Betty was created by Grim Natwick who said, 
"I had a song sheet of Helen Kane and the spit curls came from her. 
So I just designed a little dog and put cute feminine legs on her and the earrings 
which developed later started out as long ears. 
I suppose I used a French poodle for the basic idea of the character.
" Grim Natwick's other claim to fame was that he created and animated 
most of Snow White for Disney.
They tried her in a few cartoons as Bimbo's girlfriend
and by the time of "Bimbo's Initiation" she was a regular. 
She gained her name in the Screen Song cartoon "Betty Coed". 
"Any Rags" marked Betty's debut as a human. 
By this time she had changed so much that the only change 
needed to make her human consisted of turning her ears into earrings. 
Minnie the Moocher is where Betty gained her real personality as a Jewish princess.
 

The voice of Betty Boop was done by several women, 
including Margie Heinz, Kate Wright and Bonnie Poe,
but Little Ann Little and Mae Questel were the most important. 
Little Ann Little did the voice first and then went on the road
with a Betty Boop act. The act consisted, in part of a drawing demonstration 
by Pauline Comanor, who drew Ann as Betty Boop 
and handed out the drawings to lucky audience members. 
Mae Questel did the voice until the series ended in 1939. 
She was quite adept at mimicry and could imitate anyone. 
She also, like Ann bore a striking resemblance to Betty. 
 
 

The Fleischer's cartoons were definitely reflective of the East Coast
especially when you compare to the "Sunny Disposich" cartoons 
produced on the West Coast such as those from 
Disney, Lantz, Warner Brothers and UB Iwerks. 
Everything was alive including inanimate objects.
 

There were two types of cartoons which the brothers did particularly well. 
One was the use of unconnected gags called surprise endings 
but was more often a weird shock ending. One of the best examples
of this is "Betty Boop M.D." in which Betty, Bimbo and Koko
sell a cureall elixir called Jippo. One customer drinks it and starts a 
rhythmic sputtering and all join in. Bimbo joins in singing "Nobody's Sweetheart". 
The sputterer gets close up to the camera and turns into the now classic image 
of Frederic March as Mr. Hyde. One way to achieve a lot of motion 
in the gag string with a minimum of drawing was through the use of cycles (loops)
in which the last drawing animated into the first drawing. All the animation 
in this web site uses this method. The Fleischers did the best cycles 
in the business. If you over-used cycles it was too obvious
as in the case of Paul Terry's Farmer Al Falfa cartoons. 
 

The other type was the surrealistic mystery drama. They were bizzare and moody. 
The animation camera was held stationary in those days and changes 
in the camera field had to be drawn by the animator. This lent an 
unearthly quality that added much to the mysterious style cartoons. 
One of the best of this style was "Bimbo's Initiation". One animation scholar 
called it a bad dream and that's exactly what it was. Bimbo is walking down 
a street and falls into a manhole where he is acosted by a group of hooded
members of the mystic order of the Hoom cooka hotcha. Each with a lit 
candle on his head spouting the words, "Wanna be a member?" 
over and over to which Bimbo always replys no. That is until Betty, 
whom at this point has dog ears, asks coyly "Wanna be a member?" 
to which he replies "Yessss!" and is led into a room filled with 
four rows of identical Betty Boops stacked one on top of the other.
 

In 1932 the release of "Minnie the Moocher" marked the first
of the cartoons to feature a big name Jazz star, Cab Calloway, 
who also appeared in two other Boop cartoons, "The Old Man of the Mountain" 
and "Snow White" In "Snow White" the featured song was 
"St. James Infirmary" The Fleischer's must not have known 
the true references in the song, when Calloway goes on to say
"my baby is stretched out on a long white table" he was referring 
to her death to syphillis, also that Minnie the Moocher was a cocaine user. 
They had the hottest jazz of any of the cartoons though even if they didn't 
understand the lyrics. Betty's popularity had grown so much that 
there was merchandise galour and Helen Kane 
filed a $250,000 law suit against Max Fleischers, 
Fleischer Studios and Paramount in 1934 claiming that Betty Boop 
was taking away her popularity by using her method of singing. 
The turning point came when Paramount located a film 
of a black entertainer, Baby Esther, singing a song containing Boop Oop a Doop. 
This film was made in the early days of sound. Paramount, of course, 
claimed that Helen Kane had seen this entertainer's act. The case was dropped 
due to the judge stating that Helen Kane didn't prove that Boop was a rip-off. 
 

Betty's cartoons were rather risqué. Ever since she coyly pulled her skirt down 
and it popped back up again in "Barnacle Bill" it became the running gag. 
These gags showed up almost everywhere in Betty's career. 
With the Will Hays production code challenging everyone in the entertainment
industry Paramount asked the Fleischer's to tone down the sexuality which they did. 
 
 

They toned her down so much that, by 1935 she lost her personality. 
She went from a vivacious wised-up dumb brunette type 
to a Jewish maiden aunt transferring the love she's never known 
with a man to her cute, moonfaced dog Pudgy. Her mini-skirt became 
a knee-length and sedate dress. Among other new characters 
were a boyfriend named Fearless Fred, but, the best new character was Grampy. 
Indeed Grampy, in my opinion, Grampy was the new star of the cartoons. 
His wacky inventions were the only thing to give the cartoons 
vitality in the last days. Betty's career was short lived but it was influential to no end.
 
 
 
 

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