Friday 9 August 2019

'DIZZY DISHES', THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF BETTY BOOP

Betty Boop
Another deep heat wave is affecting the city of Barcelona. Temperatures are too high to go out or go to the beach and The Grandma prefers to stay at home without doing anything more than watching old cartoons.

She loves cartoons and she has been watching some masterpieces of an old friend of her, Betty Boop, the wonderful girl who debuted on a day like today in 1930. The Grandma likes remembering the story of Betty, this wonderful cartoon whose origin and inspiration is still a great mystery. Some people say she was inspired in a black jazz singer, other say this story is a fake. It doesn't matter which was her inspiration, the most important thing is that Betty Boop has become an icon and a cult cartoon to be enjoyed and respected.

Before watching Betty's cartoons, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.

Chapter 11. Printing (I) (Spanish Version)

Betty Boop is an animated cartoon character created by Max Fleischer, with help from animators including Grim Natwick. She originally appeared in the Talkartoon and Betty Boop film series, which were produced by Fleischer Studios and released by Paramount Pictures. She has also been featured in comic strips and mass merchandising.

A caricature of a Jazz Age flapper, Betty Boop was described in a 1934 court case as: combin[ing] in appearance the childish with the sophisticated -a large round baby face with big eyes and a nose like a button, framed in a somewhat careful coiffure, with a very small body of which perhaps the leading characteristic is the most self-confident little bust imaginable.


More information: Betty Boop

Despite having been toned down in the mid-1930s as a result of the Hays Code to appear more demure, she became one of the best-known and popular cartoon characters in the world.

Betty Boop made her first appearance on August 9, 1930, in the cartoon Dizzy Dishes, the seventh installment in Fleischer's Talkartoon series. Although Clara Bow is often given credit as being the inspiration for Boop, some say she actually began as a caricature of singer Helen Kane, who performed in a style popular with many talented performers of the day, including African American singer Baby Esther Jones.
 
Betty Boop
Inspired by a popular performing style, but not by any one specific person, the character was actually originally created as an anthropomorphic French poodle.

Betty Boop appeared as a supporting character in ten cartoons as a flapper girl with more heart than brains. In individual cartoons, she was called Nancy Lee or Nan McGrew -derived from the 1930 Helen Kane film Dangerous Nan McGrew- usually serving as a girlfriend to studio star, Bimbo.

Within a year, Betty made the transition from an incidental human-canine breed to a completely human female character. While much credit has been given to Grim Natwick for helping to transform Max Fleischer's creation, her transition into the cute cartoon girl was also in part due to the work of Berny Wolf, Otto Feuer, Seymour Kneitel, Doc Crandall, Willard Bowsky, and James Shamus Culhane. By the release of Any Rags Betty Boop was forever established as a human character. Her floppy poodle ears became hoop earrings, and her black poodle nose became a girl's button-like nose.


Betty's voice was first performed by Margie Hines, and was later performed by several different voice actresses, including Kate Wright, Bonnie Poe, Ann Rothschild, also known as Little Ann Little, and most notably, Mae Questel. Questel, who began voicing Betty Boop in Bimbo's Silly Scandals (1931), and continued with the role until 1938, returning 50 years later in Disney's Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Today, Betty is voiced by Cindy Robinson in commercials.

More information: Black Enterprise

Although it has been assumed that Betty's first name was established in the 1931 Screen Songs cartoon, Betty Co-ed, this Betty is an entirely different character. Even though the song may have led to Betty's eventual christening, any reference to Betty Co-ed as a Betty Boop vehicle is incorrect although the official Betty Boop website describes the titular character as a prototype of Betty.


There are at least 12 Screen Songs cartoons that featured Betty Boop or a similar character. Betty appeared in the first Color Classic cartoon Poor Cinderella, her only theatrical color appearance in 1934. In the film, she was depicted with red hair as opposed to her typical black hair.

Betty also made a cameo appearance in the feature film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), in which she appeared in her traditional black and white and was voiced by Mae Questel.

 More information: Little Things

Betty Boop was the star of the Talkartoons by 1932 and was given her own series that same year, beginning with Stopping the Show. From that point on, she was crowned The Queen of the Animated Screen. The series was popular throughout the 1930s, lasting until 1939.

Betty Boop's films found a new audience when Paramount sold them for syndication in 1955. U.M. & M. and National Telefilm Associates were required to remove the original Paramount logo from the opening and closing as well as any references to Paramount in the copyright line on the main titles. However, the mountain motif remains on some television prints, usually with a U.M. & M. copyright line, while recent versions have circulated with the Paramount-Publix reference in cartoons from 1931.

Betty Boop & Bimbo
The original Betty Boop cartoons were made in black-and-white. As new color cartoons made specifically for television began to appear in the 1960s with the spread of color TV sets, the original black-and-white cartoons were retired.

Boop's film career saw a revival with the release of The Betty Boop Scandals of 1974, becoming a part of the post-1960s counterculture. NTA attempted to capitalize on this with a new syndication package, but because there was no market for cartoons in black and white, they sent them to South Korea, where the cartoons were hand-traced frame-by-frame in color, resulting in the degradation of the animation quality and timing.

Unable to sell these to television largely because of the sloppy colorization, they assembled a number of the color cartoons in a compilation feature titled Betty Boop for President, to connect with the 1976 election, but it did not receive a major theatrical release; it resurfaced in 1981 on HBO under the title Hurray for Betty Boop.

It was the advent of home video that created an appreciation for films in their original versions, and Betty was rediscovered again in Beta and VHS versions. The ever-expanding cable television industry saw the creation of American Movie Classics, which showcased a selection of the original black and white Betty Boop cartoons in the 1990s, which led to an eight-volume VHS and LV set, Betty Boop, the Definitive Collection.

More information: Sinuous Magazine

Some of the non-public domain Boop cartoons copyrighted by Republic successor Melange Pictures, Viacom's holding company that handles the Republic theatrical library, have been released by Olive Films under Paramount's license, while the Internet Archive currently hosts 22 Betty Boop cartoons that are public domain.

There were brief returns to the theatrical screen. In 1988, Betty appeared after a 50-year absence with a cameo in the Academy Award-winning film Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The Betty Boop comic strip by Bud Counihan, assisted by Fleischer staffer Hal Seeger, was distributed by King Features Syndicate from July 23, 1934 to November 28, 1937.


From November 19, 1984 to January 31, 1988, a revival strip with Felix the Cat, Betty Boop and Felix, was produced by Mort Walker's sons Brian, Neal, Greg, and Morgan.

In 1990, First Comics published Betty Boop's Big Break, a 52-page original graphic novel by Joshua Quagmire, Milton Knight, and Leslie Cabarga. In 2016, Dynamite Entertainment published new Betty Boop comics with 20 pages in the alternative American anime graphic novel style.

More information: Read Comic Online


Today is a new day,so laugh at the past,
live for today, and look forward to the future.

Betty Boop

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