ABSTRACT
A small road in north-west Malta ends at a cliff-top car park, but the settlement that it serves is no ordinary fishing village (see Figure 18.1). Vaguely reminiscent of small ports along the sleepy backwaters of New England, the quays and clapboard houses of ‘Sweethaven’ in fact only date from 1979 when a film production company selected the hitherto undeveloped inlet of Anchor Bay to construct a set for the film Popeye, a musical commissioned by Paramount and Walt Disney Productions and based on the cartoon character created by Elzie Crisler Segar (Inge, 1990). Begun in May 1979, the set took seven months to construct. Replete with extensive earthworks and a substantial breakwater to protect the site from high seas during filming, the final product constituted a substantial investment for a single film project. After the end of shooting in 1980, the set’s future was undecided. The film company painted
the buildings with grey protective paint and left, passing ownership to the Malta Film Facility (MCF). Rather than adopt the usual practice of quickly demolishing it and returning the area to something approaching its original state, the MCF hesitantly decided to retain Sweethaven as an attraction, seeking to generate revenue by drawing in tourists interested in visiting the sites of the film’s production. While this remains an essential part of the raison d’être of the ‘Popeye Village’, new owners have converted the buildings, all but two of which were originally just shells, into functioning craft workshops and tourist amenities. Hence as Popeye faded into cinematic history, the landscapes of Sweethaven became shaped by new attractions related to the packaging of Maltese tourism. During 2011, these included pedagogic instruction on the marine environment and nautical skills, displays of local handicrafts, a year-round Christmas display (‘Santa’s Toy Town’), and provision of adventure playgrounds – activities sometimes only tangentially related to the adventures of the strip-cartoon sailor.
