Then, in 1955, Paramount sold the Betty Boop shorts to television syndicator U.M.&M., and with the shorts reappearing on television and in revival houses, there was a resurgence in Betty's popularity. It's no longer something that's exciting to see." With her popularity plummeting, Fleischer Studios stopped making Betty Boop cartoons in 1939. this normative representation of middle-class sensibilities, and that ends up taking away the joie de vivre. She dresses more modestly - censors, you know, and she personifies the typical 'swing' fan." Instead of the fun-loving, exciting, and even dangerous storylines, Betty was now domestic and demure, engaging in such activities as bathing her dog Pudgy, and running a hotel.Ĭartoon scholar Katia Perea, in the previously cited Smithsonian Magazine, said, "With that kind of sanitation, there's this compulsion to present. A 1938 article in The Central New Jersey Home News explained it best: "She's lost most of her curls, the jewelry - and the curves. Even her relationship with Bimbo the dog was deemed inappropriate. The innuendos and flirtations that had been part of Betty's makeup were ditched. RELATED: Why Has Disney Never Made a Feature-Length Mickey Mouse Film?īetty Boop was forced into wearing acceptable tops and full-length skirts. Betty, the first heroine to tackle sexual harassment in entertainment history (as per the previously cited Vogue article) by slapping a crooked producer in a 1932 short, would be cleverly used as a callback in a New Yorker cover for a 2017 piece regarding sexual harassment and abuse in Hollywood at the onset of the #metoo movement, dismayed at how little has changed. But Betty held her own, successfully defending herself from these advances time and again. She wasn't free from men who openly tried to force unwanted sexual interactions, as was regretfully a product of the time (even Mickey Mouse wasn't above forcing himself on Minnie in the 1928 Disney short Plane Crazy). She was liberated, unashamed, and free, taking on careers like as a pilot, a racecar driver, and even successfully ran for president. However, despite her male gaze sexualization, Betty Boop defied the female stereotyping that befell other female cartoon characters. She was immensely popular, with an article from 1932 hailing her as the " most popular personage on the screen today." There's little doubt that Betty was designed as a sex symbol, with a baby doll face, big eyes, a short skirt, hoop earrings, and a visible garter on one leg, an " archetypal flapper, the speakeasy Girl Scout with a heart of gold." Her high-pitched, coquettish voice and her "Boop-Oop-A-Doop" catchphrase, provided by Mae Questel from 1931 on, just added to the innocent vamp persona that Betty personified. Within a year, she became the Betty Boop we're most familiar with, the flapper girl who is the first all-human cartoon heroine and the first as a headliner of an animated series. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.Betty Boop's first appearance came in 1930's short Dizzy Dishes, where she was introduced as an anthropomorphic French poodle, the girlfriend of Bimbo, a cartoon dog, in Fleischer Studios' Talkartoon series. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
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