Betty Boop
Betty Boop is an animated cartoon character appearing in the Talkartoon and Betty Boop series of films produced by Max Fleischer and released by Paramount Pictures. With her overt sexual appeal, Betty was a hit with theater-goers, and despite having been toned down in the mid-1930s, she remains popular today.
BOOP OOP A DOOP !
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Betty Boop made her first appearance on August 9, 1930 in the cartoon Dizzy Dishes, the sixth installment in Fleischer's Talkartoon series. She was little like her soon-to-be-famous self, however. Grim Natwick, a veteran animator of both Walt Disney's and Ub Iwerks' studios, was largely responsible for creating the character, which he modeled on Helen Kane, a singer and contract player at Paramount Pictures, the studio that distributed Fleischer's cartoons. In keeping with common practice, Natwick made his new character an animal, in this case, a French poodle. Beginning with this cartoon, the character's voice was performed by several different voice actresses until Mae Questel got the role, in 1931, and kept it for the rest of the series.
Natwick himself later conceded that Betty's original look was quite ugly. The animator redesigned her in 1932 to be recognizably human in the cartoon Any Rags. Her floppy poodle ears became hoop earrings, and her poodle fur became a bob haircut. She appeared in ten cartoons as a supporting character, a flapper girl with more heart than brains. In individual cartoons she was called "Nancy Lee" and "Nan McGrew". She usually served as studio star Bimbo's girlfriend.
Although some claim that Betty's first name was established in the 1931 Screen Songs cartoon Betty Co-ed, this "Betty" was, in truth, an entirely different character. Though the song itself may have led to Betty's eventual christening, any references to Betty Co-ed as a Betty Boop vehicle have been made in error. (The official Betty Boop website describes the titular character as a "prototype" of Betty.) In all, there were at least 12 Screen Songs cartoons that featured either Betty Boop or a similar character.
There were only two films known in which Betty was featured in color. 'Poor Cinderella' and 'Crazy Town' (1932). ( Although she appeared in the color feature film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Betty appeared in her traditional black and white. Betty made light of it in the film, saying work may have been slow since cartoons went to color, but she still had what it took.
Betty's development was still incomplete, however. Max Fleischer's brother, Dave, further altered the character, making her sexier and more feminine. The character was officially christened "Betty Boop" with the release of the 1932 Talkartoons short Minnie the Moocher, to which Cab Calloway and his orchestra lent their talents. Betty's famous personality also finally came into play in this film. In Minnie the Moocher, Betty runs away from her over-bearing parents, only to get lost with her boyfriend Bimbo in a haunted cave. A ghostly walrus (rotoscoped from live-action footage of Calloway), sings Calloway's hit song "Minnie the Moocher" accompanied by several skeletons and other ghosts. The ghosts' performance impels the frightened Betty and Bimbo to flee back to the safety of home. The eight Talkartoons released after Minnie the Moocher all featured Betty as their star. With the release of Stopping the Show in August of 1932, the Talkartoon series was replaced by a series of Betty Boop cartoons.
The portrayal of Betty's parents in Minnie the Moocher as seemingly being Orthodox Jews has led many to assume that Betty herself was intended as an overtly Jewish character. However later cartoons, such as the 1936 short Be Human, introduced Betty's Grandpa, who was portrayed very much as an 'old timer' in the style of such characters from wild west films. In 1932, Betty had become the self-proclaimed "queen of the animated screen"-above even Minnie Mouse- and also became one of Paramount's top stars.
Betty Boop is noteworthy for being the first cartoon character to fully represent a sexual woman. Other female characters of the same period showed their panties regularly, like Minnie Mouse, but didn't have a full caricature of a woman's form. Betty, however, reveled in her sexuality. She wore short dresses and a garter belt. Her breasts were prominent, and she showed her cleavage. In her cartoons, other characters try to sneak peeks at her while she's changing. In Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle, she does the hula wearing only a lei and a grass skirt, a bit she repeated in her cameo appearance in the first Popeye cartoon.
Nevertheless, the animators made sure to keep the character "pure" and girl-like (officially, she was only 16 years old). As Betty tells Koko the Clown in the film Boop-Oop-A-Doop after being threatened by a salacious ringmaster, "He couldn't take my boop-oop-a-doop away!"
Her cartoons also stood out from the competition due to their upbeat jazz soundtracks. In addition to three cartoons with soundtracks by Cab Calloway, guest bands for Betty Boop cartoons included the bands of Louis Armstrong, Rudy Vallee, and Don Redman. Ethel Merman, Irene Bordoni and Reis and Dunn also appeared in a few shorts as guest performers.
The adult sensibilities of Betty's cartoons made her a hit, and a wave of merchandising soon swept the world. Meanwhile, Helen Kane, who had inspired the character in 1930, sued the Fleischer studio in 1934 for allegedly stealing her trademark look, dancing and singing style, and catchphrase. Kane lost the suit (and the catchphrase "boop-oop-a-doop") when the Fleischers proved that the phrase had been used by other performers before Kane.
In the end, Betty's heightened sexuality would spell her doom. The Production Code censorship laws enforced beginning in 1934 forced her to wear a longer skirt and less revealing neckline. Betty was no longer a flapper; she was a husbandless housewife with a little dog named Pudgy. As a result, Betty's popularity sharply declined. The animators struggled to keep Betty's cartoons interesting by pairing her with popular comic strip characters, but none of these films were very successful (though one such pairing did propel Popeye to stardom of his own). Betty's cartoon career came to an end, at least temporarily, in 1939.
A Betty Boop comic strip by Max Fleischer was syndicated from 1934 through 1937. From 1984 through 1987, another strip, Betty Boop and Friends was produced by Brian Walker, Ned Walker, Greg Walker, and Morgan Walker.
Betty Boop's films would reach audiences once again when they were placed into syndication on television in the 1950s by U.M.&M. T.V. Corp. and later National Telefilm Associates (NTA). U.M.&M. and NTA altered the Paramount openings, removing the Paramount logo from the opening and closing. However, the mountain part of the logo remains on television prints, usually with a U.M.&M. copyright, but some prints contain Paramount-Publix bylines.
She also gained exposure in the 1960s counterculture movement. NTA capitalized on this and bought the rights to her shorts to colorize and re-air them on TV as The Betty Boop Show. There was criticism towards NTA's colorization since, as Turner Entertainment later did with Fleischer's Popeye the Sailor, the Korean artists who traced the cartoons into color skipped drawings and simplified movements, using limited animation in place of Fleischer's full animation.
Ivy Films put together a movie of some of Betty's better shorts called The Betty Boop Scandals of 1974 which saw some limited success. NTA later released another compilation movie, Hurray for Betty Boop in 1980. Marketers rediscovered Betty Boop in the 1980s as well, and merchandise featuring the character (in her earlier, sexier form) is now widely available. Also in the 1980s, rapper Betty Boo (whose voice, image, and name were influenced by the cartoon character) rose to popularity in the UK.
In 1988, Betty appeared for the first time in years, with a cameo in the Academy Award-winning film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It was widely reported that the animators had slipped in one frame of Betty nude, invisible to the audience, of course. If such a frame existed, it was replaced by a conventional frame once the movie came out on home video.
In 1993, animation director Jerry Rees, best known for his film The Brave Little Toaster, wrote and produced a new Betty Boop feature film for Metro Goldwyn-Mayer. Seventy-five percent of the film was storyboarded, but two weeks before voice recording was to begin, MGM switched studio chiefs and the project, tentatively called The Betty Boop Feature Script, was abandoned.
Ownership of the Boop cartoons has changed hands over the intervening decades due to a series of corporate mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures (mainly involving Republic Pictures and the 2006 corporate split of parent company Viacom into two separate companies). As of 2006, Lions Gate Home Entertainment (under license from Republic) holds home video rights, and CBS Paramount Television handles television distribution, while, ironically, original distributor Paramount handles theatrical distribution, although any sort of rerelease has yet to be announced. Also, the Betty Boop character and trademark is currently owned by King Features Syndicate and Fleischer Studios.
The Betty Boop series continues to be a favorite of many critics, and the 1933 Betty Boop cartoon Snow White (not to be confused with Disney's 1937 film Snow White) was selected for preservation by the U.S. Library of Congress in the National Film Registry in 1994. Betty Boop's popularity persists as well, and references to the character appear in such wide-ranging places as the comic strip Doonesbury, where the character B.D.'s busty girlfriend/wife is named "Boopsie", and the animated reality TV spoof Drawn Together, where Betty is the inspiration for Toot Braunstein. A Betty Boop musical is due to be produced on Broadway, with music by Andrew Lippa. Betty has her own themed shops at the Universal Orlando Resort: One at Islands of Adventure's Toon Lagoon (which features many King Features Syndicate cartoons) and one at the adjacent Universal Studios Florida theme park. She also makes cameo appearances as a walkaround character to sign autographs, usually nearby the store. There are currently twenty-two public domain Betty Boop cartoons available at the Internet Archive.
Max Fleischer (July 19, 1883 – September 11, 1972) was an important Austrian-American pioneer in the development of the animated cartoon. He brought such characters as Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, Popeye, and Superman to the movie screen and was responsible for a number of technological innovations.
Born to a Jewish family in Kraków, Poland then part of the Austrian-Hungarian province of Galicia, Fleischer was the second oldest of six children. His family immigrated to the USA in 1887 and settled in New York City.
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Fleischer came up with a concept to simplify the process of animating movement by tracing frames of live action film. His patent for the rotoscope was granted in 1917, although Max and his brother Dave Fleischer made their first cartoon using the device in 1915. Extensive use of this technique was made in Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell series, which started in 1919 and starred Koko the Clown and Fitz the dog.
Fleischer produced his Inkwell films for Bray Productions until, in 1921, he established Fleischer Studios (initially named "Out of the Inkwell Films") to produce animated cartoons and short subjects. Koko and Fitz remained the stars of the Out of the Inkwell series, which was renamed Inkwell Imps in 1927.
The Fleischer Studio invented the "bouncing ball" technique for its "Song Car-Tunes" series of animated sing-along shorts. In 1924, Fleischer added synchronized sound to this series, using the Phonofilm sound-on-film process developed by Lee De Forest; these Song Car-tunes would last until 1926. This was years before Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie (1928), which is often mistakenly cited as the first cartoon to synchronize sound with animation.
In 1923, Fleischer made a 50-minute animated film to explain Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. In 1925, he made a feature-length film about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution combining animation and live action.
Several of Fleischer's cartoons had soundtracks by (and often live or rotoscoped footage of) some of the leading jazz performers of the time, most notably Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong and Don Redman. Black musicians contributed songs to Betty Boop cartoons as well. Fleischer's use of featured black performers was unusual at a time when cinematic depictions of blacks were often minor and/or stereotypical roles.
In 1928, as film studios made the transition to sound, Fleischer decided to revive the Song Car-Tunes, as Screen Songs, and made a distribution deal with Paramount; Out of the Inkwell Films was renamed as Fleischer Studios. In 1929, Walt Disney would also gain a great amount of success through sound cartoons Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies. Fleischer responded to Walt Disney by discontinuing his silent Inkwell Imps series and concentrating on the production of sound cartoons through both the new Talkartoon-which debuted in October of 1929- and Screen Song series. A year into the series, Fitz was renamed "Bimbo" and became the star of the Talkartoon series, starting with the cartoon Hot Dog. By 1931, it became clear that Bimbo's girlfriend, a tall, sexy girl/dog hybrid with floppy ears, was making a hit with audiences. The canine characteristics were eliminated and the new, fully human girl, christened "Betty Boop," became the new series star. By the time of the 1932 cartoon Minnie the Moocher, Betty Boop could stand her own against the popularity of the Disney shorts; indeed, Fleischer would be considered Disney's primary rival in the 1930's.
Disney, however, was clearly still on top. In 1932, Disney's Flowers and Trees became the first cartoon short produced in the new three-strip Technicolor process. Disney shrewdly negotiated an exclusive license with Technicolor, preventing other studios from using the new full-color process until 1935. Additionally, the tremendous success of Three Little Pigs (1933) significantly boosted the popularity of the Silly Symphonies.
Fleischer's next move was to license the comic strip character Popeye the Sailor from King Features Syndicate. The sailor made his film debut in July, 1933, introduced in the Betty Boop short Popeye the Sailor. Popeye was an immediate hit for Fleischer, and his popularity would grow to rival that of Mickey Mouse by 1935.
The Color Classics series was introduced in 1934 as Fleischer's answer to Disney's Silly Symphonies. These color cartoons featured innovative techniques, such as the use of the setback, which allowed animation cels to be photographed in front of three-dimensional backgrounds.
The popularity of Betty Boop was irreparably damaged as a result of the enforcement of the Hays Code in 1934. Her overt sexuality was downplayed, and her racy flapper attire was replaced with longer skirts and a less revealing neckline. As a result, the character lost much of her audience appeal.
In 1937, film production at Fleischer Studios was disrupted by a 5 month long strike, which was ended when Paramount Pictures pressured Fleischer into settling with the striking workers. In 1938, Fleischer Studios moved from New York City to Miami, Florida to avoid pending unionization of the New York studios. In the wake of Disney's triumph with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, Paramount pressured Fleischer to move to feature-length animated films. Fleischer borrowed heavily from Paramount to finance the new state of the art studio and the production costs of the feature length films Gulliver's Travels (1939) and Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941). Both films suffered from unfavorable comparison to Disney, received mixed reviews, and had disappointing box-office receipts; Gullivers Travels could only be a small success. Max and Dave were also not able to pay off their loans due to the lack of success that came from most of their late period projects as well.
On May 24, 1941, Paramount foreclosed on the Fleischer loans and took over the studio. Max remained nominally in charge, but a long-simmering personal feud with his brother Dave complicated the situation further. Shortly after the release of Mr. Bug, Dave, not able to cooperate with Max, left for California to take over as head of Columbia's Screen Gems animation studio in April 1942, and Max was then forced out as Paramount installed new management, among them Max's son-in-law, Seymour Kneitel. Within a year, the studio was renamed Famous Studios and, soon after, moved back to New York.
Despite the disappointing performance of the feature films, one of Fleischer's most successful productions, the Superman cartoon series, was launched during this late period. Nine episodes were completed by Fleischer Studios, with the final eight made by Famous Studios after the reorganization.
Unlike Disney, Fleischer did not own many of his characters and he was not interested in merchandising. This is one of the reasons why the studio was financially beholden to Paramount.
After leaving his namesake studio, Fleischer took a job making commercial and educational films for the Jam Handy Corporation, including Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (1944). Fleischer left Handy in 1954 and went to work for his old colleague John Randolph Bray, who had given Max his big break in 1916.
Fleischer brought suit against Paramount in 1956 over the distribution of his old cartoons to television, which had resulted in many cartoons being edited and broadcast with Fleischer's credits removed. The case was pending for five years before Paramount was granted a summary judgment dismissing the suit, as too much time had elapsed and the statute of limitations had expired.
In 1958, Fleischer and cartoon producer Hal Seeger created 100 Koko the Clown cartoons for television. Koko was voiced by Larry Storch, as were friends Kokonut and Mean Moe. These cartoons were aired on many local channels during the 1960s.
Fleischer, along with his wife Essie, moved to the Motion Picture Country House in 1967, where he died from congestive heart failure on September 11, 1972, at the age of eighty-nine. Eleven days earlier, Fleischer had signed a contract with King Features for a Betty Boop merchandising campaign, a deal that would generate millions of dollars in revenue after his death.
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