Thursday, July 13, 2023

SCANDALOUS Pre-Code Betty Boop! (Will this get me a decency strike?)



Admittedly, I cheated a little and slowed this WAY down. It's a tiny excerpt from the infamous Bimbo's Initiation, often called the most bizarre cartoon of the 1930s. It's all about the hapless Bimbo (and nobody quite knows WHAT Bimbo is, kind of like Goofy in Stand by Me) and how he wants to join some sort of lodge or club or Scientology group (which didn't exist back then), or Freemason society or whatever it was supposed to represent - but it involved a bizarre and convoluted series of ordeals/rituals/hazing practices. 

Towards the end of it, a pre-Code Betty, wearing her usual teeny tiny dress, does a seductive dance in front of him, explicit enough that I did not dare include it on my video (though it appears on DOZENS of other channels). I once got a "decency" strike for showing a woman taking a shower with a bikini on (along with incomprehensible strikes for showing a puppet in a glass case, a jiggly cheesecake, and a boy throwing a rock at a wall). 


If you get three strikes in a 90-day period, your channel and all the videos on it is terminated forever, and in many cases you can't even start a new one - you are banned for showing a preacher dancing joyously in a church (WHY??), among other strikes I can't even remember. And this was a reupload of something I had already posted years before. Yet, racist, sexist and homophobic channels/videos are allowed to stand with the most tasteless, offensive and outrageous material in them. 

Some strikes happened two or three years after I posted the original video.  So I had to censor a scene from this cartoon showing Betty shimmying like the '20s flapper she is. But it's Betty Boop, for God's sake! I was anxiously waiting (and I am still anxiously waiting) to get a strike because Bimbo taps her bottom, after Betty WHACKS his bottom, as part of the dance. I could well get a decency strike for THIS, too. Pray for me, please.