Betty Boop is possibly the most durable of all Hollywood female icons, since she can still be seen adorning stationery items and girlie accessories almost 85 years after her creation! Even so, her real stock-in-trade – the Max and Dave Fleischer series of black-and-white cartoon shorts throughout the Thirties – are among the least-seen items of classic animation. She was a staple of Italian TV during my childhood, to be sure, but it has been ages since I have seen her image displayed on any channel!
Although I have collected many of the comprehensive classic animation box sets issued on DVD in the past decade (be it Walt Disney Treasures, Looney Tunes Golden Collections, Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker or, best of all, Tex Avery), tellingly, I have not sprung for any of the 3(!) collections recently released on BluRay (no less!) dedicated to Betty Boop and what entries I will be reviewing from her filmography presently have been watched via "You Tube" and are simply more grit from the "Wonders In The Dark" mill.
This particular "Talkartoon" short – which was obviously intended to highlight then-popular entertainer Cab Calloway's current song hit, who also appears with his jazz band in the brief, live-action intro – features Betty angering her parents by declining to eat her dinner (a helpful flower tastes it and promptly wilts away!) and fleeing the house with her dog Bimbo into the woods where they meet a bunch of ghosts, whose walrus leader scares them back home with a rendition of the titular tune. Again, for a film of its age, the animation is pleasing enough (if not particularly inventive) and the song itself is now a standard.
Although I have collected many of the comprehensive classic animation box sets issued on DVD in the past decade (be it Walt Disney Treasures, Looney Tunes Golden Collections, Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker or, best of all, Tex Avery), tellingly, I have not sprung for any of the 3(!) collections recently released on BluRay (no less!) dedicated to Betty Boop and what entries I will be reviewing from her filmography presently have been watched via "You Tube" and are simply more grit from the "Wonders In The Dark" mill.
This particular "Talkartoon" short – which was obviously intended to highlight then-popular entertainer Cab Calloway's current song hit, who also appears with his jazz band in the brief, live-action intro – features Betty angering her parents by declining to eat her dinner (a helpful flower tastes it and promptly wilts away!) and fleeing the house with her dog Bimbo into the woods where they meet a bunch of ghosts, whose walrus leader scares them back home with a rendition of the titular tune. Again, for a film of its age, the animation is pleasing enough (if not particularly inventive) and the song itself is now a standard.