the phrase “Popeye racing game.”

Learn such things as:

Were our parents lying to us about spinach all these years?
What’s the point of dropping plot threads if you never plan on picking them up?
Will somebody just bring me a cheeseburger already?
And so much more!

You can find everything you could ever want to know about Ryan on RyanEstrada.com. Let’s see if anyone can pick out my favorite part. I’ll give you a hint, it’s on the home page.

If you want to be a guest on the show please check out the Be a A Guest on the Show page and let me know what you’re interested in.

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Play Comics is part of the Gonna Geek Network, which is a wonderful collection of geeky podcasts. Be sure to check out the other shows on Gonna Geek if you need more of a nerd fix.

You can find Play Comics @playcomics.bsky.social on Bluesky, @playcomicspodcast on Threads, @playcomics on YouTube or the Play Comics website.

If you want to hear Chris talk with Karrington Martin about the lessons we learned from children’s media and how crazy it is that we’re supposed to just forget about that now that we’re adults, then Sugar, Spite, and Everything is Fine is probably something you should check out.

A big thanks to Peace Bound and Down – A Wonder Woman Podcast and Carnival of Glee Creations for the promos today.

Intro/Outro Music by Backing Track, who prefers arugula.<iframe style="display: none;" src="about:blank"></iframe>

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