Monday, June 26, 2017
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.
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.
Sunday, June 25, 2017
EXPLICIT: crawling and mooing for Jesus
Don't try this at home! This is a Pentecostal service known as "The Toronto Blessing". It took place some time in the 1990s at a church near the Toronto airport, and started a nationwide movement of cackling and howling that went on for some years. But then it all went underground. Can't imagine why! The recent revival is much more sedate, and much of the crawling around, mooing and quacking (along with walking people on leashes, which I found especially kinky) has been toned down. Not only that - they're now claiming that hardly any of this actually happened! It was just tiny isolated little episodes which have been blown out of proportion by the usual villain, THE MEDIA. (Blame God for the rest.)
Most Pentecostals rail and thunder at this stuff and think it's the work of the devil. I DO think it's bullshit, and a form of getting yourself off, if you don't mind me saying so. Kenneth Hagin did some great work here, but it's extremely creepy. He walks around the crowd making "whoosh"ing noises at everybody while his helpers hold him up so he won't fall over. What scares me is that Hagin started off more-or-less "straight" - a normal, if there is such a thing, fundamentalist preacher. Then he got corrupted, I guess. It makes for very entertaining viewing, as do the disavowals by the OTHER right-wing/Pentecostal Christians. I guess there is a right and a wrong way to experience God.
Friday, June 23, 2017
Thursday, June 22, 2017
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
Girls in cages
In her cage she danced for him
although a hundred eyes were turned her way
And before the set was through he knew
She would be his loved one
Only a go-go girl in love with someone who didn't care
Only twenty-one, she was a young girl just in from somewhere
Only a go-go girl in love with someone who didn't care
A go-go girl in love.
Gordon Lightfoot
A song nearly forgotten (then remembered)
Over the Hills
The old hound wags his shaggy tail,
And I know what he would say:
It’s over the hills we’ll bound, old hound,
Over the hills, and away.
There’s nought for us here save to count the clock,
And hang the head all day:
But over the hills we’ll bound, old hound,
Over the hills and away.
Here among men we’re like the deer
That yonder is our prey:
So, over the hills we’ll bound, old hound,
Over the hills and away.
The hypocrite is master here,
But he’s the cock of clay:
So, over the hills we’ll bound, old hound,
Over the hills and away.
The women, they shall sigh and smile,
And madden whom they may:
It’s over the hills we’ll bound, old hound,
Over the hills and away.
Let silly lads in couples run
To pleasure, a wicked fay:
’Tis ours on the heather to bound, old hound,
Over the hills and away.
The torrent glints under the rowan red,
And shakes the bracken spray:
What joy on the heather to bound, old hound,
Over the hills and away.
The sun bursts broad, and the heathery bed
Is purple, and orange, and gray:
Away, and away, we’ll bound, old hound,
Over the hills and away.
George Meredith
The poem is good enough to stand alone - I guess - but when I can't find something. . . What annoys me is that it's harder than ever to find things on Google or YouTube or anywhere else, due to sheer volume and congestion. Every day millions more entries are added. This harms, rather than helps your search because of all the CRAP in the way.
This reminded me of something else I tried to track down the other day, and couldn't.
I even remember making gifs of it (and please forgive me for not using GIFS - capital letter always seem to scream at me), but I can't find them anywhere. This is odd, because I always save the gifs I make - I have thousands of them by now. It was an old cartoon - I assumed Disney, because it was one of those sylvan things where nymphlike creatures frolic around, wearing practically nothing. You know what I mean - they're dancing and capering around in a village with thatched roofs, etc., while a man sings in a very high voice.
But that's not the part I wanted.
At a certain point in this pastoral scene, a bunch of the cherubs or whatever-they-are were pulling on a massive bolt which held a huge sort of gate together. They tugged and tugged on it, and when it finally came loose an explosion of water burst out, causing a massive river to tumble and cascade down the dry rocks and hills. It was extremely erotic, and I remember playing that bit over and over again. The animation was, as I remember, outstanding. Animating water convincingly is no small feat. I thought of The Sorcerer's Apprentice in Fantasia, with a doomed Mickey swirling down the drain, his mouth open in a round black O.
I'm trying to remember ANY other identifying details of this cartoon. Disney? Fleischer? Warner Bros.? Merrie Melodies (not likely!)? Happy Harmonies? Silly Symphonies? Obviously every studio had a version of this: cartoons that were churned out weekly for theatrical release. This one was colour, in my memory at least, and the little creatures reminded me of those cherubs in Fantasia:
(I only had three frames to work with here, so pardon the jerkiness.)
It wasn't Fantasia. I checked. I went through synopses of all the Silly Symphonies, including the much-hated Bugs in Love (which was always being shown on the Mickey Mouse Club, much to our disgust. By that time, Hanna-Barbera had become the standard.) Water Babies, a Disney Silly Symphony from which I made these three gifs, was downright disturbing to me because of the excessive focus on small children's bare bums. At least, they look like small children. Was sexual abuse so unthinkable then that child nudity passed without notice?
After much fruitless and boring searching, I've given up on the lost cartoon. It will ever remain a memory. Though I wish I had some idea how to describe it to Google.
Blogger's afterthought. The more I look at that George Meredith poem, the more alarmed I become. The guy is not just a misogynist: he's a misanthrope, apparently hating the whole human condition. The poet is sick of watching the clock in depression, tired of the hypocrisy of those who seem to hold worldly power. In the company of men, he feels like "prey" (the deer, usually the target of such romps). The "cock of clay" line confused me, until I realized that the guy is fantasizing about skeet-shooting, with his enemies as the target.
And women! Forget about it, they're all tarts and temptresses. But boys pose even more of a dilemma: "Let silly lads in couples run/To pleasure, a wicked fay". I found one meaning of "fay" which kind of disturbed me:
fay (third-person singular simple present fays, present participle faying, simple past and past participle fayed)
To fit.
To join or unite closely or tightly.
To lie close together.
To fadge.
So, to fay is to fadge. Right, it all makes sense now.
The last two verses, which I remember because the tempo changes at the end, are gorgeous:
The torrent glints under the rowan red,
And shakes the bracken spray:
What joy on the heather to bound, old hound,
Over the hills and away.
The sun bursts broad, and the heathery bed
Is purple, and orange, and gray:
Away, and away, we’ll bound, old hound,
Over the hills and away.
On the last verse we sang, "The sun. . . bursts. . . broad," the part of it which stayed in my head, along with the purple, and orange, and grey. "Over the hill" can of course be a synonym for "old and obsolete", but Meredith doesn't seem to mind: his greatest desire is to get the hell away, as far away as possible, from the whole chaotic human mess.
ADDENDA. Fadge.
Verb
fadge (third-person singular simple present fadges, present participle fadging, simple past and past participle fadged)
(obsolete, intransitive) To be suitable (with or to something).
(obsolete, intransitive) To agree, to get along (with).
(obsolete, intransitive) To get on well; to cope, to thrive.
(Geordie) To eat together.
(Yorkshire, of a horse) To move with a gait between a jog and a trot.
Noun
fadge (plural fadges)
(Ireland) Irish potato bread; a flat farl, griddle-baked, often served fried.
(New Zealand) A wool pack, traditionally made of jute, now often synthetic.
(Geordie) A small loaf or bun made with left-over dough.
(Yorkshire) A gait of horses between a jog and a trot.
Tuesday, June 20, 2017
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