“When that happens to most feminine stars they are flattered. “Betty has two leading men in every picture,” noted the News-Herald in 1932. Unlike her contemporary Minnie Mouse, Betty wasn’t a sidekick, but rather the star of her own show. Here, Betty's ice block coffin is carried by dwarfs on skis. "Snow-White" is filled with surreal imagery. “In fact, they were inspirational to the Surrealists.” “The Fleischer Studios had a really experimental and kind of Surrealist style,” says Hendershot. Halfway through the film, jazz legend Cab Calloway (a regular guest in Betty Boop cartoons) performs a spooky musical number, embodied first by Koko and then by a ghost. As Max’s grandson Mark Fleischer recalls, his grandfather’s motto was “If you can do it in real life, why animate?” Fleischer Studio’s seven-minute “Snow-White” short includes such surreal images as the evil queen’s face morphing into eggs in a frying pan a tree stump fighting with Betty’s co-stars, canine beau Bimbo and his friend Koko the Clown and Betty, interred in an ice block coffin, being led down a mountain by the dwarfs on skis. In the Fleischer landscape, anything was possible, and seemingly nothing was off limits. In New York, meanwhile, Fleischer created a grungy, often dangerous urban world for its characters to navigate. From its home in California, Disney was laying the groundwork for the idyllic, fantastical fairy tales that would soon dominate its oeuvre. The dueling studios’ styles were diametrically opposed. After a makeover, Betty became the first fully human, fully female animated character.Īt its height in the 1930s, Fleischer Studios was a giant in animation, rivaled only by Disney.
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She appeared in the Fleischers’ “ Talkartoons” series as the girlfriend of main character Bimbo and was such a success that the studio promoted her to its star. Initially, Betty was depicted as a dog with a button nose and floppy ears. Her constantly shifting design offers an intriguing case study of how representations of women-including fictional ones-are shaped by censorship, the public’s response and changing conceptions of morality. Betty’s appearance continues to evolve today, with the character donning ripped jeans, joggers and sneakers, and overalls in merchandise and on social media. Beneath that iconic look, however, is a more complex story of aesthetic transformation, from what Heather Hendershot, a media historian at MIT, describes as a “flapper-secretary-adventurer” in the early 1930s to a “middle-class homemaker” by the end of the decade. The enduring image of Betty is a flapper in a strapless minidress, with a garter peeking out above her knee and large hoop earrings in her ears. … They would come for the Betty Boop cartoon.” “She’s a big hit,” says Katia Perea, a cartoon scholar at City University New York, “and she’s a big hit in the same way that Felix the Cat is a big hit, where she was drawing audiences to the movie. She is, however, mentioned in many documentaries and books about the Harlem Renaissance, and her legendary way of singing does live on in the iconic Betty Boop character.At a time when cartoons were largely opening acts before a featured movie, Betty’s stardom was an outlier. During her entire career, she was mostly only known locally in the New York City area, and she reportedly died at a very young age.
In fact, she never even really achieved mainstream success.
Meanwhile, the very woman who inspired the character, Baby Esther, was never compensated in any way. It's estimated that the Betty Boop franchise generated millions of dollars in revenue from televison networks and sales of merchandise. But soon after, she was transformed into a white woman and remained so until her character was finally retired.
She appeared in at least one animated scene in the popular Popeye The Sailor Man series. Initially, Betty Boop was shown in cartoons as an African American woman. That very same style was heavily imitated by the Betty Boop animated character. Her stage name was "Baby Esther", but unfortunately, when her character become the first and most famous sex symbol in animation she was whitewashed with most people having no idea where the original inspiration came from.īaby Esther had a popular cabaret act at the infamous Cotton Club in Harlem, New York where she sang with a unique vocal style that featured “boop-boop-a-doops” and other similar scat sounds. PBS has confirmed that Betty Boop, the popular cartoon character introduced to the world by cartoonist Max Fleischer in 1930, was actually inspired by a real-life African American jazz singer and entertainer from Harlem named Esther Jones.
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