Mexican Jumping Bean - Jumping Beans in Popular Culture

Jumping Beans in Popular Culture

Jumping beans were used as a recurring gag in many cartoons from the 1930s to the 1950s, wherein eating the beans would cause a character's whole body to bounce out of control and land on something painful.

In the Popeye cartoon, Spree Lunch, Popeye serves Wimpy a plate of baked beans in his diner. Bluto stealthily replaces the baked beans with a plate of Mexican jumping beans, which causes Wimpy to bounce across the street into Bluto's diner.

Jumping Beans are accidentally eaten by Scooby in the Scooby Doo, Where Are You! episode "Which Witch is Which?", first aired in 1969.

In the fourth episode of An Idiot Abroad, "Mexico", Karl Pilkington spends much of his time in the country unsuccessfully searching for Mexican jumping beans after having seen them as a child on Sesame Street. Frustratingly for Karl, the Mexican locals that he approaches seem to have never heard of the beans. In the last scene of the episode, Karl expresses his relative (compared to other episodes) appreciation of Mexico, but also his one regret: that he couldn't obtain a Mexican jumping bean.

In the South Park episode "Cartoon Wars Part II", Eric Cartman states that the endless waves of suicide bombers in his story are like Mexican Jumping Beans.

In Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Sabrina makes "Magical Jumping Beans," which grow into a magic beanstalk after she throws them out.

In the episode "Bubble Bites" of the children's television program Bubble Guppies, jumping beans are used as part of a running gag during the show's "It's Time For Lunch" segment in which one of the characters receives something comical and inedible for lunch, often in line with the theme of the current episode. The character Nonny, after being told by his classmates that they have cans of baked and green beans, reveals that he has been given a can of jumping beans. The can then jumps out of his lunchbox and hops away.

A Mexican Jumping Bean appears in The Garfield Show episode 'Full of Beans', when Odie accidentally swallows a Mexican Jumping Bean given by Jon's Mexican uncle, Pablo.