Betty Boop in Color
Betty Boop remained a black & white cartoon character even after color became de rigour, with only a single exception during her classic period.
Discounting some Betty Boop cartoons that were garishly & ineptly colorized in the 1980s, Poor Cinderella (1934) is the only full color cartoon the Fleischer Brothers ever produced for Betty, & it turns out she had red hair!
A couple minutes longer than most Boops, it passes the ten minute mark. She sings "I'm just a poor Cinderella/ Nobody loves me it seems/ And like a poor Cinderella/ I find my romance in dreams."
 After the ugly stepsisters go to the ball, the Disneyseque fairy godmother appears & sings "Pretty Cinderella." A pumpkin, six mice, & two lizards are turned into horse, carriage, & liverymen.
I like that she had some white mice in a little cage as pets, not trapped pests. The mice sing "We are little mice & we are glad to be free." The pumpkin & lizards sing, too, then are turned into Cinderella's conveyance & guards.
Before she takes off for the ball, she's dressed up nicely, & warned to be home by twelve. She's a hit at the ball of course.
 As she & the prince dance with startling fluidity, while a Rudy Vallee figure sings a couple lines from "Poor Cinderella." At midnight she flees leaving behind a glass slipper.
The prince promises he'll marry anyone the shoe fits, a risky promise, but fortunately only Betty was footbound I guess. They get married & if life was hell after that we don't see the story at that point.
The one fault in all this is it doesn't vary from the well-known story in any way peculiar to Betty Boop. It's all prettily done but awfully trite.
In its defense, it predates both Rogers & Hemmerstein's musical & Disney's cartoon, & seems indeed to have influenced the set design of the Disney feature, as the Fleischer brothers rever before or after designed such lush backgrounds. It's a very beautiful cartoon, just don't expect authentic Bettyisms.
A color cartoon made for television by many of the same people who brought us "Charlie Brown" specials, The Romance of Betty Boop (1985) is supposedly set in 1939. Opening credits are shown on signs outside Club Bubble as we hear Betty singing on the soundtrack "Just Give 'Em Your Boop Oop a Doop," not bad really.
Betty is voiced by singer-composer Desiree Goyette, pretty damned well done too, even if not the equal of Mae Questel. The original music is co-written by Goyette & her husband Ed Bogas. It's not always quite period-correct but none of the music's bad, & the original bits don't necessarily pale when heard back to back with classic tunes.
Some of the background sets are very beautiful, sometimes like Victorian wood engravings for the New York city streets. Except for Betty herself, the animation looks very 1980s & does not capture the Fleischer spirit, but it's pretty decent even so.
Betty sells shoes by day, performs in the club by night. We first see her heading home from her day job, singing a swing tune with lyrics such as "Betty Boop is my name/ Boop oop a doop is my game."
 On the street near her apartment, she encounters a butcher who knows her well, who gives her a gift of meat, then he along with all the ladies hanging out on the ghetto street sing "My Dear Mr Shane."
She enters her steam-heated apartment where she has a pet parrot (Frank Buxton). The parrot is excited that his mistress is home. She's so tired, but prepares herself a meal, & has a lengthy dialogue with the parrot.
She picks up a gossip magazine called Blab! & the cover features millionaire playboy Waldo Van Lavish (Derek McGrath) with his "debutante tramps."
Betty's never met Waldo but apparently has a crush. A life of two jobs is hard even if one of the jobs is what she likes to do. Marrying a millionaire playboy would be easier. An attitude the real Betty never once possessed when David & Max Fleischer put her in films.
Freddie (Sean Allen) the ice deliveryman. He's out in the street with his horse-drawn ice wagon. He calls to Betty & when she comes to her apartment window to look down, he croons to her, "I Only Have Ice for You." He starts up the stairs with a big hunk of ice in his tongs. It has melted to the size of an ice cube when he arrives at her door, but it's perfect for her drink.
 They spend time together. He likes to think of himself as her boyfriend, but she dreams only of Waldo Van Lavish. Fred leaves distraught, though both he & she sing a bit more of "Only Have Eyes for You."
At Club Bubbles, a combo sings & plays "Baby You're the Cause of It All." The pianist sings it Vegas style in imitation of Sinatra. An international audience is arriving in droves to see Betty, who is in the dressing room getting ready when she learns that Waldo van Lavish is in the audience with his two debutante tramps.
She goes on stage singing "I Can't Give You Anything but Love." The club manager/owner is Betty's Uncle Mischa (Sandy Kenyan). His Jewish name is the only thing to informs us Betty is a Jewish, a fact hinted at in a couple of the the Fleischer cartoons, notably in Minnie the Moocher (1932) in which we see Betty's East European or Russian Jewish mom & dad.
Uncle Mischa is confronted at the stage door by a trio of threatening gangsters, such as in the '30s really did have dubious connections with nite-clubs. Mischa tries to argue with them, & beg, but they're not the sorts to be reasonable. This is when the head gangster, Johnny Throat (George Wendt), takes an unsavory interest in Betty.
 For Betty's second number she does "I Wanna Be Loved By You" going into the audience to flirt outrageously with Waldo. She strives to displace Waldo's scowling sluts. He leaves the club with his two dates, however, & a distraught Betty soon has worse to deal with, as she's grabbed by the gangsters to be delivered to Johnny Throat.
She beats up two of the two henchmen with her purse, & gives the head gangster a chewing out befdore she storms away to her home, not taking seriously the danger she is in.
Waldo shows up at her house in his limousine. The deliveryman sees her getting into the guy's big car, & is heartbroken. The vain Waldo is terrible on their date, but Betty is seemingly too stupid to notice.
Later she's kidnapped by the henchmen & delivered to Throat's apartment. They discover she's quite a handful & just about impossible to keep captive. When she escapes, Throat sends his henchmen to just kill her.
 Uncle Mischa at Club Bubbles has meanwhile contacted Fred the Ice Man telling him Betty's been kidnapped, not knowing she escaped & went to Waldo for help. Waldo's an unutterable coward & Betty has to save him.
Fred goes to the Johnny Throat's apartment to beat up the gangster boss. But Betty's fleeing the other two thugs who've been sent to kill her. She climbs into the neo light tower of Club Bubbles, carrying Waldo over her shoulders, rather like a demure tiny King Kong.
Impossibly strong though she appears to be, Betty nevertheless falls from the tower. Fred arrives in time to save the day, catching Betty & Waldo in a butterfly net he just happened to have on him.
Foolish Betty is still showing affection only for Waldo. wjp takes Betty to meet his parents. She believes Waldo wants to marry her. But he's introducing her to his mom & dad as a possible new maid for their household.
In high dudgeon Betty speaks up for the proletariat & realizes she should stick with a working class man like Fred! A scene later she is on the balcony of her apartment with Fred as they sing "I Only Have Eyes for You" as a duet.
The half-hour cartoon kind of sucks for weakening of Betty's character, but she does save Waldo's life at least, so not entirely weak, & in the very end, to Fred's continuing distress, Betty asserts her intent to remain "an independent girl" & reprises her theme song behind the closing credits.
Betty made another come-back in the 1989 color cartoon Betty Boop's Hollywood Mystery, borrowing a mite ineptly the style of the Fleischer cartoons.
Betty is a waitress in a diner, with entirely the wrong voice which alone wrecks the effectiveness. Doing the voice wrong sabotages the film more than does the limited animation or the purely retarded gags for Koko & Bimbo in the kitchen.
After about ten minutes I started to be able to overlook the phenominally dumb mistake of not finding a better Helen Kane impersonator than Melissa Fahn.
 Fahn did have a naturally babyish voice, which got her spotted (or overheard) by the second-rate casting directors for the Betty Boop cartoon while Fahn was working as a receptionist.
Fahn would go on to much professional voice work plus a tiny bit of professional acting. So this film was better for her than it was for Betty by a long shot.
She sings "On Movie Star Island" to the diners. Which stinks. Meanwhile Mr. Slade is being hired under mysterious circumstances by a mystery lady. The number's big finale has the villainous cat slipping on a banana peal. He fires Betty, Bimbo the dog-boy, & Koko the clown.
 Detective Sam Slade in a trenchcoat needs a band to go undercover for him, so hires Betty & her pals. Bimbo says, "You mean musical detectives?"
That night at Lola Deville's annual masquerade ball, everyone who's anyone has come in costume.
Betty sings, "Mystery's Rhythm," not as bad as the first song, though not sung as well as the real Betty would've sung it. Maxwell Moviola claims he wants Betty in her pictures.
 There's a gunman & the lights go out. When the lights come on, Lola's necklace is gone, & Betty's left holding a gun. Lola calls her a guttersnipe & thief, & the police arrest Betty. She sings "Poor Little Jailbird, blue to the bottom of your soul," which is the entirety of the lyric.
Bimbo & Koko found the real thief's mask which says "Property of Moolah Studios." They break Betty out of jail not knowing the police let her escape, then they set off to solve the crime & clear Betty.
 They'll soon find the real culprit, an insipid femme fatale. Sam Slade was in on it, too.
The escape sequence is through the Special FX department of Moolah Studios, an opportunity for major gags, which is blown. The second escape sequence through a movie set reminiscent of Busby Berkley is better.
In the meantime, Dan the Cat's diner has gone broke without Betty's act, & he wants her back, but hasn't worked up the nerve to ask. In the addendum, he gets them back with a singing telegram. Betty sings a final crappy song, "You Don't Have to be Star to be a Star."
What a pity this revival of Betty couldn't've been done by folks who knew & understood the character & possessed sufficient talent to do her justice.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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