"On with the New"

On a trip to Target before we left Texas, Corrie picked up a two-buck dvd, "100 Classic Cartoons", mainly for the historical benefit of having many Betty Boop, Popeye, and other various cartoons in our film library

There's an interesting cartoon about from the Fleischer Studio about a futuristic World's Fair, rather, a World's Fair set in the future. To see how important people in the 30s thought World's Fairs were going to be in the future is interesting. That was the primary spot for cultures coming together and technological advances being unveiled. Now all anyone needs is the internet.

The majority of the cartoons are from after the Code. In 1936, at the urging of Congress, a Code was developed to tone down the sexuality, raunchiness, as well as the mix of anarchist/socialist allegory. I think there was a single pre-Code Betty Boop cartoon in our collection, and her vamping walk, coy looks, and visible garter were all a bit more exaggerated.

Most of the cartoons, also, were during the time when there was Disney and everybody else. Fleischer was well known, as well as a slew of other animators and animation studios, but the big bad papa at the time was Disney. This is seen in a short set at a circus. The main characters are a mean dog-ring master, and a mouse couple that are blatantly patterned after the creation of Ub Iwerks and his boss Walt. I know who came first because I looked it up.

This particular animated short is very interesting...the ring-master villain does something to knock the hero-mouse up into space. Then the ring-master puts the moves on the hero's mouse girlfriend. She's sitting in his lap and enjoying it, kissing the ring-master all over. The hero-mouse, using his telescope from space sees all this, and gets sad. When he returns to earth, his girlfriend acts like nothing's happened, and tries to give him love. It looks like he might relent, but eventually tosses her aside, sticking his tongue out at her as he walks away. This is so shocking to her that her panties fly off from underneath her dress! I couldn't make this up if I tried.

The titular episode of this post, "On with the New", is a post-Code Betty Boop installment, of which there are so many in this collection that they run together as a rather vacuous blur of black and white. In this episode is something that I hadn't seen before or since in a lifetime of watching cartoons: it begins with Betty working alone in a busy kitchen, working the line, breaking to wash and dry dishes, and getting right back to the line.

I've never seen an animated short where anybody was working a busy line in a restaurant. She had a range-top and a griddle, had orders barked out at her in quick repetition, and was having trouble keeping up, especially since she was washing dishes as well.

An animated sex-symbol running a line by herself...never would have guessed it.