Here is Betty Boop singing the “Keep a Little Song Handy” song from yesterday’s Mae Questel featurette.
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Betty Boop’s Crazy Inventions (1933)
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Category Archives: Fleischer Studios
The Original Boop-A-Doop Girl… Helen Kane
Betty Boop’s character was actually based by animator Grim Natwick on vaudeville performer Helen Kane. Miss Kane wasn’t pleased… here’s what Wikipedia says about it…
In 1930, Fleischer Studios animator Grim Natwick introduced a caricature of Helen Kane, with droopy dog ears and a squeaky singing voice, in the Talkartoons cartoon Dizzy Dishes. “Betty Boop”, as the character was later dubbed, soon became popular and the star of her own cartoons. In 1932, she was changed into a human from a dog, her long ears turning into hoop earrings.
In 1932, Kane filed an unsuccessful $250,000 suit against Paramount and Max Fleischer, charging unfair competition and wrongful appropriation in the Betty Boop cartoons. The trial opened in April 1934 with Helen Kane and Betty Boop films being screened by Judge McGoldrick (no jury was called). Margy Hines, Bonnie Poe, and, most notably, Betty Boop voice-over talent Mae Questel, were all summoned to testify. McGoldrick ruled against Kane in 1934, claiming that Kane’s testimony could not prove that her singing style was unique or not an imitation itself (a little-known black singer known as “Baby Esther” was cited by the defence as “booping” in song).
Surprisingly, there are a lot of Helen Kane videos on the web… here are a few of them.
Here’s Helen Kane in “Dangerous Nan McGrew” (the name being a take off of the Robert Service poem The Shooting of Dan McGrew)
Here she is performing “I Love Myself Because You Love Me”
Here she is performing “He’s So Unusual” and “The Prep Step”
I can’t find any films or recordings of “Baby Esther,” unfortunately… it sounds like she may have been the original original Boop-A-Doop girl.
Musical Doctor (1932)
Ever wonder what Mae Questel (the voice of Betty Boop) looked like in real life? It seems strange that Betty’s wonderful voice could have emitted from anything human. Here are a couple films featuring Miss Questel.
Silver-throated Rudy Vallee (another utterly unique voice) stars with her in this short, Musical Doctor, from 1932.
Here’s another short film with Mae Questel and Bela Lugosi!
THE CARTOON CRYPT: The Inkwell Imps in Koko’s Haunted House (1928)
Here’s another spooky cartoon from the Fleischer Studios… The Inkwell Imps in Koko’s Haunted House (alternate title: “KoKo Goes Ghosting”).
I had forgotten about the Big Cartoon Database, but it is an excellent resource for finding information on old cartoons. Here is the info they have on this one.
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Flip the Frog in Spooks (1932)
My two-year old daughter likes old cartoons as much as I do, I think… we don’t watch much teevee, but we watch about an hour of online cartoons a week. She has different standards for them than I do, though. Usually she asks for Betty Boop or Gumby cartoons (she has good taste), but her other favorite request (since Halloween) is for cartoons with “spookies.”* I know you’re thinking, yeah, sure, obviously the guy with the goofy skull at the top of his website has a daughter who likes creepy cartoons… but she came up with this all on her own, as far as I can tell. So we’ve been watching lots of cartoons with ghosts, skeletons & other spooks… Ub Iwerks’ Disney Silly Symphony Skeleton Dance (which I’ll post after this) and the Fleischer Brothers’ Snow White, Minnie the Moocher, Swing You Sinners and Bimbo’s Initiation were obvious choices… here is a fun Iwerks obscurity featuring the unjustly forgotten Ub Iwerks’ character Flip the Frog. Flip has my favorite cartoon intro sequence of all time (tied with Betty Boop).
Have any favorite cartoons with spookies in them? Are they online? Help! I need more for the kid! Please let me hear about them in the comments.
*We’ve also been devouring John Stanley Little Lulu comics thanks to Dark Horse Comics wonderful cheap reprint books, for which she also requests “let’s read a spooky one!” every time. In this case, a “spooky” one generally is qualified by either having Witch Hazel in it, having ghosts in it, or simply having a pitch dark panel in it with two eyes in the dark.
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Betty Boop in Ha! Ha! Ha!
My 2-year old daughter and I have been watching a whole lot of Betty Boop cartoons lately. Here’s a fun one. Homeland security is going to be all over Betty and Koko after this…
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Koko’s Earth Control
This is my favorite Koko the Clown cartoon I’ve seen (not including him guest-starring in Betty Boop toons). It is hilarious, well-animated, and totally nuts. You’ll want to skip over the first 2 minutes and 11 seconds of it, as some jackass has added a bunch of annoying unrelated footage and commentary at the beginning. Unfortunately, the other versions of this cartoon I’ve seen on the web are taken from a heavily edited version that appeared on MTV’s Liquid Television, which also features a terrible soundtrack… those are to be avoided.
Update: Holmes! of the excellent Barnacle Press blog commented to point us to a better version of this cartoon that he posted here (note… it is a big download, 100MB). Thanks Holmes!
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Monkey of the Week, April 6, 2007: The Peanut Vendor
Meet the Peanut Vendor. It is credited to “Len Lye” on youtube (although in the comments, someone claims it is actually by Dave Fleischer). Judging from the other Len Lye films on youtube, it seems unlikely it is by him, as none of the others feature any character animation that I saw… and the character animation in this gem is quite good, and would appear to be by someone with experience. Anyone know the answer to this?
Wow.
Update: It is directed by Dave Fleischer all right. No wonder it’s so great.
Update 2: Or not… Tyler in the comments points us to lenlye.com, which credits it to Len Lye here. Tyler says:
Hi – I can assure you that this film is by Len Lye – see my comment on YouTube. The monkey happens to be owned by the New Zealand Film Archive, actually. Lye made one other stop-motion animated film – The Birth of the Robot. Anyway, glad you liked the film.
Thanks Tyler! Lenlye.com says:
Experimental Animation (also “Peanut Vendor”) (1934)
3 min, 35mm, b&w, sound
Music: “Peanut Vendor” by Red Nichols and his Five Pennies
The protagonist of this film is a marionette monkey built by the film-maker himself. Lye presented this film as a prototype in the hope of finding partners for a series of puppet films, but without success.
So, presumably, the Internet Movie Database is wrong, which credits the film to Dave Fleischer (item 301) and makes no mention of it under Len Lye’s filmography. Or it’s right and the Len Lye site is wrong, but I’m leaning towards Len Lye at this point, since I have seen no credible attributon to Fleischer. I have no idea who did it, but it’s a great cartoon! Now I want to see The Birth of the Robot…
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Betty Boop and Louis Armstrong in I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You
Here’s a cartoon the Fleischers did with Louis Armstrong and his orchestra providing the music. This is, unfortunately, vastly inferior to the Betty/Cab Calloway cartoons, in spite of having a great soundtrack. This is largely because it is loaded to the gills with offensive and uninspired racial caricatures of black tribesmen, some of who are tastelessly transposed onto the band members… yes, they don’t make cartoons like this any more, do they? Worse yet, it just isn’t very funny, and the animation is not nearly as spectacular or surreal as it is in the Calloway trilogy.
I wonder what Satchmo thought of it.
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Betty Boop in The Old Man of the Mountain (1933)
The Old Man of the Mountain is the last of the Betty Boop/Cab Calloway trilogy (I posted the other two previously). It’s my least favorite of the bunch, but is still excellent… it doesn’t have the same level of creepiness that the other two have.
I wonder if this is the cartoon that inspired the way Don Martin drew toes.