Studio: Paramount Cartoon Studios (formerly Famous Studios)
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Seymour Kneitel, Isadore Sparber
Short Synopsis
Popeye and Bluto run diners facing each other across a street, and neither has a customer. J. Wellington Wimpy, hungry and penniless as ever, appears, and the two proprietors compete for him: each shouts a lower price, each drags him across the street into his own establishment, each loads his counter with food that Wimpy eats before the rival snatches him back. The price war becomes a brawl in which the diners are wrecked and the cooks fight in the street, while Wimpy, serenely, works his way through both menus for nothing. The spinach settles Bluto, and Wimpy, having eaten everything in sight, presents his usual promise to pay on Tuesday and strolls off, leaving both men with nothing but a bill.
Why It Matters
- The rival-diner plot had been used before, in Customers Wanted and elsewhere, and this version is notable mainly for being the last: it is the final theatrical appearance of Bluto and of Wimpy, who had been with the series since 1933, and Wimpy's exit, fed and unpaid, is the right one.
- Spree Lunch is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright never renewed, and it is among the handful of 1957 Popeyes, the last year of theatrical production, that can be freely seen. The studio had by then been renamed Paramount Cartoon Studios.
Notes and Trivia
- Bluto became "Brutus" in the 1960 television cartoons because of a confusion over who owned the name.
- Jack Mercer wrote the story, one of many he contributed in the series' last years.
- See also: Customers Wanted (1939), Insect to Injury (1956), Spooky Swabs (1957).
