Fleischer Friday: Minnie the Moocher

The Fleischers’ first collaboration with Cab Calloway takes his most famous song and turns it into the vehicle that first makes Betty Boop a star.

This cartoon can be viewed as a sort of origin story for Betty- Boop Begins, if you will.  In other cartoons we see her as an adult with her own place in the big city, but here she’s a teenage girl, living unhappily with her immigrant parents in a suburban house.  They’re mean to her for refusing to eat her hasenpfeffer (which Wikipedia tells me is a rabbit stew thickened with the animal’s blood, so what American kid could blame her?), so she runs away with Bimbo.  We don’t know what her previous fights with her parents were about, but we can assume her continual association with an anthropomorphic dog (who migh be her boyfriend) has probably come up.

Things get really crazy when they set out on the road, though.  Taking refuge in a cave, they’re accosted by the ghost of a walrus who sings in Cab Calloway’s voice, along with an assortment of ghosts, cats, and witches.  I don’t know why Calloway is a walrus, and I really wish I did.  There weren’t a ton of people clamoring to interview animators in the early 1930′s, and there’s no record of anyone asking about that choice.  Did somebody just think it would look cool?  Did they ask Calloway what animal he’d like to be?  Did his flailing dance remind someone of flippers?

One of my favorite things about this cartoon is how easily the use of the song can be read two different ways, depending on your level of understanding of Jazz Age slang.  “Minnie the Moocher” is about a girl who gets mixed up in drugs, and ends up living out her life in an opium den, hallucinating that she’s the consort of the King of Sweden.  But if you’re unfamiliar with phrases like “kick the gong around,” it just sounds like nonsense.  So to anyone who’s clued in, this is a cartoon about a girl who runs aways from home, hears a cautionary tale from some scary characters about what happens to girls out on the streets, and runs back to her parents, scared straight.  To anyone not in the know, on the other hand, it’s a cartoon about a girl who runs away, encounters some spooky ghosts who sing a nonsense song, and runs back to her parents to hide.  Either version works, but there’s an extra layer of meaning for those who were hip enough to follow it (or, for today’s viewers, for those of us who are big enough nerds to be fluent in hipster slang from 80 years ago).