On with the New

Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: December 2, 1938
Stars: Betty Boop
Rating:  ★★
Review:

In the opening scene of ‘On with the New’ we watch Betty Boop working at the ‘Ye olde quainte coffee house’.

Betty has to work hard: she must cook and wash the dishes at the same time. She clearly hates her job, but luckily she gets a job as a nurse in ‘Bundle from Heaven Nursery’. At the nursery we watch the babies being cleaned at an assembly line. However, as soon as Betty has them in their beds and said goodnight to them, the babies cause havoc. The uncontrollable babies behave so badly that Betty quits her job on the spot and rushes back to her old job, which she does with renewed enthusiasm.

There’s little to enjoy in ‘On With The New’, although the assembly line sequence is rather nice. The uncontrollable baby material go all the way back to ‘Mickey’s Orphans‘ (1931) and ‘Mickey’s Nightmare‘ (1932), and by 1939 such antics, with its multitude of animation cycles, had become old fashioned and trite. The assembly line sequence, on the other hand, looks forward to a similar sequence in the Warner Bros. classic ‘Baby Bottleneck’ (1946).

Watch ‘On with the New’ yourself and tell me what you think:

This is Betty Boop cartoon No. 77
To the previous Betty Boop cartoon: Sally Swing
To the next Betty Boop cartoon: Pudgy in Thrills and Chills

‘On with the New’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’