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.

🌷BETTY BOOP: Treacherous Tulip!😳

What I love best about these early Fleischer cartoons is how inanimate objects are animate - in other words, animated. Things suddenly spring to life, talk, dance, make mischief. Some of them look rather grotesque. Even Betty, adorable as she is, has a massive head balancing on a sexy little body that, after 1934 and the Hayes Code, was covered up from neck to ankles. She looked like a matron in a girls' school, not a sassy little sexpot. 

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💗Sexy Betty Boop: SHAKE THAT THING!💗

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. 

BIZARRE Betty Boop Initiation Dance!😍

Jane pushes the broom

This post was originally going to be about Tarzan and Jane, and how Jane's costume radically changed between 1934 (Tarzan and his Mate, with the infamous nude swimming scene) and Tarzan Escapes in 1936, in which she wore something like gym bloomers coming all the way up to her neck and all the way down to her knees. But I couldn't find a video clip that illustrated all that, so I couldn't make any gifs.

So I used Betty Boop instead.

Nowhere is the repressive, soul-deadening Hays Code more vividly displayed than in Betty's change from a hot little floozie to a housewife pushing a broom. I mean, LITERALLY pushing a broom! In Tarzan Escapes, Tarzan and Jane had enough physicality and emotional chemistry to somehow imply a sexual relationship - still pretty taboo, given the fact that they weren't married.

There is one gorgeous scene, which I can't find, in which Jane lies back langorously by the river, managing to look sexy in the unsexiest clothing imagineable. Tarzan gives her a tropical flower, towering over her as she looks up in a kind of half-frightened awe (and in case you haven't seen one of these for a while, Tarzan is quite rough on Jane and even overwhelms her). The way he silently falls to his knees says it all, as does her hand as it slowly and langorously lets go of the flower so that it slides into the current.

So they got around it, with the finest acting and directing, and the best body in Hollywood.

But poor Betty Boop. Just look at her! Navy blue dress, looking like some military surplus, skirt even below the knees and shoulders decently covered. She would never be the same. For she belonged to the boop-a-doop '20s and early '30s, before the forces of suffocating decency descended like a toxic cloud.

And yet, what she's wearing in the other three is - even by today's standards - kind of scanty. Hell, in that hula scene she's hardly wearing anything at all! She even breaks the sacred Disney blurred-nipple rule for a split-second. Would that be acceptable for family viewing today?

P., S. I found it! I found it! This is the most erotic scene in the whole erotic Tarzan series.  And yet, they get around the Hays code very nicely, flouting those repressive rules. Maureen O'Sullivan does it with her face, and Weismuller with that incredible body.

My life as a dog: the evolution of Betty Boop

I have always had mixed feelings about Betty Boop. How can I not? Her gigantic head wobbles on top of an impossibly tiny sexpot body, barely clothed: a wisp of a dress with no straps and back, a garter, fetish-calibre high heels. She speaks in a squeaky little-girl voice. And yet, there's something bold about her, something almost intrepid, as she gets herself into one pickle after another.

What shocks some people is the realization that Betty did not spring from Max Fleischer's pen fully-formed. She was a peripheral character in her first cartoon, Dizzy Dishes (1930) - well, actually it wasn't even HER in the cartoon (above). It was a grotesque, unnamed sort of dog-woman with a black nose and fleshy, pendulous ears, whose face sometimes popped out in a sort of weird canine snout. Betty wasn't even Betty then - she wasn't anything. She was named only after several false starts.

In the bizarre Barnacle Bill (later to be remade, much more effectively, in a Popeye cartoon called Beware of Barnacle Bill), her name is Nancy Lee. She still has the flappy, doggy ears and black nose, not to mention a sort of double-jointed quality. Betty/Nancy at this point is nothing more than a caricature - of what, we don't know.

I love the ability of inanimate objects to do weird things in Fleischer cartoons. What's the name for that? Does anybody know? But it's cool. Walls and sofas and things have a will of their own.

Let's face it, in these early cartoons, Betty is a real dog. The weird exaggerated glamour and sexpot persona is still miles away. Maybe it's that black nose - ewwww!

I think you see what I mean by grotesque - the rolling, popping eyes, cactus-spine lashes, spasmodic body language. The way those fleshy ears flap and dangle creeps me out. They look like ear lobes with gigantism or severe edema. In Mysterious Mose, she's a little less grotesque - it's a kind of middle stage in her evolution, but she still has a long way to go.

Towards the end of her life as a dog, the animators (here in Bimbo's Initiation) began to normalize Betty and nudge her towards humanness. But it took a full two years to figure out who Betty was supposed to be, from her weird table-dance in 1930 to leaning out the window (and losing her top) in her fifteenth outing, Any Rags (1932):

Note the changes, which are actually pretty radical. Her eyes have been downsized, with eye-shadowed lids. The eyebrows have been raised and made more delicate. Somewhere along the line Betty has acquired a hair stylist. I think the animators might have sat down for a conference before making this one. OK, hoop earings from now on! No more floppy flesh (though it's interesting how they felt they had to retain that familiar dangle). From then on she was Betty Boop, world's only cartoon sexpot, unchallenged until Jessica Rabbit came along some 50 years later.

And here are a few of my animations, based on the few frames available to me. These are from the infamous Dizzy Dishes, in which Betty had nowhere to go but up.

It amazes me how changing the order of the frames creates an entirely different effect: a Betty who is depressed, sorrowful, lonely, even terrified.

But lest we forget what Betty is really all about, here's a classic scene from the very first Popeye cartoon (which was in reality a Betty Boop cartoon - he "piggybacked" on her well-established fame). In fact, some claim that this scene explains exactly why the Hays code came into existence.

Working girl: the life of Tillie the Toiler

I will admit that the name Tillie the Toiler caught my attention. As usual, I was looking for something else: vintage comic book paper dolls, the kind with so much detail that cutting out the dresses with those fiendish little tabs would be well-nigh impossible.

And in looking for paper dolls, I found. . . 

Tillie the Toiler
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tillie the Toiler is a newspaper comic strip created by cartoonist Russ Westover who initially worked on his concept of a flapper character in a strip he titled Rose of the Office. With a title change, it sold to King Features Syndicate which carried the strip from 1921 to 1959.
Characters and story[edit]

Stylish working girl Tillie was employed as a stenographer, secretary and part-time model. An attractive brunette, she had no problem finding men to escort her around town. Comics historian Don Markstein described the story situations:Tillie (last name Jones) toiled for a fashionable women's wear company run by clothing mogul J. Simpkins. Or usually did, anyway—she'd occasionally quit or be fired, as the plotline, which ran at breakneck pace and didn't always make perfect sense, required. 

During World War II, in fact, she even joined the U.S. Army. But she always came back to Simpkins.  Whatever she did and wherever she went, however, she was impeccably dressed in the very latest styles. This helped her in the pursuit of charming and often wealthy young men, who came and went at an alarming rate, providing grist for the story mill.

The comic strip inspired two films of the same name: Tillie the Toiler (1927), a silent film with Marion Davies in the title role, and Tillie the Toiler (1941), starring Kay Harris

Who knew? I didn't, and found her by accident. Perhaps, like the immortal Hilda, Tillie the Toiler will soon make a well-deserved comeback. She seems surprisingly contemporary. Most "girls" of the era would envy Tillie her wardrobe, if not her exciting love life. She seems to me like the quintessential flapper, financially independent (if poorly paid), with a ton of male attention. 

A typical Sunday "funny papers" page, extra-special 'cuz it's in colour. I remember those days.  This entry seems to be about the characters' grief over the passing of the jitterbug dance craze. But it's soon to be surpassed by "super-goofy dancing", which involves throwing women up in the air or over your shoulder.

This is what you'd get during the week. I notice a certain difference between Tillie (and the other girls in the office) and the rest of the characters, particularly in the men, who are somewhat primitive in appearance. A bit of Dagwood going on here. Tillie, however, is always immaculate in her dress and coiffure. The Jitterbug is still on people's minds, as in the song, "Put on your flash bang togs/You're gonna slap your dogs/At the Jitterbug Jamboree". 

Though Tillie is a "working girl" in the old-fashioned sense, being a model on the side inclined her working life towards the exotic, if not the suggestive. This was the '20s, after all, and the Hays code (which may or may not have included the funny papers) had not yet kicked in. Betty Boop still wore skirts that barely covered the essentials, whereas in wartime, they were somewhat below the knee. As for that wardrobe. . . do you remember Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City? How on earth could she afford all those Manolo Blahniks from writing one skimpy column a week about the sexual goings-on in a large American city?

Honestly, some of these are plain gorgeous! My only question now is: did Tillie, like Boop, ever become an animated character? I can't find any evidence of it, nor can I find any clips from her two eponymous (I've been waiting all my life to use that word) movies. Turner Classics may some day dredge one of them up - their selections can be pretty dreadful, stretching the definition of the word "classics". 

So is Tillie the Toiler a thinner version of Hilda? I don't think so. Hilda was carefree and unsophisticated, and while she was always on the phone, reading letters and running around in skimpy clothing, implying there were definitely boy friends in her life, you got the idea she wasn't being chased around the desk like Tillie. And her wardrobe (bikinis made of autumn leaves, daisies or flour sacks) was too simple for tabs.