Cultural Legacy
Lyrics of Popeye's theme "I'm Popeye The Sailor Man", composed by Sammy Lerner in 1933 for Fleischer Studios' first Popeye the Sailor cartoon: "I'm Popeye the sailor man / I'm one tough Gazookus / which hates all Palookas".
South of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on the way to the town of Mountain Top, Pennsylvania is Joe Palooka Mountain, named in the early 1980s by the Mayor of Wilkes-Barre.
In September 1948, a 30-foot high limestone Joe Palooka statue (in a flowing cape) was erected on a hill overlooking Route 37 in Indiana. In 1984, the nine-foot high, ten-ton statue and its base were moved and rededicated to the Town Hall in Oolitic, Indiana.
In Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey skewers one of his characters with this paragraph: "'Tsk, tsk,' said Brother Walker. And, as he had learned the comment from Joe Palooka, it came out 'tisk tisk', the way he assumed it was pronounced."
Extended Joe Palooka story sequences from 1930 to 1961 can be read at Steve Cottle's I Love Comix Archive.
In Smokey and the Bandit, after having been drawn into a fight and taken a beating, character Cledus "Snowman" Snow (Jerry Reed) tells his friend Bo "Bandit" Darville (Burt Reynolds) over the CB radio, "Look, you ain't gonna believe this, but I just did my imitation of Joe Palooka."
In Pulp Fiction, John Travolta's character (Vincent) has an exchange in the bar with Bruce Willis (Butch) where he tells him, "You ain't my friend, Palooka"
Read more about this topic: Joe Palooka
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