File:Popeye - Jeep origin.jpg

Summary

When Eugene the Jeep was introduced, E.C. Segar gave him a surprisingly hard-SF introduction for the year 1936, only a decade after the term "science fiction" was invented.

Here is a transcript of the professor's explanation of the Jeep:

The reference to an African "Hooey Hound" is very likely an early nickname for the Basenji, a dog breed that had just been introduced to America that decade and which had a distinctive howl ending in a whine which sounds like "hoooo-EE". The Basenji's curled tail and propensity for standing on its hind legs can be seen in Eugene the Jeep. "Free life cells" can be interpreted as a delicate reference to reproductive cells, e.g. eggs, which were "at a favorable time" (estrus) for fertilization. The result was that a Basenji gave birth to the hybrid being known as Eugene, allowing a "fourth-dimensional" being to live in our three-dimensional world. Reading the professor's words closely, Eugene may in fact be, not a hybrid, but the actual animal which normally resides on the other side of this dimensional barrier, which simply needed a "kindred" host (the closest to its kind on our side) to "transmute" an embryo into its usual form, but living in our world.

It's difficult not to relate this to my concept of the Daodan organism as an entity or genetic process which invades our world through the phase barrier. --Iritscen (talk) 00:17, 25 November 2021 (CET)