For some reason I remembered this scene from my early childhood. I think it's from the first Popeye cartoon, Popeye the Sailor Man (not counting the one where he co-starred with Betty Boop). Of course I've played around with it a little bit!
Showing posts with label Fleischer cartoons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fleischer cartoons. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 8, 2022
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Betty Boop - she's such a bitch
The cartoons I used to watch very early on Saturday mornings (I mean before the REAL cartoons came on, like Huckleberry Hound and Bullwinkle and Linus the Lion-Hearted) were way, way old. I mean, these barely had any talking in them, mostly just wacky music from some distant era, and I loved them.
There was something called Tarrytoons, early Warner Brothers cartoons called Merrie Melodies, very old Disney (I particularly remember "Bugs in Love"), and of course ancient Popeye, a figure so coarse and ugly he should have scared me. Not only was he smoking a pipe, one of his eyes really was popped out!
At the end of these antique Popeyes there was just a split-second glimpse of an inkwell, trademark of the animator Max Fleischer (video posted above). As a kid I used to wonder if I was imagining it, it was over so quick. I thought it was magical. Much later, when my kids and I got into the habit of taping bizarre old cartoons, we used to try to freeze-frame on it, usually with no success.
But before Popeye, even, there was Betty Boop, a frenetic little sexpot hallucinated by the Fleischer studio. These cartoons had a fever dream quality combined with non-stop, manic activity. The characters, as far as I could make out, were all animals, some of them very hard to identify. (And let's not get into that Goofy versus Pluto debate, and how a mouse could own a dog.) When they first brought out Betty Boop in the surreal Dizzy Dishes - she isn't even named but just sort of appears standing on a table - it all gets very strange, indeed.
It gets very strange because Betty has bulldog jowls,long pendulous ears, and a snout that keeps popping out grotesquely. Betty either has some sort of bizarre facial deformity, or else. . .
She's a dog.
A dog wearing garters and high heels. In other words, a bitch.
In subsequent cartoons the animators decided to turn her into a human being, making her flappy ears into earrings that still looked suspiciously canine. Mae Questel's squeaky voiceovers helped bring her decidedly flaky character into focus.
People have come out with all sorts of boopery about this subject: how Betty reflected the morals and mores of the times, how her barely-there skirt (always showing at least one garter) and wispy top, which sometimes fell off altogether, illustrated the daring style and energy of the madcap twenties and early '30s. Turner Classics made a whole documentary about this, about pre-Code Hollywood and the racy, suggestive language and dress that was common in movies before Will Hays and the suffocating legion of "decency" (read: sexless repression) shut it all down.
You can see what happened to Betty over the years, and it's alarming: her barely-there dress evolves into a suffocating uniform, completely destroying her giggly, girlish flapper/vamp image. But the thing to remember about Betty is, she was a caricature right from the start.
If anyone had a head that size, for one thing, they'd bloody fall over. (Though note that the later Boop incarnation shows a head much more in proportion with her body.) Her huge eyes with their fans for lashes are almost scary. She's a sexpot who jumps out of an inkwell, but she might as well be jumping out of a cake at some LSD-inspired stag party.
You have to ask yourself: was this character really created for children? Cartoons started off as general entertainment, a way of padding out the bill (you really got your money's worth in those days), usually shown with a movie feature or double-bill along with the newsreel and short subject. People had longer attention spans in those days and could stand to sit in a theatre for three or four hours.
If the movie was adult in nature, then - most likely - so were the cartoons. In the early 30s, this trampy little vamp ran around in her nearly-nothings, showing cleavage, having little "accidents" that tore her clothes away entirely so she had to dive behind something.
Meant for kids? Though it was hardly Fritz the Cat, I doubt it.
Somewhere along the line, maybe when TV came in, cartoons began to gravitate kidward and grow more tame. I never even saw most of the outrageous Boop cartoons I've found on YouTube: they must have been banned as unwholesome. Don't want innocent 8-year-old boys having fantasies about some trampy little tart!
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Fatter 'n a hamster's ass!
I swear, this isn't as incoherent as it seems. It all ties in with the grand show of vintage cars I took in on Sunday, my favorites being those immense, bulbous tanks from the 1940s. There was something imposing - almost disturbing - about these things, a great upthrusting nose like the prow of a ship, giant (bosomy?) swellings at the front and a falling-off at the back so extreme that in some cases the rear tires were completely invisible. How these things navigated road-bumps without severe damage is beyond me.
I remembered this Popeye cartoon, one of the good old vintage ones from the '40s (which means, of course, that it has a mililtary flavor to it). The car in it is a splendid example of the 1940s tank. Most of all I remembered that exploding tire scene, was almost traumatized by it as a child, and now I see why. It seems to build and build, expand and expand until you know what's coming, a sort of screen-filling red-drenched orgasm that blows all the main characters into next Thursday. They blast through several billboards before colliding with a clothesline, leaving them all clad in someone else's underwear (Bluto in a frilly corset), adding to the bizarre erotic effect.
Sex in cartoons? Are you kidding? Not that Popeye squeezing his spinach-can until it spurted into his mouth had any sort of Freudian significance at all.
It was nice to find this dear old thing - strictly through a Google search, I never would have tracked it down any other way - because I've been obsessed with those bulbous, surreal '40s vehicles lately, particularly the custom-made ones that pushed all those features to a fetish-y extreme.
The kids could slide down this one, except their short pants might get caught on that pointy rear bumper. It's hard to see the rear tires, though they do just peep through seductively. A little trap-door thingie over the rear tire is also just visible. Else how'd you ever change the thing?
A lot of these extreme cars were custom-made by a guy named Westergard. I think I caught a glimpse of one of those cars once, and it was breathtaking, but didn't quite look real.
This is some sort of convertible, I guess, but I'd be too scared to get in it. It just looks intimidating.
Now we get to it. This car has a FAT ASS. It has haunches on it that are as cobby and waddly as a hamster's. It looks overweight. It looks like it has big overstuffed seed-pouches both fore and aft: a hamster squared!
Hamster!. . . Car!. . . Hamster!. . . Car!
Does this thing even HAVE rear tires? Does it just sort of drag itself around, creating horrendous sparks behind it and making an awful screeching noise? It seems to sit level on the ground, belly down, kind of like a. . .
Yes.
Would you call this a station wagon that's been left out in the sun too long? A pregnant trailer? What the fxx IS it? Like Popeye's tire, it looks as if it's about to explode from internal pressure.
Then again, maybe it's just a hamster on wheels.
Cars were more animal-like then, but this one seems so hunkered-down, so crouched. It would have to scuttle around on its belly like a badger. And the squinty little eyes on it: disturbing. It must have run, or no one would have gone to the trouble to have this Westergard guy build it for them. But it just looks so wide. How did you navigate turns in it? How could you see out of these tiny little window-slits? How much gas would it guzzle in a day?
I don't particularly trust hamsters at the wheel, but some of their antics are kind of amusing.
But just look at this majestic thing, jeez, it almost has a face on it, with a fierce toothy frown and great upjutting phallic nose. It's a straight-ahead sort of thing, a get-out-of-my-way car. Come to think of it, it seems like something from another planet. But breathtaking nonetheless.
Any resemblance to a hamster's ass is purely coincidental.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
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Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
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Order The Glass Character from:
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Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Betty Boop Cartoon Banned For Drug Use 1934
This is all a little unbelievable, like most early cartoons. Not to mention a little nightmarish. At least Betty looks like a girl: in her first couple of appearances she was a dog with long ears and a snout that popped out from time to time. The animators didn't quite know what to do with her.
After a few episodes she became a sexpot. It's interesting to watch the evolution of her costumes: here, in pre-code Hollywood, she was so scantily clad that you occasionally caught flickers of bare breasts (a wardrobe malfunction, perhaps) and, in her saucily flipped-up hemline, the delta of Venus. By the mid-30s the censors had clamped down, and by wartime she looked like a no-nonsense Army nurse with twill jackets and skirts below the knee.
These were Max Fleischer cartoons, some of the strangest things ever made, and they evolved into Popeye which ran forever but also ran out of steam around the time of the war. Then they became patriotic bullshit and propaganda, and never quite recovered. I like the fact that these characters are all a little hideous, a little smudgy, and almost psychotic in their unpredictable behaviour. By the end they all get stoned, sucking up nitrous oxide like a dentist who has fallen off the rails.
Were cartoons really made for children? I don't think so. They were shown along with movies (there'd be a newsreel, a cartoon, a short subject, and the main feature: or perhaps two), later sent overseas to bolster the morale of the troops. The studios cranked out hundreds and even thousands of them: Disney and Warner Brothers were the big guns, but then you had weirdball Fleischer and, a little later, Bob Clampett with his bizarre puppets-brought-to-animated-life, Beany and Cecil.
This just gets more unbelievable as you watch. Maybe the animators WERE on something.
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