Sherry Chandler

4 Comments

• 1. Tommy replies at 22nd February 2008, 10:29 am :

  Wow, that’s about as surreal as anything the Pythons ever did. I loved it when Betty’s mom reached into her gramophone-headed spouse and changed the cylinder. Apparently that wasn’t just metaphor, it was metamorphosis!

  (And she’s German? Huh.)

• 2. sherry replies at 22nd February 2008, 12:18 pm :

  Yiddish, I think, Tommy. Looks like Papa is wearing a skull cap. Racism may also be part of what got this cartoon banned. Plus a fairly frank sexuality.

  What I really like is Cab Calloway’s dance at the beginning. Eat your heart out Michael Jackson.

  Poppysmatus says Betty Boop is too free and fearless and so had to be repressed.

• 3. Rebecca Clayton replies at 22nd February 2008, 5:46 pm :

  When I was in Costa Rica in 1984, I sat one night in a cafe and watched a bunch of Betty Boop cartoons (in English), including this one. Never saw them before or since, but they were all rather nightmare-inducing.

  Sauerbraten, as made my my German great-aunt (she was about Betty’s age, come to think of it, a flapper) was a pork sausage. Betty would never have turned up her nose at Aunt Zelma’s sauerbraten, I’m sure.

  Thanks for posting this strange, strange cartoon!

• 4. sherry replies at 24th February 2008, 8:48 am :

  Rebecca, perhaps Ma and Pa should have urged Betty to “just say no.” Her adolescent rebellion has overtones of an opium dream. To me, her refusing to eat (anorexia) and drug associations are eerily predictive of modern troubled teens.

  On the other hand, this anonymous critique of Betty Boop cartoons, which also explains Tommy’s question about her origins, suggests that she’s defying tradition by refusing to eat.

  Betty was the creation of the Fleischer brothers, Jewish immigrants from Austria, who set out, with financing from Paramount, to challenge Walt Disney. In almost every respect their cartoons differed from Disney’s. This was true of their style of animation, which utilized film of human motion. It was true of theme and story line. Betty is, along with Popeye and Superman, the best known of their creations. She is also, as befitted a “flapper,” the one who introduced jazz music to the movies.

  Several of the “Betty Boop” cartoons used jazz songs, not simply as background music, but for style of movement. One of the most interesting of these for our purposes is “Minnie, the Moocher.” The film begins with live action footage of Cab Calloway, who made the song his trademark, and his Cotton Club Orchestra (he had replaced Ellington as the club’s headliner). Cab sings and dances the title song. When the animation begins, Betty and her father, a Jew from Austria, perhaps based upon the Fleischers’ own father, are arguing. He insists that she must follow the family tradition and eat a traditional dish. Betty tearfully refuses. The scene is a thinly disguised parody of “The Jazz Singer.” Like Jakie Rabinowitz, Betty decides to run away. Like Jakie, she too runs toward jazz music. But, unlike Jakie, Betty runs toward the real thing. No “Toot, Toot, Tootsie” for her. With her boyfriend, the dog Bimbo, she runs off to the strains of “Minnie, the Moocher.”

  Minnie, Calloway sings, had learned “to kick the gong around,” to use opium, from her boy friend “Smoky” whose drug of choice was cocaine. Although the cartoon does not show Betty taking any drug, she does, to the accompaniment of Cab’s version of the song, find herself in a dream world. …Betty meets a ghostly walrus with enlarged lips who sings the song. Betty and Bimbo are terrified, as well they should be, for the Walrus transforms itself into a spectral cat whose kittens suck it dry and into a prison guard who escorts skeletons to the electric chair, among other transmigrations. In all of these, the walrus/cat/guard moves like Cab Calloway. At one point, in a reversal of a Stepin Fetchit gag, Betty and Bimbo turn black with fear.

  It’s a fascinating article that makes the point that these cartoons were the first exposure the movie-going audience had to real (dangerous, sexy, violent) jazz instead of an Eddy Cantor, jazz-singer bowdlerization.

  The walrus’s movements were done by rotoscoping Calloway’s dance movements. It’s a technique used in several other of these Fleischer brother cartoons.

  Aunt Zelma’s sauerbrauten sounds good to me, but then it’s been years since I had a girlish figure to protect.

Leave a comment