Once upon a time, Betty Boop and Cab Calloway performed together.

Minnie the Moocher was filmed in 1932, before the Production Code of 1934 forced Betty to give up her short skirt & garter and change into a knee-length dress with a back (and, presumably, a bra). As you might imagine, the Code was Betty's death knell. Sex sold, even in cartoons from the 1930's.

This cartoon opens with the earliest known footage of Cab Calloway and his Orchestra performing a one-minute introduction to Minnie the Moocher. The plot of the cartoon is pretty simple: Betty decides she hates her parents and runs away with a friend, then she gets the bejeebers scared out of her and she returns home. Simple, eh?

Yeah, but one wonders where Max Fleisher got some of his ideas. Calloway appears before Betty and Bimbo in a puff of smoke as a rotoscoped walrus and conjures up visions of ghosts & skeletons while singing about drug use & having a sugar daddy in front of a constantly changing background. The demons & witch that scare Betty home seem almost tame by comparison.

Cab Calloway went on to make two other Betty Boop cartoons: The Old Man of the Mountain in 1933 (which also features a one-minute long live-action introduction by Cab Calloway and his Orchestra performing the title song) and Snow White, also in 1933, four years before the Disney version. Alas, there is no live-action footage of Cab Calloway performing the featured song, St. James Infirmary Blues, although he does appear as a rotoscoped Koko the Clown.

If you have some extra time, check out those two cartoons. In them Max Fleisher comes up with some of the most original and clever visual stunts and situations ever commited to film...and, yeah, the Production Code of 1934 killed those, too.

Posted by: Victor at 10:17 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 307 words, total size 3 kb.