![]() ![]() Sadly, the censorship was the beginning of the end for Betty cartoons. Bimbo had to be replaced with a human boyfriend because people were worried that a female human with a male dog suggested bestiality (hey, it worked for Jessica Rabbit). The garter, cleavage and short skirts were replaced with a more respectable knee-length black dress, complete with long sleeves and a ruffle on the neckline to avoid exposing too much skin. Kane lost the lawsuit.īetty fell victim to the Hays Code in 1934 and had to clean up her act. Since so many entertainers of the day were adopting the flapper style, it was impossible to prove that Fleischer had stolen Kane’s look specifically. Furthermore, they said, many people also believed the design of Betty Boop was inspired by Hollywood It Girl Clara Bow. It was determined that Helen didn’t have exclusivity to the baby-styled singing voice or the “Boop-Oop-A-Doop” line – Fleischer’s lawyers were able to insinuate that Helen actually took both of these elements from a singer she saw at the Cotton Club who went by the name Baby Esther. Though the evidence was certainly stacked against Fleischer and his company, the court ruled in their favor. In the cartoon “The Bum Bandit,” the studio Betty Boop portrayed Dangerous Nan McGrew, a role Helen originated the previous year. Not only did they look similar, Helen was famous in the ‘20s as “The Boop-Oop-A-Doop Girl,” which you almost certainly recognize today as Betty’s tagline, not Helen Kane’s. And you can be sure that the actresses themselves noticed – Helen Kane sued Max Fleischer and Paramount for $250,000 for blatantly using her likeness without her permission. It didn’t take long for Betty to become more popular than her boyfriend (gee… wonder why?), and suddenly, Bimbo was out of the picture and Betty was front-and-center.Īs Betty became more popular, some people began to notice a striking resemblance between the cartoon and a couple of famous actresses, most notably Helen Kane (pictured) and Clara Bow. If you have a spare six minutes, check it out. Her first recognizable appearance as Betty (Bimbo had a female companion in earlier cartoons but in no way did she resemble Betty Boop) was in 1930’s “Dizzy Dishes.” Though she looks pretty familiar, the long dog ears are a dead giveaway that she hadn’t reached her final form yet. Yep – back in 1930, Betty was less person and more poodle (and not nearly as cute). Boop was conceived of as a girlfriend for Bimbo, a cartoon dog created by Fleischer Studios, a big player in the era of silent cartoons. She’s gone through a lot of changes over the years – as in, she’s completely changed species. Throughout the decade of the Great Depression, this reminded the audience of the carefree times of the Jazz Age, and they loved it.Don’t let her fool you: she may look pretty good (OK, amazing) for her age, but Betty Boop is actually 81 years old today. Yes, she symbolized one of those fashionable young women who wore short skirts, cut their hair in a short style, listened to jazz, and just wanted was to have fun and break conventional standards of behaviour. This suggested the combination of girlishness and maturity that many people saw in the flapper type of the 1920s, which Betty represented. There was, however, a certain girlish quality to the character and also her look was childish with that head more similar to a baby’s than an adult’s in proportion to her body. She showed plenty of skin, wore short dresses, high heels, and a fancy garter on her left thigh, which she sometimes snapped in a provocative way. ![]() She had huge eyes, long eyelashes, a distinctive high-pitched voice, best known for her “Boop-Oop-a-Doop” catchphrase, with which she frequently punctuated her sentences. Her figure seems to have been modelled after Mae West‘s. Her floppy ears became large hoop earrings, and her nose changed to a cute, human, button-like nose. She had lost all traces of her canine qualities and had been reinvented as a vivacious girl with a heart of gold. The public loved the character so much that Paramount & the Fleischer Studios decided to develop Betty Boop, who later appeared as the main protagonist in her own series of more than one hundred cartoons. She was merely a side character, a nightclub singer attempting to win the affection of the protagonist, Bimbo, an anthropomorphized dog, and was only meant to make few appearances. In that original version, she was a plump anthropomorphic French poodle with long, floppy ears. 90 years ago, on 9 August 1930, Betty Boop made her first appearance in the cartoon “Dizzy Dishes”, created by Max Fleischer ![]()
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