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Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: December 5, 1931
Stars: Betty Boop, Bimbo
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
Only three months after Van Beuren’s ‘The Family Shoe’, the Fleischer studio released their retelling of the fairy tale in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.
Despite being released after six cartoons featuring Bimbo in his final design, ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ features Bimbo with his old, less memorable look. Bimbo plays the part of Jack. He is prompted to plant some magic beans, after a giant in the sky has dropped a cigar on him. The beans soon sprout into a giant beanstalk, which takes Bimbo to the clouds. There he discovers Betty Boop, who’s the giant’s prisoner, making pea soup for him. Bimbo ties the giant and flees with Betty on the magic hen, which changes into a car when hitting the road. But an obnoxious mouse releases the giant who follows them using cars as roller-skates.
‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ is a very enjoyable, but weird and highly surreal version of the classic tale. It was the last Talkartoon to feature Betty Boop with dog ears. In all her subsequent films she would be fully human.
The short features ‘Sweepin’ The Clouds Away’ as its theme song, which had been a huge hit for Maurice Chevalier in 1930. Two years later Disney would visit similar grounds in ‘Giantland‘, which is, as you may expect, way less surreal, but much better animated.
Watch ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Talkartoon No. 28
To the previous Talkartoon: Mask-a-Raid
To the next Talkartoon: Dizzy Red Riding Hood
‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: June 10, 1932
Stars: Betty Boop, Bimbo, Koko the Clown
Rating: ★
Review:
In ‘Admission Free’ Betty Boop works as a ticket seller in a penny arcade hall.
We’re watching Koko being knocked out by a boxing ball, a monkey watching a boxing game in a mutoscope, and Bimbo trying his luck at a shooting gallery. When he fails to hit pipes and ducks, Bimbo tries to shoot rabbits. One of these wanders into the forest. Bimbo follows him. Suddenly we’re in the forest, never to return to the arcade. Betty Boop only reenters in the last scene, when the rabbit blows Bimbo up into the air with some fireworks. Suddenly Betty is with Bimbo on a large sky-rocket. Iris out.
‘Admission Free’ makes very little sense, and is terribly unfunny. It’s only noteworthy for being the first cartoon to feature Betty Boop’s very own theme song: ‘Made of pen and ink, she can win you with a wink. Ain’t she cute? (Boop-oop-a-doop), Sweet Betty‘.
Watch ‘Admission Free’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Talkartoon No. 40
To the previous Talkartoon: Hide and Seek
To the next Talkartoon: The Betty Boop Limited
‘Admission Free’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: May 20, 1932
Stars: Ethel Merman, Betty Boop, Bimbo
Rating: ★
Review:
‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’ is a Screen Song featuring Ethel Merman singing the 1911 hit song.
The cartoon opens with Betty Boop being a baby sitter in a park where Bimbo is a park warden. Bimbo doesn’t try to hide his lust, panting in front of our female hero. To be with Betty, Bimbo kicks off the baby-carriage. The baby falls into the water, steals a hot dog and plays with a fountain. When he returns to the loving couple, it’s night already. Enter Ethel Merman. At the end cartoon there’s some strange sequence with a chicken hatching three eggs, and the chicks being followed by a cat.
Unfortunately, this scene cannot rescue the short, and the cartoon remains completely forgettable.
Watch ‘Let me Call you Sweetheart’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Let me Call you Sweetheart’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: April 8, 1932
Stars: Betty Boop, Bimbo, Koko the Clown
Rating: ★★
Review:
In ‘The Dancing Fool’ Bimbo and Koko are painters, who try to paint the outside of a large building in a lengthy and boring intro.
Then they go painting the words ‘Betty Boop’s dancing school’ on the window of that very school. Immediately they go inside themselves, where Betty’s teaching several animals how to dance. This leads to several shots of dancing animals.
This short contains no plot and only a few gags. Its highlight is a scene of strange birds, who dance through, above and under each other. The animators must have thought the same way, for these weird birds appear no less than three times on the screen.
Watch ‘The Dancing Fool’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Talkartoon No. 36
To the previous Talkartoon: Crazy Town
To the next Talkartoon: Chess Nuts
‘The Dancing Fool’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: March 25, 1932
Stars: Betty Boop, Bimbo
Rating: ★★½
Review:
In ‘Crazy Town’ Betty Boop and Bimbo take a streetcar to Crazy Town, where everything is the other way round.
Unfortunately, this great idea doesn’t really lead to a funny cartoon. We’re watching e.g. fish in the sky and birds in the water, an elephant with a real trunk and a fish fishing for a person. In a lengthy sequence Bimbo is a barber adding hair to his customers. None of these scenes even raise a chuckle. In fact, the cartoon’s only interesting part is it’s opening, because the story unfolds like a real book.
It’s weird to realize that as soon as the Fleischers deliberately tried to show a surreal world, they failed, while their ‘normal’ shorts were full of mesmerizing surrealism (e.g. the earlier ‘Mask-a-raid‘ and ‘Chess Nuts‘ or ‘Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle‘ from later that year). The theme song of this cartoon is the 1931 hit ‘Foolish Facts’.
Watch ‘Crazy Town’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Talkartoon No. 35
To the previous Talkartoon: S.O.S.
To the next Talkartoon: The Dancing Fool
‘Crazy Town’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
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’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: January 16, 1932
Stars: Betty Boop, Koko, Bimbo
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
In ‘Boop-Oop-a-Doop’ Betty Boop works at the circus as a lion-tamer and as a rope-dancer.
We watch her in a sexy performance on the slack-rope. During this performance we can see the circus-master growing with lust, and back in her dressing room he tries to harass her. Luckily, Koko saves here, so he “couldn’t take her boop-oop-a-doop away“.
This is the first short to co-star Koko and Betty. Koko had returned to the animated screen in ‘The Herring Murder Case’, and he’s clearly comfortable in the circus setting of this short. Interestingly, it’s Koko who is Betty’s lover in this cartoon, not Bimbo. Bimbo’s role is reduced to being a peanut seller in a running gag. Koko’s career in the sound era was short-lived, however, and was to end already two years later with ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!‘ (1934).
‘Boop-oop-a-doop’ is an entertaining short, full of catchy music. For example, on the slack-rope Betty sings ‘Do Something’, a song associated by the singer who inspired her character, Helen Kane, who had recorded it in 1929. The two versions are indeed surprisingly similar, and it is not hard to see why Kane, whose own career had been in a steady decline, sued the Fleischer company on May 4, 1932.
It may very well be that this cartoon alone triggered that event. It at least should have been quite some evidence for Fleischer’s piracy, but after a case of two years, judge McGoldrick saw it otherwise. It’s rather difficult to understand now how the Fleischers could have won. Not only does Betty Boop sound like Kane, her looks are also strikingly similar. Indeed, according to her animator and creator Gram Natwick she was modeled after Helen Kane when conceived for ‘Dizzy Dishes‘ (1930). However, Betty’s grotesque, and rather ugly appearance in her earliest cartoons must hardly have given that fact away. Moreover, in her following films both Betty’s voice and looks were both subject to change. Only by the time of ‘Boop-Oop-a-Doop’ Betty really started to look like her source of inspiration…
Anyway, for a detailed account of the trial, see Trafalz’s excellent blog post on the subject.
Watch ‘Boop-Oop-a-Doop’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Boop-Oop-a-Doop’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
This is Talkartoon No. 31
To the previous Talkartoon: Any Rags
To the next Talkartoon: The Robot
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: November 14, 1931
Stars: Betty Boop, Bimbo
Rating: ★★★★
Review:
In ‘Mask-A-Raid’ a very sexy Betty is queen of a masked ball.
The king, a dirty old man, fancies her, but she prefers Bimbo. Nevertheless, she makes Bimbo and the old guy fighting each other. Suddenly knights pop up from nowhere and everybody is fighting.
In ‘Mask-a-raid’ some of the random surrealism of ‘Barnacle Bill‘ and ‘Mysterious Mose‘ (both 1930) returns to the screen. The cartoon is full of weird images and odd gags, and at times should be seen to be believed. It ends with some great scatting by Bimbo himself.
This is Betty’s first cartoon as a human being (apart from the Screen Song ‘Kitty from Kansas City‘ from only one week before), with her dog ears having changed into large earrings. It’s also the first to give her starring credits. It introduces the new story idea of old men fancying Betty, and harassing her against her will. This story element would also be featured in e.g. ‘Boop-oop-a-Doop‘ (1932) and ‘Betty Boop’s Big Boss‘ (1933).
Watch ‘Mask-A-Raid’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Talkartoon No. 27
To the previous Talkartoon: In the Shade of the Old Apple Sauce
To the next Talkartoon: Jack and the Beanstalk
‘Mask-A-Raid’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: October 10, 1931
Stars: Betty Boop, Bimbo
Rating: ★★½
Review:
Betty Boop, who lives in an apartment across the street, invites Bimbo over, but he can’t come, because he has to attend his little baby brother Aloysius.
Nevertheless, he does abandon the mischievous little brat and goes to Betty’s house to skip rope. However, Aloysius sucks them back into his own house, using a particularly powerful vacuum cleaner.
Aloysius is seen smoking a cigar and reading the paper, not unlike Baby Herman in ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit‘ (1988). The cartoon establishes Bimbo and Betty as lovers, but it doesn’t make much sense, and its gags feel random and misguided.
‘Minding the Baby’ was the last cartoon featuring Betty with dog ears. in her next cartoon ‘Mask-A-Raid‘ she became fully human.
Watch ‘Minding the Baby’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Talkartoon No. 25
To the previous Talkartoon: Bimbo’s Express
To the next Talkartoon: In the Shade of the Old Apple Sauce
‘Minding the Baby’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: August 22, 1931
Stars: Betty Boop, Bimbo
Rating: ★★
Review:
In this Talkartoon Bimbo is a moving man, moving Betty Boop’s household together with a horse, a cat and a hippo.
The short features ca. no story and consists of a string of unrelated throwaway gags. The animation, too, is at times completely random. For example, there’s some totally unnecessary and incomprehensible flexible animation on Bimbo’s van in the opening scene. This total lack of direction hampers ‘Bimbo’s Express’, and it fails to fulfil any promise.
The cartoon’s most stunning scene is that of Betty Boop cutting her toenails. But even more striking is Sammy Timberg’s music, which is loosely jointed from numerous familiar tunes, and which anticipates Carl Stalling’s techniques by several years.
This cartoon is billed ‘Bimbo & Betty’, indicating Betty’s rising star. In the next cartoon, ‘Minding the Baby‘, it would be ‘Betty Boop and Bimbo’, and in ‘Mask-A-Raid‘, it’s already “Betty Boop in ‘Mask-A-Raid’ with Bimbo’…
Watch ‘Bimbo’s Express’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Talkartoon No. 24
To the previous Talkartoon: Bimbo’s Initiation
To the next Talkartoon: Minding the Baby
‘Bimbo’s Express’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: July 24, 1931
Stars: Bimbo, Betty Boop
Rating: ★★★★★ ♕
Review:
‘Bimbo’s Initiation’ is probably the most famous Betty Boop cartoon, apart from ‘Snow-White‘ (1933).
Nevertheless, Betty only plays a small part in the cartoon, which is really about Bimbo. In his previous cartoon, ‘The Herring Murder Case’, Bimbo had been redesigned. He’s now more clearly a dog character, with a predominant black coloring instead of the earlier white. This redesigned Bimbo has some character in his rather original looks, but he’s still far from a character, remaining only a foil for the things happening around him.
In no cartoon this is so clear as in ‘Bimbo’s Initiation’. In the first scene we watch him walking on the street, when he suddenly falls into a well and is being caught in a scary underworld beneath the street. There bearded guys repeatedly ask him whether he wants to be a member of their secret order. Bimbo keeps saying no, and he tries to flee, but he cannot escape the nightmarish world, in which every deadly room leads to another one. These scenes are accompanied by a hot jazz version of ‘Tiger Rag’. Luckily, the last room features Betty, and when she asks him whether he wants to be a member, Bimbo gives in. Then all the bearded figures appear to be duplicates of her!
Betty Boop is completely blank in this cartoon and she still has dog ears here. But the nightmarish world is absolutely inspired. It’s both claustrophobic and funny, and we feel with Bimbo, who’s now victim of a world, in which no law, whether human or natural, applies. No other cartoon was so far removed from the happy world of Walt Disney, and arguably no other cartoon before Tex Avery’s ‘Northwest Hounded Police‘ (1946) and Chuck Jones’s ‘Duck Amuck‘ (1953) would be so compelling in portraying the anguish of a trapped cartoon character. Despite its primitive looks, the cartoon hasn’t aged at all, and it’s an undisputed classic within the complete cartoon canon.
‘Bimbo’s initiation’ undoubtedly has been the inspiration of the scary cartoon sequence in which a girl is caught in Joe Dante’s episode in the theatrical version of ‘The Twilight zone’ (1983).
Watch ‘Bimbo’s initiation’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Talkartoon No. 23
To the previous Talkartoon: The Herring Murder Case
To the next Talkartoon: Bimbo’s Express
‘Bimbo’s initiation’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’ and on Betty Boop: Essential Collection 2′
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: May 23, 1931
Stars: Bimbo, Betty Boop
Rating: ★★★
Review:
In ‘Silly Scandals’ Bimbo wants to visit a theater, where Betty Boop performs.
Unfortunately he’s broke, but he finally succeeds in sneaking into the theater by walking backwards along the leaving crowd. Inside we watch Betty singing the 1930 hit song ‘You’re driving me crazy’. Like in ‘Mysterious Mose‘ her sexiness is well explored, as her dress falls off during the performance, revealing her bra.
After Betty’s performance, Bimbo ends up being hypnotized by a magician, who makes our unfortunate hero dance against his will. The cartoon ends in a short, but zany and nightmarish dream sequence.
‘Silly Scandals’ is a transitional cartoon that shows the potential of Fleischer’s fledgling cartoon star Betty Boop, but failing to explore it to the max, still focusing on the rather bland Bimbo. We hear her name for the very first time. Yet, Bimbo is still the only billed star of the cartoon. But the Fleischers were quick learners, and with almost every subsequent Talkartoon Betty’s star would rise, and her screen time increase.
Watch ‘Silly Scandals’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Talkartoon No. 21
To the previous Talkartoon: Twenty Legs under the Sea
To the next Talkartoon: The Herring Murder Case
‘Silly Scandals’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: April 3, 1931
Stars: Bimbo, Betty Boop
Rating: ★★½
Review:
Bimbo is a train robber who holds up a train. Unfortunately for him, his stout wife, Betty Boop (called Nan McGrew in this cartoon), is also on this train.
She confronts him and in the end Bimbo unwillingly reunites with his wife, fleeing with her into the distance on the locomotive.
‘The Bum Bandit’ lacks the wild surrealism of earlier Talkartoons, like ‘Barnacle Bill‘ and ‘Mysterious Mose‘ (both 1930), and is thus less interesting to watch. The best scene is when Bimbo practices shooting, e.g. shooting a cow from the sky. There is also some nice and flexible animation on the riding train. Betty Boop has a distinctly different voice here, which was not repeated after this cartoon.
Watch ‘The Bum Bandit’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Talkartoon No. 18
To the previous Talkartoon: The Cow’s Husband
To the next Talkartoon: The Male Man
‘The Bum Bandit’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: December 26, 1930
Stars: Betty Boop, Bimbo
Rating: ★★★★★
Review:
Bimbo is the uncanny phantom-like Mysterious Mose, who visits a frightened Betty Boop at night.
The cartoon has a jazzy score, using the St. James Infirmary Blues. Like ‘Barnacle Bill‘, it is wildly surrealistic, with all kinds of animals appearing out of nowhere and disappearing into nothingness again, and during the title song there’s metamorphosis all over the place.
‘Mysterious Mose’ is the third cartoon featuring Betty Boop, and the first with her in the starring role. She’s still unnamed here, but her development as as sex object is pushed further, when her night shirt flies off twice, leaving her naked in bed. She’s also animated much better than in her earlier two films, ‘Dizzy Dishes‘ and ‘Barnacle Bill‘. Her looks and moves are more stable, more feminine, and thus, more sexy.
Watch ‘Mysterious Mose’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Talkartoon No. 14
To the previous Talkartoon: Up to Mars
To the next Talkartoon: The Ace of Spades
‘Mysterious Mose’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: January 5, 1934
Stars: Betty Boop, Fearless Freddie
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
Betty is the star in a melodrama with an evil landlord and a classic hero.
Arguably the first Betty Boop cartoon with a clear plot, ‘She Wronged Him Right’ marks the debut of Fearless Freddie, who seems to be designed as Betty’s new suitor (Bimbo, being an animal, was no longer accepted in a Hollywood dominated by the puritan Hays Code). His stay would be short, however, because very soon Betty would lose interest in men altogether, taking the Code even further.
Only nine months later the formula of this cartoon was repeated with less successful results in ‘Betty Boop’s Prize Show’. ‘She Wronged Him Right’ still contains some wonderful metamorphosis gags and some inanimate objects speaking or suddenly growing hands, preserving some of Fleischer’s famous surrealism.
The very idea of Betty performing in a melodrama may have been borrowed from Disney, who had released the comparable ‘Mickey’s Mellerdrammer‘ in 1933.
Watch ‘She Wronged Him Right’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Betty Boop cartoon No. 24
To the previous Betty Boop cartoon: Parade of the Wooden Soldiers
To the next Betty Boop cartoon: Red Hot Mamma
‘She Wronged Him Right’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: September 1, 1933
Stars: Betty Boop, Bimbo, Koko The Clown
Rating: ★★★★
Review:
Betty Boop works in a tavern near a coal mine, where Koko The Clown and Bimbo are working. The latter discovers some ghosts in the mine.
This short contains an excellent swinging jazz score by Don Redman and his orchestra, who are introduced in the beginning of the picture, playing in a zany cartoon decor. The music includes adapted versions of Don Redman’s hit songs ‘How am I doing?’ (1932) and ‘I Heard’ (1931).
‘I Heard’ was the last Fleischer cartoon to feature a great jazz score. Don Redman, and his predecessors Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong, where soon replaced by Rubinoff and his orchestra playing sweet semi-classical music in ‘Morning Noon and Night‘ and ‘Parade of the Wooden Soldiers‘ (both late 1933). Even worse, the cartoon marked Bimbo’s last screen appearance. Being an animal he was no longer accepted as being Betty’s suitor in a Hays Code dominated Hollywood which shunned all eroticism and ‘unnatural sexual behavior’, including human-animal relationships.
After Bimbo, Betty would shortly date a human character named Fearless Freddie, but from 1935 on she remained a bachelor apparently with no interest in men whatsoever. In this cartoon, though, she’s still sexy, and she can briefly be seen in her underwear, after the elevator she and Bimbo had taken has crashed.
Thus, in many ways, one can regard ‘I Heard’ as the last of the classic Betty Boop cartoons. After this cartoon, the intoxicating mix of sex and surrealism was only seen once, in the compilation cartoon ‘Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame‘ (1934), a last tribute to Betty’s glory days.
Watch ‘I Heard’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Betty Boop cartoon No. 20
To the previous Betty Boop cartoon: The Old Man of the Mountain
To the next Betty Boop cartoon: Morning Noon and Night
‘I Heard’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Dr. Grob's Animation Review 