Betty Boop in Color
Betty Boop remained a black & white cartoon character even after color became de rigour, with only a single exception during her classic period.
Discounting some Betty Boop cartoons that were garishly & ineptly colorized in the 1980s, Poor Cinderella (1934) is the only full color cartoon the Fleischer Brothers ever produced for Betty, & it turns out she had red hair!
A couple minutes longer than most Boops, it passes the ten minute mark. She sings "I'm just a poor Cinderella/ Nobody loves me it seems/ And like a poor Cinderella/ I find my romance in dreams."
 After the ugly stepsisters go to the ball, the Disneyseque fairy godmother appears & sings "Pretty Cinderella." A pumpkin, six mice, & two lizards are turned into horse, carriage, & liverymen.
I like that she had some white mice in a little cage as pets, not trapped pests. The mice sing "We are little mice & we are glad to be free." The pumpkin & lizards sing, too, then are turned into Cinderella's conveyance & guards.
Before she takes off for the ball, she's dressed up nicely, & warned to be home by twelve. She's a hit at the ball of course.
 As she & the prince dance with startling fluidity, while a Rudy Vallee figure sings a couple lines from "Poor Cinderella." At midnight she flees leaving behind a glass slipper.
The prince promises he'll marry anyone the shoe fits, a risky promise, but fortunately only Betty was footbound I guess. They get married & if life was hell after that we don't see the story at that point.
The one fault in all this is it doesn't vary from the well-known story in any way peculiar to Betty Boop. It's all prettily done but awfully trite.
In its defense, it predates both Rogers & Hemmerstein's musical & Disney's cartoon, & seems indeed to have influenced the set design of the Disney feature, as the Fleischer brothers rever before or after designed such lush backgrounds. It's a very beautiful cartoon, just don't expect authentic Bettyisms.
Betty made a come-back in the 1989 color cartoon Betty Boop's Hollywood Mystery, borrowing a mite ineptly the style of the Fleischer cartoons.
Betty is a waitress in a diner, with entirely the wrong voice which alone wrecks the effectiveness. Doing the voice wrong sabotages the film more than does the limited animation or the purely retarded gags for Koko & Bimbo in the kitchen.
After about ten minutes I started to be able to overlook the phenominally dumb mistake of not finding a better Helen Kane impersonator than Melissa Fahn.
 Fahn did have a naturally babyish voice, which got her spotted (or overheard) by the second-rate casting directors for the Betty Boop cartoon while Fahn was working as a receptionist.
Fahn would go on to much professional voice work plus a tiny bit of professional acting. So this film was better for her than it was for Betty by a long shot.
She sings "On Movie Star Island" to the diners. Which stinks. Meanwhile Mr. Slade is being hired under mysterious circumstances by a mystery lady. The number's big finale has the villainous cat slipping on a banana peal. He fires Betty, Bimbo the dog-boy, & Koko the clown.
 Detective Sam Slade in a trenchcoat needs a band to go undercover for him, so hires Betty & her pals. Bimbo says, "You mean musical detectives?"
That night at Lola Deville's annual masquerade ball, everyone who's anyone has come in costume.
Betty sings, "Mystery's Rhythm," not as bad as the first song, though not sung as well as the real Betty would've sung it. Maxwell Moviola claims he wants Betty in her pictures.
 There's a gunman & the lights go out. When the lights come on, Lola's necklace is gone, & Betty's left holding a gun. Lola calls her a guttersnipe & thief, & the police arrest Betty. She sings "Poor Little Jailbird, blue to the bottom of your soul," which is the entirety of the lyric.
Bimbo & Koko found the real thief's mask which says "Property of Moolah Studios." They break Betty out of jail not knowing the police let her escape, then they set off to solve the crime & clear Betty.
 They'll soon find the real culprit, an insipid femme fatale. Sam Slade was in on it, too.
The escape sequence is through the Special FX department of Moolah Studios, an opportunity for major gags, which is blown. The second escape sequence through a movie set reminiscent of Busby Berkley is better.
In the meantime, Dan the Cat's diner has gone broke without Betty's act, & he wants her back, but hasn't worked up the nerve to ask. In the addendum, he gets them back with a singing telegram. Betty sings a final crappy song, "You Don't Have to be Star to be a Star."
What a pity this revival of Betty couldn't've been done by folks who knew & understood the character & possessed sufficient talent to do her justice.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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