“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. 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. I'm celebrating these shorts, not condemning them.įor years, everyone gasped that BETTY BOOP'S RISE TO FAME had what appeared to be a single frame showing a naked breast.At a time when cartoons were largely opening acts before a featured movie, Betty’s stardom was an outlier. Huh? This is to show how much freedom the animators and the people behind these shorts had.ĭon't deduct the exact opposite of what I had in mind with this post. don't go for attention that doesn't make sense. anyway, let's not pretend this stuff is titillating or controversial, cause it isn't. its the human body man, and half the time it isn't - it's a cat or dog's shape. Interesting post, appreciate your work on this, but have to say: watch what you write man, there's enough conservative PC shit going around these days, we don't need people (stupid uneducated people who might read your post) suddenly thinking that there's something wrong with the old cartoons, because hey who are we kidding, all these frames you've posted are freakin' innocent as hell. Among the most shocking are the shots of her very first cartoon, 'Dizzy Dishes'.īetty wasn't called the studio's pinup girl for nothin'. If anyone got a copy (hardly possible) please contact me.Īnyway here you have a visual compendium of the these classic Boop moments, filled with sexuality and pre-Code bravery. I couldn't locate a copy of 'Accordion Joe' (which seems unfindable) though.

I've tried to highlight all these moments from all the shorts in which she appears, including the times she has canine of feline forms. Did you ever dare to count how many gags are built around her garter belt? And almost every character in her cartoons plans to woo (the good guys) or rape (the villains) her. Her 'cute legs and miscellaneous' are often shown to the audience and even what kids should not allowed to see pops out frequently. It seems hardly plausible that she lost her top tens of times revealing her bra. It is unbelievable how many times the underwear of this 'little miss' is shown. I've included shots from all the risquè moments in the Betty Boop cartoons. This is a post I was working on from months. Nuntio vobis habemus summam betty boop-arum!!

Betty boop naked frames