This Popeye cartoon, produced by Famous Studios, is not a Warner film and was originally released by Paramount, whose stereoscopic output was far smaller than that of Warner or Columbia. While the sight of spinach does not make a tremendous difference in the new format, The Ace of Space benefits from its thinly veiled Cold War metaphor, with Popeye abducted by aliens and taken to their planet, whose cityscape resembles the Moscow skyline. A series of experiments are performed on him, including the Cosmic Ager and the Electronic Disintegrator. He survives both thanks to the aliens getting into a fight over his spinach and is finally freed when the canned vegetable restores his Herculean strength. If the aliens are meant to stand in for the Soviets, then the magic of tinned food can be read as a symbol of capitalist consumerism, through which Popeye had so often won girls, cars, and fights.

Ehsan Khoshbakht