writing betty boop 03_history_cinema ___jay chapman home
	Betty Boop (Snow White) 1933 Betty Boop’s exaggerations and movements create a distortion as a seductive female in Snow White that appealed to me. Her seductive movements paired with her distinctive character draws attention to viewers both male and female. Nothing about the Betty Boop character is unintentional, everything is created for a reason. Betty Boop’s character that was introduced in 1930 was based on a living character. Her human likeness was inspired by a singer of the time named Helen Kane. When Betty first appeared in a cartoon, she was intended to be a romantic interest for Bimbo, the Max Fleischer cartoon studio's dog character that was an attempt to create a Mickey Mouse equivalent. When Betty Boop first appeared, she was a dog, singing in a nightclub where Bimbo worked. Betty soon became so popular that she replaced Bimbo as the central character in Fleischer cartoons. Soon afterwards, Betty became a human although Bimbo remained a dog. In Snow White, Betty Boop’s character is rendered in a sexually exaggerated manner. When she first walks through the door in the opening scene she is wearing a small mini skirt that exposes her form and she has a garter belt around her left thigh. Her pouty lips, large head that reflects a doll body and little girl eyes expose this embellishment. Cleavage and earrings adorn her figure in an icon manner. Phallic symbols are everywhere: the talking ice cycles hanging from the ceiling and Betty pulling the handle on the alarm clock. When Betty goes to visit her stepmother, the ugly witch, her over exaggerated features contrast with those of the witch. To help the viewer see the harsh differences both of their faces are framed in a black cartoon circle. The stepmother’s wig falls out and we see her face without hair and a phallic nose hanging in front of Betty’s face. Other sexual symbols that help add to Betty Boop’s extreme sexual femininity are when the step mother squeezes the handles on the mirror and when the oil can squirts oil in to Betty’s right eye. The mirror’s rear end even pokes out and shakes it rump in the face of the queen. During the entire cartoon, Betty’s is shaking her hips to the music of Cab Calloway. Betty’s voice is the typical little girl voice and the witch sounds like that of a truck driver. Betty is submissively tied to a tree while the cartoon henchman attempts to kill her. There attempts fail because they are watching her rotating hips and as a result grind their weapons away and fall into the hole while fighting the stump. Betty rotates her way out of the knots with the power of her hips. After the long Cab Calloway singing character with the unusually long legs. Betty escapes but not from her exaggerations. The Snow White cartoon contains intentful exaggerations that reflect some of the ideas from artists such as Salvador Dali. Max Fleischer, the creator of the cartoon, appreciated the school of surrealism. Betty Boop was created soon after the end of the "roaring '20s," a time when people were relatively uninhibited about sexuality. As a result of this, the early Betty Boop cartoons were rather explicit. Betty wore a sleeveless dress that ended high above her knees, and in countless cartoons, this dress came off and in other cases, she wore a long gown that would become translucent. Male characters often felt her up, and "boop-oop-a-doop" seemed to have more meaning than just a scatty nonsense expression. In the 1933 Snow White, the “boop-oop-a-doop” is a verbal exaggeration that adds to her absurd character. By 1933, the sound era was established and secure. The sound-on-film format was in all the movie houses, the technology for recording and reproducing sound was of adequate quality, and sophisticated recording and editing techniques were evolving. The Betty Boop cartoon, Snow White is a good example of how the sound film had matured, in that the film features creative animation and a song, "St. James Infirmary" performed by Cab Calloway and his Orchestra. This song that is more full of human emotion than a theme song for a catoon. The musical score mirrors the adult behavior of Betty and once again help to make her exaggerations more believable. Snow White is full of jazz music, performed by artists such as Cab Calloway, where Betty’s over exaggerated movements are synched up to. Louis Armstrong, and Don Redman are other musicians who have added to the cartoons. The cartoons with jazz-performing guest stars often contained references to drug use; the one with Don Redman had "Chant of The Weed" performed at the beginning of it, and Cab Calloway sang about "kicking the gong,” which means smoking opium in most of the cartoons that he was in. Snow White was one of the last cartoons created before the Hays Act was passed and her exaggerations were toned down. The Hays Act was created to clean-up media, aka to censor the media. It censored movies and cartoons, transforming Betty Boop into a wholesome female character by making her into a real figure and not a bimbo, which made her less appealing to the viewer. The Betty Boop cartoons up to 1934, including Snow White featured Bimbo and Koko The Clown. After the new Motion Picture code went into effect the animal cartoons were replaced with human ones and Betty Boop's costume transformed. Her dress became knee-length and sedate, buttoned up to the collar and her clevage was covered. There were no adornments added to appeal to the viewer even Betty's dress falls well below the knees, and has a collar and sleeves. Betty also becomes taller and her large doll head shrinks to fit the ideals of a proper figure. Her exaggerations were removed and her character became just as dull as the American housewife. Cartoons released after 1934 portray Betty Boop in an 1890's attitude of women's proper place in society a concept that censorship brought to American culture. Betty is represnted as a schoolteacher, a secretary, a housewife, or a baby sitter. Bimbo is nowhere to be found. Instead, you will find cute characters like Grampy, an eccentric inventor, and Pudgy, an almost unbearably cute little dog. The surrealism has disappeared, and so has the torrid jazz of Cab Calloway. While in the earlier cartoons such as Snow White the viewer might find stories about Betty and Bimbo running away and getting terrorized by a singing, ghostly Cab Calloway walrus in a cave full of skeletal-looking geologic formations. Still, Max Fleischer managed to slip one past the Hays Act in a cartoon called "A Language All My Own," in which Betty sings to a Japanese audience in both English and Japanese. The English version of the song is quite innocent, but the Japanese version, when translated, contains a verse that goes something like this: "Come to bed with me and we'll boop-oop-a-doop!" Betty Boop’s character as a seductive female is completely believable because of her physical exaggerations. Her supporting characters bring her in to the foreground and all attention from the viewer is placed in her spotlight. Music by the famous Cab Calloway and Betty’s typical girl voice support her authenticity. After The Hays Act, the ideas in Snow White loose their intensity and believability due to the censorship issue.