Whoop-De-Boop Amc Will Celebrate Anniversary Of Curvaceous Legend

Boop-oop-a-doop!

Whenever moviegoers of the 1930s heard that phrase, the image of a cute, curvaceous flapper with short skirt and low-cut blouse quickly came to mind.

She was Betty Boop, the sexiest cartoon character to ever wiggle across the movie screen.

The creation of animation pioneer Max Fleischer and his brother Dave, Betty Boop has become a legendary figure (pun intended) in the world of movie cartoons. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in her screen adventures, and today you can find her image on T-shirts, coffee cups and dozens of other items.

American Movie Classics will celebrate the 65th anniversary of her first screen appearance Tuesday at 4:45 p.m. with a “Betty Boop Anniversary Special.” Richard Fleischer, son of Max, hosts the two-hour show, which also showcases 10 of Betty’s cartoons.

The younger Fleischer has nothing but warm memories of growing up in a household where animation often dominated the dinner conversations.

“It was just a wonderful childhood surrounded by those cartoon characters and their creators,” Fleischer in a telephone interview last week. “I felt like the cartoon characters were a part of my family.”

During his career, Max Fleischer was the only serious rival to Walt Disney in the field of animation.

He began turning out cartoons during the silent days, launching a series called “Out of the Inkwell.” It featured a character called Ko-Ko the clown who climbed out of an ink bottle to start each episode and had adventures in the real world, thereby combining live-action and animation together.

He also introduced the bouncing ball, sing-along cartoons with the coming of sound movies. Betty Boop was introduced as a sexy female dog in 1930’s “Dizzy Dishes.” She quickly evolved into a human female who was not only sexy, but also incredibly independent and fiesty.

Betty’s skimpy costume and the cartoons’ risque humor made the series enormously popular. But after the motion picture industry adopted the stricter Production Code of 1934, the Betty Boop films became considerably tamer.

By the early 1940s, the Betty Boop cartoons were history. However, they were rediscovered in the 1950s when many were released to television.

Richard Fleischer thinks he knows why Betty Boop continues to entertain. “It was quite a different concept compared to what Disney was doing,” Fleischer said. “Disney depended on nature for a lot of his humor. Betty Boop was very big-city New York humor.

“The humor is pervasive. The laughs don’t come from somebody getting hit over the head by a sledgehammer.

“And Betty Boop had great sex appeal and naivete at the same time. Despite her sexy looks, she retained her purity but was not above putting in a sly wink or a flirtatious smile.”

Not only had Fleischer brought the public Betty Boop and her pals Ko-Ko and Bimbo the dog, he also had been responsible for animating the Popeye cartoons from 1933 to the early 1940s. Max also oversaw an expensive series of Superman cartoons from 1941 to 1943.

Some film historians say that Max Fleischer never got

the credit he deserved, but son Richard said he never heard his dad complain about that.

“The only time I ever saw my father down was when Paramount took over the studio,” Fleischer said. “During his time of creativity, he was recognized and appreciated all over the world.”

Thanks to creations such as Betty Boop, that appreciation continues for new generations.

And that’s worth another Boop-Oop-A-Doop!