![]() ![]() Though Betty Boop's first screen appearance was in the 1930 short Dizzy Dishes, the set opens with Chess Nuts from 1932, concentrating on the pre-Code era and followed by Betty Boop, M.D., Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle, Betty Boop for President (all 1932), Betty Boop's Penthouse, Betty Boop's Birthday Party, Betty Boop's May Party, Betty Boop's Halloween Party (all 1933), Betty Boop's Rise to Fame, Betty Boop's Trial, Betty Boop's Life Guard (all 1934), with one significantly later, post-Code Betty Boop, The Foxy Hunter (1937), tossed in as a good example of the later shorts.īetty was, initially, modeled by artist Grim Natwick as a kind of combination French poodle (complete with floppy ears, long gone by 1932) and singer Helen Kane, whose "boop-boop-a-doop" voice and face were similar. At least viewers don't have to contend with endless disclaimers of the type found on Disney and Warner PC releases. It's also possible Olive may have deliberately chosen shorts a bit "safer" and more family-friendly for this first volume, as a means to easing Betty's reintroduction to today's audiences. But if the trade-off is shorts looking this good, I'm all for it. I was a bit dismayed that the set contains just 12 cartoons (total running time: 84 minutes), and that Olive is organizing these sets out of chronological order and without extra features (as Warner Home Video did with its Fleischer Popeye DVDs). ![]() What's important though is that these logos aside, the shorts themselves all look fantastic, especially considering their age, convoluted ownership and distribution history. To my eyes, most of the shorts appear derived from their original negatives, and that probably the Paramount logos were spliced off and these TV syndication logos spliced directly onto the original negative. logos from about 1955, some reviewers have wrongly assumed that these may be sourced from dupes created later for TV syndication. However, because the shorts are preceded by U.M.&M.TV Corp. The shorts have been remastered in 4K using the original negatives and, in some cases, fine grains. When I visited the home of Max's son, director Richard Fleischer, over several days to record a DVD audio commentary track, it was in a den-office filled with Betty Boop merchandise his family had licensed.)* (The Fleischer family retained at least some rights to the character. Further, like various Popeye cartoons and most (all?) of the Superman cartoons, many Betty Boop shorts have fallen into public domain, and home video versions of those shorts have been of variable quality.īetty Boop - The Essential Collection, Volume 1 is an Olive Films release of 12 non-public domain shorts licensed from Paramount, the series' original distributor. Though hugely popular in their day, probably because the Betty Boop cartoons were made in black and white, their marketability has (nonsensically) been limited in recent decades. ![]() My nearly six-year-old couldn't get enough of "that little girl.") (This is not to say kids can't enjoy them, too. As animation historian Leonard Maltin and others have pointed out, where Disney exploited the natural fears of children, the Fleischers' cartoons explore the darker psychology of adults. Betty never lost her charm, however, and soldiered on through the end of the 1930s, often with Betty playing a supporting part in her own cartoons (she's not even in the very last "Betty Boop"), though her image can still be found on merchandise everywhere, all over the world.īut Betty's best, the two-dozen or so cartoons from 1932-34, and even many of those made later on, positively ooze the Fleischer house style, one more adult and surreal than his rivals, with imagery at times more Dali than Disney. Indeed, so sexy was "The Queen of the Animated Screen" that like Mae West and Maureen O'Sullivan's Jane in the early Tarzan films, Hollywood's Production Code eventually insisted Betty "put more clothes on," and forced her to assume a subtly degrading, housewifey demureness, no matter that she was single. Max and Dave Fleischer's trifecta of classic animation series, one that included the black and white and early color "Popeye" cartoons and the first screen appearance of "Superman," began with a uniquely hallucinatory series of one-reel cartoons eventually starring Betty Boop, the innocent but sexy jazz baby, a throwback to the risqué Roaring Twenties. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |