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Whatever life holds in store for me, I will never forget these words: "With great power comes great responsibility."
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Popeye's Spinach is a leafy vegetable with a high vitamin content, so it is a healthy and nutritious food for human consumption. In most media featuring Popeye it is used as a last-minute device in which the Sailor Man, in danger, pulls out a can of spinach from his shirt or otherwise acquires the vegetable and eats it, thus giving his already formidable strength a greater increase that helps him withstand his enemies' attacks and all kinds of adverse situations. Spinach is widely associated to Popeye by the public. Due to his promoting the vegetable, the sailor hero has received honors from the spinach industry.
The animated cartoons more notedly adhere to a format in which spinach is Popeye's main means for overcoming the greatest of obstacles. Even if the cartoon acknowledges Popeye's immense strength to begin with (later ones from the Famous era make him much weaker before spinach), consumption of the vegetable augments Popeye's physical might to the extreme, allowing the viewer to enjoy a power fantasy and enabling the sailor to even break the laws of physics at times.
In Popeye's dealings with opponents such as Bluto, spinach is consumed when the sailor's well-being is threatened or Olive Oyl is on the verge of being abused. After eating the vegetable, Popeye strikes at the antagonist with his increased strength, wherein the blows can immediately render the erstwhile competitor unconscious, send him airborne to a distant destination, initiate the use of various props which serve to immobilize and otherwise humble him, etc. Often, this comeuppance comes in the form of a humorous reprieve to what had been a tense and life-threatening situation and serves as a concluding "punchline" for the cartoon episode.
Eaten by others[]
Popeye is not the only character in the franchise to eat spinach; other characters have consumed it as well. For cases involving female antagonists such as the Sea Hag, since Popeye cannot clobber women, it is Olive Oyl who ingests the vegetable in order to defeat the villainess. In the theatrical shorts Hospitaliky, its color remake For Better or Nurse and Beaus Will Be Beaus, Popeye force-feeds Bluto spinach. At least in the animated cartoons, everybody would gain a surge of power comparable to Popeye's. Interestingly enough, while being so powerful, it is commercially available in Popeye's stories. Literally anyone can buy a can of spinach at the nearby grocery, but Popeye seems the only consumer. Brutus once managed to monopolize the spinach market to depower Popeye, but the villain himself did not consume it.
Extraordinary uses[]
- Spinach increases the strength and speed of a character.
- It makes Popeye invulnerable, giving him a skin as resilient as steel.
- It can turn Popeye into a rocket, transform his clothes or otherwise change his appearance.
- It has been used to transform a biplane into a F-18 Hornet and perform other such changes.
- Once, Popeye summoned a knight's armor and horse with spinach.