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Help Yourself (1939)

A promotional film made for Pabst Brewing Company distributors.


This movie is part of the collection: Prelinger Archives

Production Company: Castle Films
Sponsor: Pabst Brewing Company
Audio/Visual: sound, B&W
Keywords: need keyword

Creative Commons license: Public Domain

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Reviewer: Spuzz - - September 26, 2003
Subject: Pretty awesome!
great overview of how sales managers can halp sell more Pabst beer to their customers. Full of amazing animation trickery which makes the advertising fly by, this is quite impressive, considering this is a Castle flim and all. I liked the very beginning, where it is told that we had just watched a film about Pabst, and now here's more reasons to sell Pabst to your customers. The images of the millions of Pabst boxes is pretty awesome. The whole sales pitch at the end bogs it down somewhat, but I will say this film is strongly reccomended anyways.

Reviewer: Steve Nordby - - August 20, 2003
Subject: Yes on beer!
Campaign for beer! Seven and a half out of ten homes need beer! Promotional film for Pabst distributors showing how Pabst is doing all the real work with big ad budgets, so you sales guys just get out there and follow the script we've prepared.

Reviewer: K.P. Lee - - August 20, 2003
Subject: Let's sell beer. Really. Let's sell lots of beer.
"Help Yourself," produced by Castle Films for the Pabst Brewing Company in 1939, is an interesting little gem of the movie. This insider film, intended for Pabst Blue Ribbon beer distributors, has rather high production values (pay attention to the stop-motion animation scattered throughout the film and the music score).

The first 5 minutes of "Help Yourself" detail Pabst's 1939 advertising efforts. Even in pre-war America, corporations were not shy about saturating society with advertising. The endless shots of magazine advertising, billboards, and other types of promotional material. You can see here the antecedents of many of today's advertising campaigns.

After the meta-promotion (promoting the promotion efforts to the distributors) follows some amusing re-enactments of Do's and Don't's for distributors. (The last exchange between Tom and Jack is really quite funny.)

After some more hoorahs about Pabst comes some promotion for a new product: Andeker, a beer for more upscale clientele. The acting showing a distributor promoting Andeker to a bar is truly quite awful.