I’ve always found that nothing helps start the week on a positive note quite as well as a great old fashioned upbeat musical number. Even though I’ve shared it in other venues before, I can’t think of a better clip to start with than “Jumpin’ Jive” from Stormy Weather, by Cab Calloway and his orchestra, featuring the genuinely mindboggling dancing of the Nicholas Brothers.
I’ve been putting off the last of the Cab Calloway shorts, because it’s one of what I think of as the Problem Cartoons. That is, it’s one of several Boop cartoons in which humor is derived from a threat of sexual violence. Despite that rather large stumbling block, though, there’s some other great stuff going on in it, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Unlike in Minnie the Moocher and Snow White, Calloway and his orchestra perform throughout this entire cartoon, and Calloway voices the owl at the beginning in addition to the title character. This transforms the whole short into a kind of rhythmic jazz opera, which would be even more delightful if its subject matter wasn’t a mountain village being menaced by a scat-singing hillbilly rapist.
Betty’s decision to go see the Old Man isn’t well justified (and the Owl is definitely baffled), but it seems to be her habit of eliminating problems for her animal friends. Meanwhile everyone else is running away. I love all the little bits of pure Fleischer animal business in this: the lion skating on two rabbits, the spider enlisting his trapped flies to carry his web, and the caterpillar moving out with all its furniture. The hippo lady and her unfortunate hybrid progeny are rather less funny, and become even less so the more you think about all the implications.
The music is comprised of two slightly rewritten Calloway numbers, the title tune and “You’ve Got to Hi-De-Hi.” The latter is actually my favorite, because it’s a duet between Calloway and Mae Questel as Betty (the only time this happens in the three Calloway/Boop cartoons). It also features the trademark rotoscoped Cab Calloway dance, which looks even stranger as performed by a giant white cave man than it does when essayed by Koko the Clown or a walrus. Then of course there’s the standard chase scene, and the quick defeat of the Old Man by Betty and all the animals, who, judging from the clues given earlier, decided to give up on running away and come help Betty because she’s just that hot.
I’m curious to get some reader opinions on this one: Does the undercurrent of sexual assault ruin the whole cartoon, or is it just an unfortunate product of its time that’s balanced out by spectacular music and delightful animation?
Also, would having bugs in your beard be worth it if they fed you a beer whenever you needed one?
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).
Now it’s time for Fleischer Friday, in which I inflict on you my irrational love of 86-year-old cartoons we watch and discuss a classic of early animation. This week, one of the best ever, the Betty Boop version of Snow White:
The first thing you notice in this cartoon is that it doesn’t really succeed in telling the story of Snow White. It certainly starts out like it intends to, but once Betty-as-Snow escapes beheading, things go off in a different direction. The dwarves are barely there at all, only serving as seven identical pallbearers for the frozen Boop. Betty’s usual supporting cast of Bimbo the Dog and Koko the Clown are given much more prominent roles as the Wicked Queen’s guards, who are won over by Snow White’s beauty.
The Queen herself bears more than a passing resemblance to Olive Oyl, who she predates as an animated character by three and a half months. Both characters, as well as Betty Boop herself, are voiced by the spectacularly talented Mae Questel. The Queen is the focus of several of those great Fleischer Studios sight gags, such as when her angry face turns into a frying pan, and when she decapitates her thumb. The Magic Mirror is also put to good use. I’m particularly fond of the bit at the end where he blows the Queen a raspberry, and his tongue turns into a honking goose.
Obviously, we can’t discuss this cartoon without talking about Cab Calloway and his version of the Saint James Infirmary Blues, which dominates the second half of the short. These early Fleischer cartoons frequently served as the equivalent of music videos for popular artists of the day, and Calloway was their most perfectly matched collaborator in this regard. Like the Fleischers, Calloway had a reputation for outrageousness and an unmistakable style. He doesn’t just lend Koko his voice, but also his distinctive dance moves, which would have been immediately recognizable to audiences of the time.
It’s when Koko starts singing that the cartoon completely departs from the traditional Snow White story, and I can imagine how someone who’s invested in narrative structure might object to that. The thing is, though, even in 1933, before Walt Disney got into the feature film business, everyone already knew the story and how it was supposed to end. So rather than trying to squeeze that whole story into seven minutes, the Fleischers take it in a totally new direction. There’s no boring WASPy Prince in this version, just a sad clown with a distinctly African American voice beneath his painted-on whiteface- a far more interesting suitor for our New York Jewish flapper princess. And while so many stories end with a kiss, how many others end with a dog pulling a dragon inside-out?
