Betty Boop's Crazy Inventions USA,
NR, 7 m, 1933
In their earliest years as animators, the Fleischer
Brothers weren’t afraid to play near the rim of madness; they would eschew an
idea if it gave off even a hint of conventionality. They were true iconoclasts,
throwing oddball imaginings against the wall with an almost brazen indifference
to whether any of them would stick. (They were to cartoons what the Marx
Brothers were to sound comedies.) The world of Betty Boop seemed to be the
Fleischers’ playground of choice; it was there that they produced some of
their more inspired pieces. Miss Boop’s pre-Hays Code adventures, which took
place in a never-never land made up of cigar-chomping bulldogs, bopping
scarecrows and other strange whatsits, rarely followed a normal trajectory;
things played out like they would in a dream (or an LSD trip). The animation
that gave life to these cockeyed ideas was eerily fluid, and the surrealistic
imagery was often as potent as anything you’d find in a Dali painting. Back in
her heyday, Betty Boop was doing God’s good work: she gave American audiences
a few moments to wallow in the absurd and forget about the horrors that were
taking shape beyond the walls of the picture palace. But some of this changed
when the Production Code Administration forced the Fleischers to push their work
into a more kiddy-friendly direction. Not only was Boopsy’s saucy flapper act
tempered, her environment was made less fantastic and more everyday. (The latter
had admittedly more to do with economics than placating the Catholic Legion of
Decency: toning down the kookiness helped to make Betty Boop more accessible to
general audiences.) Still, where the Marx Brothers left us with only five good
films before signing their lives over to Irving Thalberg (more on that here),
the Fleischer Brothers turned out literally hundreds of top drawer shorts before
the Production Code sucked the daring out of their work. Betty Boop’s Crazy
Inventions is a good example of what Fleischer Studios was doing before it
had to answer to the censors, but I’ll be darned if I can spot anything here
that would offend even the most uptight moviegoer. Originally released in 1933, Betty Boop’s Crazy
Inventions finds our scantily clothed heroine (“assisted” by Bimbo, her
former canine boyfriend, and Koko, that bowling pin-shaped clown with shit for
brains) unveiling a plethora of wacky (and often bogus) contraptions to a circus
tent full of weird creatures eager to dispense with some mad money. One device,
a huge and needlessly complicated affair called the “Spot Remover,” gets rid
of a nasty handkerchief stain by simply scissoring it out of the garment.
Another cumbersome gadget, the “Cigarette Snuffer,” is equipped with robotic
limbs that stomp out Bimbo’s Chesterfield and then broom away the butt. In the
middle of this zany exhibition, Miss Boop performs “Keep a Little Song
Handy,” which she sings into a “Voice Recorder.” (For no apparent reason,
a couple of bumblebees show up during Betty’s number and trim her locks.) The
“Voice Recorder” may look like some sort of new-fangled phonograph, but its
inner workings are utterly Flintstonean: the cabinet, which has been stripped of
its tubes and wires, is being powered by a ladybug and a skeletal rat-like
thingy. By keeping an ear up to the receiving end of the recorder’s
mouthpiece, the rodent somehow transmits what he hears through his tail and onto a
turntable that’s being operated by the ladybug. When the ladybug cranks the
disc spinner in the opposite direction, the rat sings back the leggy emcee’s song in a
lower octave. Okay, now that makes no sense. There are other useless machines on display: the “Sweet
Corn Regulator,” which is a slightly modified typewriter that slides an ear of
maize across Koko’s mouth as he taps the keys, and the “Soup Silencer,” a
spoon fitted with some sort of doohickey that converts annoying slurps into
tranquil music. The show’s pièce de résistance is the
“Self-Threader Sewing Machine,” which inevitably goes bonkers and starts
sewing up everything in sight. A female spectator flips out when she finds her
skirt stitched to the trousers of the fellow standing next to her, and when a
loutish hippo-man (or something) guffaws at the sight of that, the machine sews
his big mouth shut. Of course, things only get nuttier from there, what with the
sewing machine breaking out of the tent and upsetting Mother Nature’s
apple-cart. It’s not uncommon in a Fleischer cartoon to see lighthearted
diversions deteriorate into unspeakable nightmares. Betty Boop’s Crazy Inventions is dizzy with
excitement when it ponders what technological marvels the future might have in
store for us, but it’s also quick to remind us of the inbuilt fallibility of
our machines. Though it’s thematically akin to 2001: A Space Odyssey,
it’ll never command that film’s respect; the intelligentsia will always
favor long, ponderous epics over short, snappy cartoons. But not even the
pointiest of heads can look away from the beautiful animation here, which was
done by Willard Bowsky (a Fleischer favorite who went on to work on the
studio’s two feature-length projects, Gulliver’s Travels and Mr.
Bug Goes to Town) and Ugo D’Orsi (who lent his talents to Walt Disney a
few years later for “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in Fantasia).
Whether you’re a Betty Boop fan or not, you owe it to yourself to see this
goofy but strikingly visionary curio. June 6, 2008 “Betty Boop’s Crazy Inventions” Review. © Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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