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.
Read more about this topic: Mexican Jumping Bean
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, jumping, beans, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Everything seems beautiful because you don’t understand. Those flying fish, they’re not leaping for joy, they’re jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies, the glitter of putrescence. There’s no beauty here, only death and decay.”
—Curtis Siodmak (1902–1988)
“When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)