Customers Wanted (1939) ** (out of 4)This Popeye short is fairly lazy as it features footage from LET'S GET MOVING and THE TWISKER PITCHER. Basically the "story" here is that Popeye and Bluto are working rival movie houses at a carnival. Soon the two of them are fighting over Wimpy and whose movies he will be watching.Of course, the movies that he watches are the two titles that I mentioned so basically you've got a short that shows several clips from those two movies with a few scenes worth of new material. The two shorts are very good on their own but just watching the clips here is rather pointless and on the whole this isn't a very good short. It certainly doesn't help that the new footage doesn't contain any laughs.

ONCE AGAIN WE find ourselves choosing a B & W Max Fleischer entry in the POPEYE series as an honored review. Curiously It is also one that we would pigeon hole as being a "cheater." WITH THE USE of that term of "cheater" we are not necessarily putting a curse on it or branding it as being substandard, for it surely is not that. It is our way of defining a film, be it live action or animated, which makes use of a substantial amount of archival footage from previous films as an aid to making a story of its own.OUR STORY IN a nutshell has Popeye and perennial rival, Bluto, cast as rival penny arcade owner/sideshow barkers along the fictional midway of an imaginary amusement park. With business being extremely sparse, the two wind up fighting over one interested potential customer. This patron turns out to be one J. Wellington Wimpy, the prototype mooch and long starring character in E.Z. Sehgar's THIMBLE THEATRE Comic Strip.*WITH THEIR USUAL lack of delicate debate and peaceful negotiations, the two rival would be Ziegfelds use their propensity toward physical combat and take no prisoners cunning to win over Wimpy as their own patron.INASMUCH THAT THEY are dealing with the ultimate societal parasite, the little guy uses his old "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday a hamburger today" policy In dealing with both entrepreneurs. In every case of his viewing an animated flip picture machines, the coin employed is "borrowed" from either Bluto or Popeye.THE PORTIONS OF archival film used in the penny arcade machines are two each from two different Popeye Cartoon Shorts. One involves Bluto and Popeye competing in a baseball game. Both are pitching and both are also sluggers. The other has the struggle between the two in moving furniture for the lovely Olive Oyl.INCIDENTALLY, THIS APPESARANCE in the brief flashback is the only part the pulchritudinous Miss Oyl has in the picture.THE CLIMAX OF THE story comes when the two exponents of physical action and what we would call today MMA**, find themselves locked in a great property destroying all-out battle. With the now destroyed arcade machines forming a sort of Amphitheatre, the fight rages on; while the little mooch, Wimpy-himself, charges 10 cents per patron to the great crowd who enthusiastically swarm into the arcade.NOW THAT'S AN awfully hard business plan to beat; being the combination of selling a product (the fight) at a modest price to strangers in a facility (arcade) that is not yours! WE COULD CALL this an example of "SURVIVAL OF THE FATTEST!"NOTE * That's right, buckaroos, THIMBLE THEATRE was the original title of the comic strip by Elzie C. Segar. It was around via syndication in the newspapers for a good ten years before a walk-on by a muscular, one-eyed sailor in 1929 changed the course of the strip forever.NOTE ** MMA = Mixed Martial Arts, of course.

Popeye and Bluto both run penny arcades and are side-by-side vying for customers. Neither is doing much business. Wimpy walks in and the competition is on to see who gets his business. Bluto wins out and winds up showing the cheap Wimpy a "moving picture" (flipping pages quickly through a machine) in which Bluto impresses Olive Oyl with this strength as a furniture mover. Popeye literally pulls the rug underneath Wimpy and gets him into his arcade and treats him a movie in which the story continues, expect Popeye, of course, is the impressive one.The same thing happens again with competing baseball-hero movies and finally the two just slug it out....and Wimpy winds up making a profit over it. Nothing super, but not bad and a clever ending, which refers back to the opening of the cartoon.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the right honorable J. Wellington Wimpy, raconteur, bon vivant and noted consumer of that delicacy known as the hamburger. This is one of Wimpy's shining hours. This is truly his cartoon. He walks away with this one without breaking a sweat. I have a soft spot for Wimpy-some would argue that soft spot is in my head, but I digress-because he is obviously a man aware of the value of leisure and thus the possessor of great wisdom. He was all too rarely used.This short is the best cheater I've seen. The use of old clips is minimal-at most two minutes or so from a seven minute cartoon-with a framing device that makes the use of clips integral to the plot. It's also one of the better showcases for Jack Mercer, the most familiar and successful voice behind Popeye, because not only the framing device, but the clips as well, have Mercer making remarks as Popeye sort of half-muttered, almost as asides, that are hilarious. A large part of the charm of the Fleischer Studios Popeyes arises out of Mercer's work at the microphone and he fleshed out the character's personality with his often ad-libbed remarks. Well worth seeking out. Most highly recommended.