Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer, Isadore Sparber, Sam Buchwald
Short Synopsis
Popeye and Bluto run penny arcades side by side on a seafront, and business is dead. The one passer-by is J. Wellington Wimpy, and the two proprietors fight over him, each dragging him into his own arcade to crank the peep-show machines. Bluto's machine shows a film of himself beating Popeye in a fight; Popeye's shows the reverse; the footage is drawn from the earlier cartoons Let's Get Movin' and The Twisker Pitcher, so that Wimpy, and the audience, watch highlights of two 1936-37 Popeyes through a viewer. The rivals' sales patter escalates into sabotage and then a brawl that wrecks both arcades, and Wimpy, who has watched everything for a single penny, ends the film by presenting both of them with a bill, having turned the ruins into an arcade of his own.
Why It Matters
- Wimpy as the sole customer, cadging a free show from two men too busy fighting to charge him, is a perfect use of the character, and the peep-show framing is the most elegant of the Fleischer compilation devices, since the old footage is literally what the characters are watching.
- The cartoon is in the public domain in the United States through non-renewal, and it is the first Popeye to open with the "Paramount presents" byline, a sign of the distributor's tightening hold on the studio that would end with the Fleischers' removal in 1942. The studio's publicity director, Hamp Howard, voices Bluto.
Notes and Trivia
- Margie Hines, Jack Mercer's wife, voices Olive in the Miami-era Fleischer Popeyes.
- Big Bad Sindbad and Popeye's 20th Anniversary, both Famous Studios films, used the same compilation trick in the 1950s.
- See also: I'm in the Army Now (1936), A Date to Skate (1938), Big Bad Sindbad (1952).
