Birth of Boop

Interesting Fleischer cartoon. It has a TRANSFORMERS style car that turns into a robot, and an early use of television — really a Skype call — for peeping purposes.

The star is Bimbo, who looks a bit different from later toons when he’s Betty Boop’s canine boyfriend. But Betty looks different too. She started life as a poodle, only gaining a name, a personality, and a species of humanity later. In this toon the gf mostly human but has a black dot nose. Her head is much smaller than Betty’s. She doesn’t have the dangling poodle ears, which eventually mutated into Betty’s big hoop earrings, but she does wear a chic hat with little flaps on it which match Bimbo’s ears.

And she has a fairly obnoxious personality, forcing the love-sick Bimbo to fight for her hand with a giant pugilist. The Fleischer vision of a he-man is quite something, by the way.

But there’s one scene, as pointed out by uploader parker Taibi, where Betty acquires both human compassion and a big, Boop-like noggin, as she emerges from the prizefighter’s tent to offer Bimbo’s robo-car a replenishing drink of water (like Esmeralda!).

30s toons often went off-model, depending on who was drawing them that day, but this little transformation is fascinating — Betty leaps forward millions of years of evolution in one cut, but as Dr Moreau observed, “the stubborn beast flesh creeps back,” and her cranium deflates to more dog-like proportions by her next appearance.

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