What's In Popeye's Pipe?

By Dana Larsen, Cannabis Culture. Posted February 8, 2005.

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.

Comic Creation

Popeye has gone through many different writers and artists since he was first created in 1929 by cartoonist Elzie Segar. Popeye was originally introduced as a minor character in Segar's ongoing comic strip, Thimble Theatre. For 10 years Segar had been chronicling the adventures of Olive Oyl, her brother Castor, and her fiance Ham Gravy. At the start of one new adventure, Castor and Ham were to embark on an overseas voyage, and so they went to the docks and hired a sailor named Popeye.

Soon Popeye had become a major part of the Thimble Theatre cast, and within a year Ham Gravy was written out of the strip as Popeye replaced him as Olive's sweetheart. Wimpy was added to the cast three years later, and baby Swee'pea four years after that.

At first there was no explanation for Popeye's amazing strength. But within a few years Popeye's reliance on spinach was entrenched in the strip, and the basis of some ongoing jokes. By the time of the animated cartoons, decades after Segar's death, the spinach had become an essential part of every plot, with Popeye's consumption of the magic herb signaling a swift end to his foes.

The original comic by Segar was much more complex and nuanced than the later animated shorts. Segar introduced many strange and wonderful characters into Popeye's world, including the malicious Sea Hag, whose enchanted flute enables her to fly and do magic; the wealthy Mr. Vanripple, whose beautiful daughter June rivals Olive for Popeye' affections; the disturbing Alice the Goon who speaks only in squiggles; and the mighty Toar, whose monstrous strength challenges even Popeye's.

Segar's storylines were full of adult humor, including Toar having a crush on Popeye, calling him "hot stuff" and kissing him on the head. Popeye's ongoing adventures included founding his own island nation called Spinachovia, and becoming "dictipator" over a country made up only of men.

Spinach = Marijuana

So from these seemingly innocent beginnings, what evidence is there that Popeye is actually a stoner?

During the 1920s and '30s, 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.

In addition, 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, "When a man's happy he jus' couldn't do nothin' wrong."

Dana Larsen is the editor of Cannabis Culture, which is based in Vancouver B.C.

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