BETTY BOOP Betty Boop was one of the most successful characters of the late 1920’s. While Walt Disney was creating characters that “entertained without offending anyone”, devoid of adult themes, good ol’ Betty was stirring up controversy.
In her cartoons, branches tugged at her top, gusts of wind blew up her skirt, and in the 1934 cartoon Betty Boop’s Ride to Fame one of her breasts are exposed for a split second. Armed with a short, sleeveless, backless dress and a sexuality rarely seen in the medium today, let alone in the 1930’s, Betty Boop seemed to have been created merely to shock audiences. Saying that she was in a completely different class than Walt’s mouse would be an understatement.
Betty Boop was created in 1928 at Fleischer Studios, almost by sheer luck. One of the studios founders, Dave Fleischer, approached Grim Natwick, one of the animators, and asked him to design a female character to go with the song “Boop-Oop-A-Doop”, by Helen Kane. Grim got to work and drew a female poodle that would go with the studios first creation, a dog named Bimbo.
Years Grim had spent at art school “drawing naked models” manifested itself as the first female cartoon character to have something that the other’s didn’t: genuinely feminine curves.
Betty first showed her face as a nameless, anthromorphic poodle in the cartoon Dizzy Dishes in a supporting role as a dancer at a nightclub. The studio’s less than impressive answer to Mickey Mouse, Bimbo, failed to excite audiences as usual, but the poodle was a different story. The audience, it seems, recognized an unpolished gem and demanded more of her. So, more they got.
It wasn’t long before Betty appeared again in the 1931 cartoon Betty Coed. But she was no longer a dog. Natwick had changed her into a human.
She now officially had a name too: Betty Boop. Finally, the Fleishers had their answer to Mickey Mouse. A sexual answer perhaps, but still an answer!
Betty quickly became one if the most mass marketed images in the Depression, appearing on nail polish, cards, and cigarette cases, just to name a few. She also exposed audiences to Louis Armstrong and other jazz greats-
audiences who wouldn’t have heard their work otherwise.
Betty’s popularity spread far beyond her home country, the United States: it spread worldwide and in some places she became a symbol for female independence.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t to last.
In the mid-1930’s, Paramount Pictures (Fleischer Studio’s distributor) was pressured by censors to clean up Betty’s act and when they complied, Betty was never the same. Her innocent sexuality was wiped, her short, sleeveless dress was replaced by a long dress with sleeves and she lost her
garter belt.
Betty also began to be portrayed in old-fashioned female roles. “No longer was she a nightclub singer pursued by lustful men”. Her only man now was an “old, protective professor names Grampy”.
By the end of the 1930’s, the Betty Boop craze was over, whether censorship was to blame or not. The last episode of the original series Yip Yip Yippy was released in August 1939.
Betty hasn’t disappeared completely though. She is still a strong icon in North American culture, but she would probably prefer to return to the stage singing, rather than be off-handedly referred to.
Reference:
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader
