BETTY BOOP IN COLOR FULL
BETTY BOOP IN COLOR SERIES
BETTY BOOP IN COLOR TV

Merrill’s other song texts for Brice, likewise redolent with Jewish content, include “The Yiddish Bride” and “Becky Is Back in the Ballet.” Yet “I’m an Indian” remains unique for its message about a young Jewish woman who claims to have changed ethnicity: “And now oy oy my people/ How can I tell them how/ Their little Rosie Rosenstein/ Is a terrible Indian now?”īetty Boop’s version alters the original lyrics. The lyrics to “I’m An Indian” were written in 1920 by Blanche Merrill (born Blanche Dreyfoos 1883-1966) for Brice to perform in the Ziegfeld Follies. In “Stopping the Show,” Betty sings “I’m An Indian,” a comic speciality number made popular by Brice with a thick Yiddish accent. The imitations and appropriations continued in the Betty Boop short “Stopping the Show” (1932) in which Betty imitates, among others, Fanny Brice (born Fania Borach (1891–1951) and immortalized in the musical “Funny Girl”. In 1932, Kane sued Max Fleischer for appropriating her image and her act, but lost the case, as it turned out Kane had lifted the boop-oop-a-doop routine from songs by Baby Esther, a 1920s African American mainstay at Harlem’s Cotton Club who presented an infantilized onstage character.

BETTY BOOP IN COLOR SERIES

Questel’s approach to this material was more brassy and caricatural, suitable for a series of cartoon films. Mae Questel got her start in showbiz as an imitator of Helen Kane, whose hit song, “I Wanna Be Loved by You” (1928) included the gentle, wistful interjection, “boop-oop-a-doop.” Betty’s cute essence is imitative and mimetic. More simply, Betty’s persistent trendiness, especially in recent years, may be due to her irrepressible curvaceousness, with a face that would later be echoed, if less seductively, in Tweety, the 1940s Warner Bros. Although paranoid in tone, the poem captures the multi-facetedness and extensive impact of Betty and her protean character, with a Jewish perspective in the forefront. Surely Max Fleischer would have expressed his feelings about Betty differently, but he might have approved of Ginsberg’s assimilation of the cartoon character into social, political, industrial, and journalistic spheres.

BETTY BOOP IN COLOR FULL

The product of an all-night writing session after he took amphetamines, heroin and magic mushrooms, Ginsberg’s “TV Baby,” as he called it, demonstrates a close identification with Betty: “Here I am - Old Betty Boop whoopsing behind the skull-microphone wondering what Idiot soap opera horror show we broadcast by Mistake - full of communists and frankenstein cops and mature capitalists running the State Department and the Daily News Editorial hypnotizing millions of legional-eyed detectives to commit mass murder on the Invisible/ which is only a bunch of women weeping hidden behind newspapers in the Andes, conspired against by Standard Oil…” Allen Ginsberg’s lengthy 1959 poem “Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber,” expresses Boop-awareness at a time of maximum psychedelic intoxication. While the origin of such tributes may be partly due to Betty’s Yiddishkeit, there is also the attraction of the quasi-delirious manic imagery in Fleischer’s free-flowing cartoons.

It is described by the vendor as a “sparkly addition to your Hanukkah table! Plus, it has storage for candles, dreidels, candy, lipstick, whatever your heart desires,” this hybrid object recuperates Betty in a Jewish celebratory context, promising complete self-fulfilment. It is a children’s lunchbox, repurposed as a menorah by adding rhinestones and aluminum candle cups. A Betty Boop Tin Menorah Vintage Lunchpail is on sale on Etsy. On a humbler scale, there are endless tchotchkes available that include Betty, some expressing a popular urge to make her seem more Jewish.

Posen had agreed to design a new dress for Betty in a color dubbed Betty Boop Red. Five years later, American Jewish fashion designer Zac Posen appeared with Betty in a commercial for the Pantone Color Institute.

BETTY BOOP IN COLOR TV

In 2012, the French Jewish comics artist and film director Joann Sfar, author of “The Rabbi’s Cat,” directed a TV commercial for Lancôme, the perfumes and cosmetics brand, starring Betty. To be sure, her rising fame in recent years was due to adoration by Jewish fans. Yet fans of animation have sometimes been baffled in trying to pinpoint the degree of Yiddishkeit in Betty’s chameleon-like persona.

Betty was eventually voiced by a Bronx-born Jewish actress, Mae Questel. August 9 marks the 90th anniversary of Betty Boop’s first appearance in a cartoon short produced by the Austrian Jewish animator Max Fleischer.

Betty boop in color