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Though Betty was usually able to escape, these kinds of storylines depended on the entertainment derived from the chase. “The idea is that it’s inherently funny for cartoon women to be assaulted or chased,” says Hendershot. She escapes with Koko’s help, singing, “He couldn’t take my boop-oop-a-doop”-in this case, her virginity-“away.” “Pay me or be my wife,” the villainous landlord demands, whispering in an aside that “I’ve got her in my power now.” In “ Boop-Oop-a-Doop,” a 1932 short whose name references Betty’s scat catchphrase, circus performer Betty returns to her dressing tent to find her boss waiting to assault her. “ She Wronged Him Right” (1934) opens with a teary-eyed Betty telling her landlord that she can’t pay her mortgage. Men were constantly chasing her down and forcing her into unwanted sexual interactions. Though Betty was aware of her sex appeal and often used it to her advantage, her sexuality also proved to be a liability. She is the only film star who wears fewer clothes than Jean Harlow.” As the Film Daily wrote in 1932, “Mister Fleischer gave her a doll-like face with those baby eyes BUT also a mature figure with oo-la-la curves and a boudoir languor in her walk.” The News-Herald added, “Betty has another claim to fame. But she was first and foremost a sex symbol.

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She was a circus performer, a racecar driver and a presidential candidate. But Betty Boop takes it for granted that Bimbo and Koko will form a background for her talents in each production.”Īs the star, Betty played a range of roles. “When that happens to most feminine stars they are flattered. “Betty has two leading men in every picture,” noted the News-Herald in 1932. Unlike her contemporary Minnie Mouse, Betty wasn’t a sidekick, but rather the star of her own show. Here, Betty's ice block coffin is carried by dwarfs on skis. 'Snow-White' is filled with surreal imagery. “In fact, they were inspirational to the Surrealists.” “The Fleischer Studios had a really experimental and kind of Surrealist style,” says Hendershot. Halfway through the film, jazz legend Cab Calloway (a regular guest in Betty Boop cartoons) performs a spooky musical number, embodied first by Koko and then by a ghost. As Max’s grandson Mark Fleischer recalls, his grandfather’s motto was “If you can do it in real life, why animate?” Fleischer Studio’s seven-minute “Snow-White” short includes such surreal images as the evil queen’s face morphing into eggs in a frying pan a tree stump fighting with Betty’s co-stars, canine beau Bimbo and his friend Koko the Clown and Betty, interred in an ice block coffin, being led down a mountain by the dwarfs on skis. In the Fleischer landscape, anything was possible, and seemingly nothing was off limits. In New York, meanwhile, Fleischer created a grungy, often dangerous urban world for its characters to navigate. From its home in California, Disney was laying the groundwork for the idyllic, fantastical fairy tales that would soon dominate its oeuvre. The dueling studios’ styles were diametrically opposed. After a makeover, Betty became the first fully human, fully female animated character.Īt its height in the 1930s, Fleischer Studios was a giant in animation, rivaled only by Disney.

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She appeared in the Fleischers’ “ Talkartoons” series as the girlfriend of main character Bimbo and was such a success that the studio promoted her to its star. Initially, Betty was depicted as a dog with a button nose and floppy ears. Her constantly shifting design offers an intriguing case study of how representations of women-including fictional ones-are shaped by censorship, the public’s response and changing conceptions of morality. Betty’s appearance continues to evolve today, with the character donning ripped jeans, joggers and sneakers, and overalls in merchandise and on social media.

Beneath that iconic look, however, is a more complex story of aesthetic transformation, from what Heather Hendershot, a media historian at MIT, describes as a “flapper-secretary-adventurer” in the early 1930s to a “middle-class homemaker” by the end of the decade.

The enduring image of Betty is a flapper in a strapless minidress, with a garter peeking out above her knee and large hoop earrings in her ears. … They would come for the Betty Boop cartoon.” “She’s a big hit,” says Katia Perea, a cartoon scholar at City University New York, “and she’s a big hit in the same way that Felix the Cat is a big hit, where she was drawing audiences to the movie. At a time when cartoons were largely opening acts before a featured movie, Betty’s stardom was an outlier.