Boop-Oop-A-Doop: Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me about Betty Boop

Old cartoons are usually pretty much awesome- I for one love old Mickey Mouse shorts, Silly Symphonies, and the like- I've even grown to like a lot of the Loony Tunes stuff, which I had an unreasonable distaste for when I was younger (get exposed to enough Disney at an early age and you feel compelled to take sides). It's a wealth of great ideas and (mostly) kid-friendly gags- slapstick with enough clever humor and erudite references to draw in my enormous galumphing adult brain.

For the most part, though, it's kid's stuff. Even when I drag in all the experimental animation I've been exposed to (Begone Dull Care springs to mind) I can't help but imagine a rather sanitary set of cartoons inhabiting the dawn and expansion of hand-drawn animation in the early 20th century.

If only someone had given me the proper rundown on Betty Boop.

The movement of animation on a large scale towards an adult audience often strikes me as a rather contemporary shift- Looney Tunes may have been pointed towards adult audiences but the strong reliance on word-play and slapstick is enough for me to disqualify it*. I'm talking about stuff like Space Ghost Coast to Coast, The Simpsons, South Park, the Brak Show, and Sealab 2021. Mature is probably not the way to describe these shows, but they're post-modern and highly surreal, and generally pointed towards an older audience*

Of course, I'm pointedly ignoring the initial surge of films animated for adults, but then again, I think a lot of people do. The adoption of the Hays Code for 30 odd years didn't help anything.

But I'm getting off track. All I want to talk about is how great Betty Boop cartoons are.



Let's start with Bimbo's Initiation, which is more or less five minutes of torture traps that Bimbo is forced to run through. Sadistic! This also features an appearance of proto-Betty, as a half-dog sort of deal, much like Bimbo.



This one is even more bizarre. The cartoon ambles from a fairly typical animation gag (showing the animator draw the character, who comes to life, mischief ensues) into one of the most bizarre and surreal sequences I've ever seen. By the end of it, it's reached an almost disturbing fever pitch, and then bam! it ends. It's almost like the ending of The Birds, except, you know, not at all. Anyhow. 



I've saved my favorite for last. This one, aside from exemplifying the sort of mad-cap surrealism that runs rampant through early Betty Boop (and Fleischer Studios' work in general), also features an insanely terrific performance of St. James Infirmary Blues by Cab Calloway- they even used the then-quite-new rotoscope (invented in-house) to capture his dance moves!

Betty Boop is basically everything I was looking for from early cartoons- gorgeous animation that's fun, experimental, mature, and certainly unafraid to take a turn for the insane. I'm certainly going to keep browsing through pre-Hays Code animation (especially Fleishcer Studios) for more gems, and I hope that you do as well.

*I'll just go ahead and ignore Fritz the Cat (not very good), Akira (great), Princess Mononoke (very great) and about a dozen other ways to punch holes in this sentence, okay?