![]() Soon after Bimbo’s character began appearing on the screen, however, “bimbo” came to mean a promiscuous female. When he was first dubbed “Bimbo,” that word meant a tough guy, or a criminal. At the time, “hot dog” was slang for “attractive woman.” Appropriately enough, considering this quest of Bimbo’s, his name had two different meanings at the beginning of his cartoon career. In the cartoon “Hot Dog,” released on March 29, 1930, in which Bimbo starred and in which Betty did not appear, Bimbo was shown out driving and trying to pick up women walking on the sidewalk. ![]() Nevertheless, as a dog-man he needed a partly doggy girlfriend. Although clearly a canine, he wore clothes, spoke English, played musical instruments with his forepaws, walked on his hind legs, and otherwise acted completely human. In any case, Bimbo was a pretty advanced mutt. Very few Americans love mice, but millions of American families in the 1930s owned and loved dogs.) (The Fleischers were shrewd to pick a dog-like person to star with Betty rather than a mouse, which had been Disney’s choice. He’s the author of several books including Investigative Reporting and The Story of Motown.īetty Boop started her on-screen cartoon life as a girlfriend for Bimbo the dog-man, an already existing Fleischer Studios cartoon star, whom the Fleischers had created as an answer to Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse. He taught journalism at Binghamton University, New York University, and Columbia University, and worked in various communications roles in New York City. Several hundred of his articles appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Detroit Free Press, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution before he began writing for popular magazines including Rolling Stone. In this short, Betty Boop's voice was noticeably lower and steadier than what had been previously portrayed on screen, but visual resemblance to Kane's character in Dangerous Nan McGrew is pretty apparent.The author: Peter Benjaminson *77 began his career working as a reporter. A year later, Betty Boop appeared in a cartoon called The Bum Bandit as a character named Dangerous Nan McGrew, who saves a train traveling through the Wild West from being terrorized by a robber. What's more, Kane played the titular sharp-shooter in a 1930 film called Dangerous Nan McGrew. It's unclear exactly what that competition entailed, but it's likely that it was some sort of contest to see which contestant sounded the most like Kane. Hines even got her start in show business after winning a Helen Kane "Boop-a-doop" contest, according to a 1932 newspaper article posted on the Fleischer Studios official website. She only sings a song that resembles "I Wanna Be Loved By You" with plenty of "boop-boop-a-doops" thrown in. Betty Boop doesn't speak in her debut cartoon. Kane, who also had short, curly black hair and huge eyes, had a gentle, feminine, high-pitched singing voice, which Margie Hines emulated when she lent her voice to Betty Boop in Dizzy Dishes. Kane was a popular singer in the 1920s whose signature song was "I Wanna Be Loved By You," in which she scat-sings non-words like "boop-boop-da-doo" and eventually earned the moniker "The Boop-Boop-A-Doop Girl." "One morning, Dave came over to my desk, handed me the music to the song 'Boop-Boop-A-Doop' by Helen Kane and asked me to design a girl character to go with it," Fleischer studios animator Grim Natwick told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. In a sense, figuring out who exactly is the real Betty Boop is a more complicated task than these early lighthearted animated shorts would suggest. In fact, Betty Boop's identity has been connected to a few different women in show business in the 1920s. Fleischer Studios drew upon real-life inspiration when it created the character of Betty Boop in 1930. ![]() There's no doubt that Betty Boop has become an icon in her own right over the years, but she wasn't necessarily the originator of the qualities that made her famous. That's probably thanks in part to the sheer licensing power of the character, appearing on everything today, from clothing to car mats to cell phone cases to my personal favorite, a book titled " How to be a Betty: The Ultimate Guide to Unleashing Your Inner Boop!" The character has also occasionally popped up onscreen in recent years, making a cameo in 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit and having a new animated feature in development with Simon Cowell's Syco Entertainment and Animal Logic. 9, 1930 as part of Fleischer Studios' Talkartoons series. Betty Boop is still recognizable 85 years after her debut in the Dizzy Dishes cartoon that premiered on Aug. ![]() That curly black hair, those big green eyes, that little red dress. ![]()
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