G-Rated Stoner

Wizard: Hey, kid. You want some magic powers? Magic powers for absolutely free.

Finn: Heck, yeah!

Jake: Let's not be too rash! Just look at this guy. Check out the sunken, lifeless eyes. The foul stench of decay. You know what that means?

Finn: It means he's evil, I guess.

— Adventure Time

By the late-1960s, marijuana had stopped being seen as a "scary" hard drug in large part due to the hippie movement. The days of Reefer Madness were long gone and instead a new stereotype began to become popular: The Stoner.

Lethargic, scruffy looking, and perpetually hungry, stoners (and especially Erudite Stoners) are prime comedic fuel in media. It didn't take long for these attributes to become associated with "hippies" in general, even if the character is never shown smoking a lick of pot.

In children's works, characters that seem like stoners appear, except there are no actual implications they use drugs. In some cases there might be a Parental Bonus implying drug usage, but oftentimes they're just naturally that way.

You can spot this type of character by several aspects:

• Having Exhausted Eye Bags or Dreary Half-Lidded Eyes.
• Being a Big Eater.
• Spouting random (often nonsensical) wisdom.
• Slurred speech, overuse of Buffy Speak, and/or Totally Radical slang.
• Being into art (including music).
• Having '60s Hair, '70s Hair, dreadlocks, or Messy Hair
• Being a Granola Girl, a beatnik, or a New-Age Retro Hippie (often coincide with a floral motif and baggy clothes).
• Live in a Hippie Van.

This trope can also apply to other drugs, but marijuana is the most commonplace.

Compare to I Can't Believe It's Not Heroin!, G-Rated Drug, and G-Rated Mental Illness. Often overlaps with New-Age Retro Hippie. Can also overlap with Surfer Dude and The Slacker.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• One of the four friends of The Mask Strikes Back has Hugo, a former stoner who maintains the stereotype (especially the baggy eyes and clothes) despite he continuously says he left "that" a year ago.

Films — Animation

• In Big Hero 6, Fred has a number of stoner mannerisms, and at one point launches into a speech as though he is about to speak at a 12-step meeting.
• In the Cars series, one of the citizens of Radiator Springs Lightning gets to know is Fillmore, a Volkswagen Microbus with a trippy aqua green floral paint job. He deals in "organic fuel" and generally acts like a spaced-out hippie.
  Fillmore: (staring at a traffic light) I'm telling you, man, every third blink is slower...
  Sarge: The sixties weren't good to you, were they?
• Bobby from A Goofy Movie and its sequel. He has a Surfer Dude cloudcuckoolander personality and eats a lot. It's likely a Parental Bonus because he is played by Pauly Shore (who is known for playing stoner characters).
• Yax from Zootopia. He has long dreadlocks and wears flowers and a bead necklace (but no clothes), acts like a cloudcuckoolander who has excellent memory without realizing it, and is voiced by none else but Tommy Chong, but there is no mention of him using any kind of substance.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Muppets movies, The Electric Mayhem act very much like stoners, especially Floyd, Janice and Zoot.
• Although not quite for kids (more general-audience territory), Galaxy Quest, has Fred Kwan, who is constantly a little too relaxed and calm, even in the face of danger, is often seen munching on a snack during the course of the story, and when transported to the NSEA Protector, has smoke wafting from his transport pod!

Live-Action TV

• Big Time Rush: Guitar Dude, as his name would suggest, is a laid back hippie-type who spent his time playing guitar in the Palm Woods park. He's always relaxed, and advocates for others to just chill out and relax too, all with stereotypical slang and the willingness to spout unwanted and philosophical advice. Interestingly, this started when he came to LA, as he was originally a straight-laced cellist.

Video Games

• Animal Crossing:
  • Pascal is a scallop-obsessed Cloudcuckoolander otter who spouts offball advice if you give him a scallop. Certain villagers believe his weirdness is due to Childhood Brain Damage.
  • Though not as pronounced as Pascal, the local singer K.K. Slider is a laidback beatnik that steps into this territory sometimes.
• In Bear & Breakfast, Ranger Sabine says that there are mushrooms in Sawdust rumored to give one nightmares when eaten, and that she could go for some "right now".
• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: While the series definitely isn't G-rated, "Ultimate Clairvoyant" Yasuhiro Hagakure wears baggy clothes, is more than a bit of a space cadet, talks a lot about New Age concepts like "chakras", and has long, frizzy hair that resembles an attempt at dreadlocks. The English translation of the game even gives him a faint "California surfer dude" accent.
• In the Dizzy games, there is the character of Dylan, who wears a floppy bucket hat and is always throwing up a peace sign. In Fantasy World Dizzy his opening line is "Hey man, like what's happening". When Yahtzee and Gabriel play Fantasy World Dizzy and get to his screen, Gabriel instantly says, "Yup, this is the stoner character, I knew it the second I saw his hat. I was like, 'Dylan, yeah, Bob Dylan, weed.'"
• Mina from Pokémon Sun and Moon (and its revised versions) displays many characteristics of a being an artsy stoner. She has long '60s hair, a near-perpetually vacant expression, and is splattered in paint. Mina has an airy personality and one cutscene has her rushing home, stuffing food into her mouth, then running back out. In her case it might be the Parental Bonus version as she has a mushroom-based Pokémon on her team, but Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! show that Mina acted similarly as a child. This is further reinforced in Pokémon Masters, where she is voiced by Cherami Leigh doing a very stereotypical pothead voice.
• Splatoon 2: One of the shop owners, Flo, acts this way. She's a New-Age Retro Hippie whose facial expression, dialogue, and constant swaying gives off this impression.

Web Animation

• Bulbasaur in Starter Squad tends to act pretty goofy when he gets poisoned (anybody who plays Pokémon would know that Bulbasaur is immune to poison). He's even hooked to it much like that of somebody hooked to drugs.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: Parodied. In "Wizard", Finn and Jake are approached by a shady-looking guy with a raspy voice and a cloak who offers them... magic powers.
• Elmore Junior High's hippie guidance counselor Steve Small in The Amazing World of Gumball. There's a few moments implying he is indeed a stoner; drinking herbal tea that makes him black out, and in "The Void," he can bounce through the dimension of the world's mistakes because he's "...used to feeling spaced out."
• On Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Wacky Wayside Tribe of singing New Age Retro Hippies act like this. One is even named Chong, after Tommy Chong of Cheech & Chong fame.
• "Slacker Batman" in the Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode "A Bat Divided" is mostly just lazy, but his exaggeratedly relaxed mannerisms and fondness for nachos raise some questions.
• In Clerks: The Animated Series, Jay and Silent Bob, unlike in the rest of The View Askewniverse, are not shown to be doing or dealing any sort of drugs thanks to network Standards and Practices. Their slacker attitudes hasn't been changed, however, and they still keep their stoner-like traits (Jay with his beanie, long hair, and surfer dude voice, Silent Bob with his goatee).
• Morris Stegosaurus from Dinosaur Train has a laid-back attitude, his eyes are always half-shut, his voice is slow, and he uses Totally Radical words like "dude" and "awesome" a lot.
• In the Chilean series Los Pulentos, both Walala and Ramon fit into this stereotype. Both kids have long hair and are into music (Walala goes for rock/metal and Ramon into Hip Hop), Walala has random wisdom and slurred speech, Ramon has Messy Hair with bangs and he's usually the calm guy of the team with Totally Radical slang.
• Dylan in The Magic Roundabout (at least the UK Gag Dub) is extremely mellow, usually half-asleep and has occasional mind-bending insights, man. Word of God is that the writer was just playing on hippie stereotypes without thinking about why they were hippie stereotypes, but the 2005 movie adds some Parental Bonus gags based on the idea.
  Dylan: Chill out, guys. I've got something stashed that just might help.
  Brian: Dylan, we don't have time to experiment with recreational activities.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Make New Friends but Keep Discord", Fluttershy's New-Age Retro Hippie friend Tree Hugger uses almost every "goofy stoner" stereotype — she has a perpetually tired expression, she makes heavy use of stereotypical hippie jargon such as "radical", "mellow" and "groovy", and she doles out plenty of pseudo-animist, pseudo-Buddhist spiritual nuggets that don't actually mean much of anything — but, this being a show aimed at little girls, no actual drug use is implied.
• Eve from Rugrats (2021) constantly looks and sounds like she's half asleep and uses the word "dude" a lot.
• Norville 'Shaggy' Rogers from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is a hippie/beatnik mixture with a very large appetite. He's a shaggy-haired dude with a scruffy goatee who talks in hippie speak, wears untidy clothes, constantly has the munchies, and is always paranoid and freaked out about the ghosts the gang encounters. Despite Urban Legends, he wasn't intentionally designed as a stoner. Shaggy is just naturally that way and, according to A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, he was even like that in elementary. Popular fanon is that he's definitely a pothead, but in the series itself the only suspicious substances he ever consumes are "Scooby Snacks." (Then again, how high do you have to be to think eating dog biscuits is a good idea?). Future Scooby-Doo works (such as the first live-action film) poke fun at the rumors.
• Total Drama:
  • Zee from Island (2023) is very chill and laid-back, speaks with a Surfer Dude accent, and drink a lot of soda. In "Launch Back of Notre Game", he claims that he had never been that high before after being flung in the air, then he gets a Disney Acid Sequence after being struck by lightning.
  • Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race has Spud. He often has a tired expression, he speaks slowly and he has delayed reactions.
• In the animated adaptation of U.S. Acres that was in Garfield and Friends, Bo Sheep talks like a Surfer Dude with some hippie/'60s slang thrown in for good measure, is very artistic, loves rock music, and is incredibly chill and mellow (in contrast to his cranky, bossy sister Lanolin).

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