Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: February 5, 1932
Stars: Bimbo, Betty Boop
Rating: ★
Review:
Even though ‘The Robot’ was released half a year after ‘The Herring Murder Case’ (1931) it features Bimbo in his design before his make-over in that film.
In this film Bimbo is courting a female character, who only wants to marry him, when he can lick ‘One Round Mike’ in a boxing match. Bimbo accepts, but when it’s his turn he builds a robot out of his car to win the game.
Betty Boop has a small cameo in this cartoon when she rushes outside to revive Bimbo’s car-robot (or is she Bimbo’s girlfriend but in a different design? The Fleischers were inconsistent enough to be unclear on this). Apart from this short scene, there’s little to enjoy in ‘The Robot’. The most interesting part maybe Bimbo’s way of courting his sweetheart, which he does by ‘television’, a sort of Skype avant la lettre.
Strangely enough, the idea of a boxing robot was reused in ‘Mickey’s Mechanical Man‘ from 1933, with equally weak results. There was something going on in 1932 with boxing robots anyway, for also Popeye socks a robot in the ring in the Popeye Sunday comic strip of April, 24 and May 1, 1932. In any case, to most people in the Great Depression robots were the ultimate terror, as unemployment already was a major problem. Luckily, no robot would be used in any factory until the 1960s. And boxing robots still haven’t seen the light of day, yet.
Spread from the April 1934 issue of Modern Mechanix and Inventions
More on the robot craze of the early 1930s can be found here and here.
Watch ‘The Robot’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Talkartoon No. 32
To the previous Talkartoon: Boop-Oop-a-Doop
To the next Talkartoon: Minnie the Moocher
‘The Robot’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Dr. Grob's Animation Review 
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May 20, 2017 at 06:54
David Gerstein
I’m very sure Betty is supposed to be Bimbo’s girlfriend—just as the “white Bimbo” and “black Bimbo” coexisted for awhile, so I think was the stringbeanish, bun-eared girl of HIDE AND SEEK (and similar) also intended as a kind of variant Betty, perhaps as reimagined by a different artist.
Sometimes even a single model could vary within a film—like Bimbo in ROW ROW ROW, who looks much less like himself in the earlier scenes, and that’s sort of what seems to have happened with Betty here…
May 20, 2017 at 14:22
Gijs Grob
Dear David Gerstein
Welcome back! Thanks for you comment. I guess you must be right, ‘Row Row Row’ is a good counterexample.
Gijs