Confession time: I have a "thing" for Betty Boop. It's bizarre enough to love a cartoon character "in that way", but last time I checked I was hetero, so. . . but never mind. Some corner of me that refuses to conform crushes on Betty, or at least the magnificent pre-Code Betty who could really shake that thing.
She wore practically nothing, and even what she did wear kept falling off or being pulled off her, or blown off by the wind, or suggestively tugged on by her little doggie, or whatever. She ran around practically nude, and in more than one cartoon danced the hula WITH NO TOP ON. I am not kidding, all she had on was a diminutive Hawaiian lei which shifted back and forth as she shimmied. In this guise she (nonsensically) introduced Popeye in his very first cartoon appearance by DANCING THE HULA with him. Make sense? Never mind, the piggybacking worked, and in the next Popeye cartoon he didn't have to hula at all.
It was dismaying to see what happened to her after 1934, the threshhold for "the Code" that killed everything. Her hemline plunged to her knees, she suddenly had long sleeves and a high neckline, the winsome garter no longer existed, all her clothes (and very dowdy clothes they were) stayed on her body, and all she had left of her old teasing sexy self was the "boop-boop-be-doop" and the spit curls. Thus a '20s icon was destroyed, tamed, and turned into a domestic drudge, winsomely doing housework and selling war bonds.
But we still have pre-Code Betty, a character which I am SURE was not ever meant for kids! Who WAS she meant for, then? Guys who were turned on by a line-drawing of a bizarrelly-proportioned female with next to nothing on? Must have been - or people like me, who just see her as exotic, sweetly rebellious, and totally adorable.
POSTSCRIPT. I forgot to mention that the little video-ette I made (in slow motion, and with tango music added) was taken from an old Boop cartoon called HA! HA! HA!, and it featured all the characters and a number of inanimate objects getting STONED on laughing gas (thus the vapor shimmering in the air as she dizzily shakes her booty, then literally falls down at the end). The drug connection caused this cartoon to be banned, but it does seem like shutting the barn door after the fact. Why not ban the whole thing? She's about as subversive as a cartoon character gets.
