Popeye the sailorman
From Cannabis Culture:
Popeye is one of the world's most well-known and beloved animated characters. Since his creation, the pipe-puffing Popeye has become a global phenomenon, with millions of kids heartily munching on spinach in the hopes that it will make them as strong as the legendary sailor-man.
Yet is the spinach which gives Popeye his super-strength really a metaphor for another magical herb? Have children around the world been adoring a hero who is really a heavy consumer of the forbidden weed - marijuana?
The evidence is circumstantial, but it is there, and when added together it presents a compelling picture that, for many readers at least, Popeye's strength-giving spinach is meant as a clear metaphor for the miraculous powers of marijuana.
Spinach = marijuana
What evidence is there that Popeye is actually a stoner?
The best evidence is that during the 1920's and 1930's, the era when Popeye was created, "spinach" was a very common code word for marijuana. One classic example is The Spinach Song, recorded in 1938 by the popular jazz band Julia Lee and her Boyfriends. Performed for years in clubs thick with cannabis smoke, along with other Julia Lee hits like Sweet Marijuana, the popular song used spinach as an obvious metaphor for pot.
Second, anti-marijuana propaganda of the time claimed that marijuana use induced super-strength. Overblown media reports proclaimed that pot smokers became extraordinarily strong, and even immune to bullets. So tying in Popeye's mighty strength with his sucking back some spinach would have seemed like an obvious cannabis connection at the time.
Further, as a "sailor-man," Popeye would be expected to be familiar with exotic herbs from distant locales. Indeed, sailors were among the first to introduce marijuana to American culture, bringing the herb back with them from their voyages overseas.
Segar did make other, more explicit drug references in his comic strip. One ongoing 1934 plotline had Vanripple's gold mine facing corrupt, thieving workers. Popeye discovers that the mine manager is feeding his men berries from a bush whose roots are soaked in a nasty drug. Consuming the drugged berries removes human conscience, making people more violent and willing to commit crime.
Popeye falls under the influence of the laced berries and becomes surly and mean, striking out at his friends and allies. Yet he still manages to get five gallons of "myrtholene," a joy-inducing drug which he pours over the plant's roots. The new berries produce delirious happiness, and as Popeye says it, "when a man's happy he jus' couldn't do nothin' wrong."
Pot references
In many of the animated Popeye cartoons from the 1960's,
Popeye is explicitly shown sucking the power-giving spinach through his pipe.
Pure Bolivian spinach
The only Popeye strip to ever explicitly refer to the pot/spinach connection was published in the 1980's by illustrator Bobby London. The comic showed Popeye and Wimpy picking up a load of "pure Bolivian spinach."
full article: Cannabis Culture/ Popeye the pothead
According to Bud Sagendorf, Popeye is 34 years old , 5'6",and weighs 158 lbs. In the cartoon "Popeye in Goonland", made in 1938, Popeye says he hasnt seen his Pappy since birth, 40 years ago, so that would put his actual birth in 1898. Since the first appearance in the strips of Popeye was 1929, this would make him 31 years old when he first appeared.
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