Betty Boop has appeared in over 100 cartoons.ĥ. According to King Features, Betty Boop originally appeared in human form in the cartoon short Any Rags?, although her first legit appearance according to the "Betty Boop Wikia Fandom" as a human girl was actually in Mask-A-Raid.Ĥ. Betty Boop's initial cartoon debut was as a dog with long floppy ears and great legs.ģ. Betty Boop made her first cartoon appearance as a satire of Helen Kane, Clara Bow and flapper girls of the Roaring Twenties in the 1930 short Dizzy Dishes.Ģ. Betty's cartoons, which were frequently set in Depression-era New York City, took adult moviegoers to weird worlds where the characters were pursued by frightening creatures but where everything turned out all right in the end.
Fleischer Studios' animators gave her the common touch. Yet even with the extra violence, the Bimbo cartoons maintain a lighter mood than the Calloway-Betty Boop shorts, as physical danger is often translated to slapstick humor at Bimbo's expense.Betty Boop is still popular throughout the world. Like the later Calloway collaborations, the Bimbo cartoons feature a rich jazz soundtrack and ghostly atmosphere.īut rather than evoking a melancholic, creeping terror like in Snow-White and Minnie the Moocher, these earlier Fleischer cartoons are noticeably more violent and place Bimbo in a variety of perilous situations. An anthropomorphic dog and Betty Boop's sometimes-boyfriend, Bimbo was the featured protagonist of several Fleischer shorts before being relegated to a supporting role as Betty Boop herself became more popular. The next two Fleischer cartoons feature Bimbo as the central character. Burton's version is certainly fun, but the original Fleischer short is drenched in a nightmarish weirdness that just doesn't translate to his film's animation style. The character of Oogie Boogie was heavily inspired by (i.e., almost exactly copied) from the Calloway-walrus character, as was the musical style and dance sequence. Chock-full of ghouls, this short will seem familiar to anyone who has seen Tim Burton's A Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). RELATED: The Consumer's Guide to Goth FeminismĪn oddly didactic fever dream, Betty Boop runs away from home with her boyfriend, Bimbo, and finds herself in a haunted cave watching a phantom walrus dance.
The artistry of the cartoons from that brief collaboration leave one wishing for an alternate history where Calloway and the Fleischers had continued working together to produce more of their joint style of strange, jazz-inflected beauty.
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In a country where segregation and Jim Crow laws were a part of daily life, disseminating the music and artistry of a Black musician was considered controversial by many.Įnforcement of the Hays Code began in earnest in 1934, and the Fleischers were forced to stop using Calloway's music and likeness in their animation. Two of the Betty Boop cartoons included here feature Cab Calloway both for his music and his distinctive dance style. Perhaps remembered more nowadays for the titular character's kittenish charms, early Betty Boop cartoons are marked by the macabre and a push against social boundaries. The following four cartoons exemplify the Fleischers' signature brand of the bizarre, fitting fare for anyone with a taste for creepy, vintage curiosities. The shorts produced by Max and Dave Fleischer are particularly distinguishable by their surreal aesthetics and distinct German Expressionist influence. In pre-Code Hollywood, the animated short was an opportunity for artists to let their strangest aesthetic whims come to life. In the early years of cinema, from the silent era and into the talkies, animated shorts were a constant accompaniment to feature films shown in cinemas.ĭuring this time, animated shorts were a vehicle for whimsical musical entertainment, but at the same time, they were not always the twee flights of fancy that became the overwhelming norm when the Hays Code came into strict enforcement. Cartoons have not always been immediately associated with bright colors and light, child-friendly themes. Halloween may be over, but who says the eerie, the spooky, and the outright weird must be seasonal? This compilation of vintage cartoons is all of those things and watchable all year round.
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