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Betty Boop

“ 🎵Made of pen and ink,
She came win you with a wink, (Whoo-hoo!)
Ain’t she cute?
(Boop-oop-a-doop!)
Sweet Betty!🎵 		„
~ Betty Boop’s introduction song

Betty Boop is the main protagonist of the cartoon series of the same name, originally called Talkartoons but renamed to her’s after she became more popular and the main character.

Betty is a 16-year-old girl dealing with the various misadventures of show business and other adventures. Her cartoon shorts ran both as precursors to movies and as their own self contained TV episodes ranging from 1930 to 1939. She has become an icon in cartooning. An anthropomorphic dog named Bimbo accompanies her as her boyfriend and was the original main character before her. Despite Boop's age and the lightheartedness of her misadventures, Boop's risqué cartoons have famed her as one of the world's first cartoon sex-symbols.

Many a media has featured her using the term "Boop" in many things she says, presumably as a pun.

Physical Appearance

Based on the singer Helen Kane, despite her age, Betty has a huge eyes, long eyelashes, a high-pitched voice and a svelte, slender body. She is usually depicted in a red off-shoulder dress (which made her a sex-symbol), but she also has worn a wide variety of different outfits and often changes clothing.

Personality

Betty Boop has a kind, sweet and happy-go-lucky personality, being a very cheery person and is loving and caring to many who meet her. Although, she is very clumsy in her several appearances. Betty is quite naïve and innocent and is not too bright, but isn’t completely dimwitted either showing some levels of wit. However, despite her sweetness she is not a complete push over and can be quite sassy. She enjoys singing and dancing and is mainly a jazz singer.

Filmographic Appearances

1930s

List of Actors and Actresses of Betty Boop

Gallery

Trivia

  • The people who worked on Betty Boop said they view the characters as “animated actors” with many shorts being a show within a show type situation. So a lot of the time all characters are doing is simply acting out but the people who worked on the cartoon also indicated in some instances the characters are acting how they regularly do in their normal environment. It hasn’t been specified which shorts are just characters acting and what is just them acting normally but in shorts like where they are taking a role based on another story, like a fairy tale or movie for instance, that is them just acting. It is also shown in some media, such as some shorts even breaking the fourth wall, deliberately showing them acting. This was also discussed in the Betty Boop: Queen of Cartoons documentary.
    • The crew members also have an official image of how they view the characters and what officially applies to them and what may not. For example some relationships of the characters such as Willy Wolf, while his most well known role is a short where he antagonizes Betty in a take on Little Red Riding Hood, their canonical relationship is actually that they are friends and he is not an enemy of Betty despite his most well known role. This is part of the “animated acting” thing that the characters have. Betty Boop has many animal friends, but a lot of them get ignored, even by many fans, because they can be confused as simple background characters or sometimes their given roles for a short won’t show them as friends. Alternatively, it may even have just been that some of these friends turning out to be actual recurring characters could have been an afterthought and not the original intent, thus perhaps making it so they were meant to be background characters, but that is just a guess and not confirmed. At the very least it seems to be lesser known or obscure knowledge even among hardcore fans that a lot of the shorts is just characters acting so what may be an enemy or stranger in one short is actually a friend of Betty behind the scenes.
    • While Bimbo is the one who is mentioned the most when it comes to characters who have been removed, many forget that all of Betty’s friends and cast members have been removed during pre-code with entirely different characters for post-code. The reason for removal was not because of any strict actions from the code, but because the team would basically try to make an entire new cast to start fresh for the new setting albeit to no great success. Betty was the most popular and successful character so that was their main focus until they tried to make characters to replace her once her series started failing, first with a younger cousin in Buzzy Boop then another musician with Sally Swing and neither succeeding to be replacements for Betty, until they would soon finally end the series. Only very few post-code characters are actually liked by people, with many fans not liking the post-code era.
    • In the documentary mentioned previously, while Bimbo was Betty Boop’s official love interest many of the staff didn’t like by contrast Koko was seen as a good friend of Betty Boop “on-screen and off-screen” that a lot of the staff liked and played in different roles with the character. The roles they would act in would change but the team only saw them as good friends and many of them just liked his character more than Betty’s actual boyfriend. Koko would make one last appearance, showing them as their official relationship as close friends, after Bimbo was removed.
  • Betty Boop’s exact weight and body type varies from chubby to skinny depending on the artist or animator with the only remaining consistency typically being that she is curvy. It seems that the person she was originally a parody of, Helen Kane, was considered to be “plump.” She was originally just a simple parody and caricature of Helen Kane that was only meant to make a very limited appearance. However the character became popular and her popularity is the reason why she became a recurring character.
  • As is shown in the short "Minnie the Moocher," Betty is raised by strict parents who are Jewish immigrants and her canon race and ethnicity is a white Ashkenazi Jewish girl. It is unknown what country they came from, but the Fleischer Brother’s were Jewish people that were Austrian/of Austrian descent (in a region that is now part of modern day Poland) and Betty’s most famous voice actor was a Russian Jewish person. Both seemed to have possibly influenced Betty’s ethnicity. However, Betty has shown no signs of being Russian or Eastern European at all and is more likely meant to be Austrian Jewish and it has been noted by people that her parents seem more culturally “germanic” than anything else. Max Fleischer had a German accent when he was younger.
    • She appears to have had alternate depictions as a Native American, in one short when she was still a dog, and Samoan, which only appeared very little times but first appeared in a short that featured a musical group called the Royal Samoans and Betty’s animations were based on movements and rotoscoped from a female member called Lotamuru. There is in one episode, titled Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame, where Betty Boop recreates many scenes from her different cartoons she is shown putting on brown-face before portraying herself as a Samoan, these instances of her as a person of color may have actually just been a regular white Jewish Betty putting on brown-face rather than a genuine race swap. The fact that the characters that were people of color made for the shorts, that were meant to “match” the race of Betty in these shorts, were explicitly drawn as racial caricatures yet Betty was not redrawn with a caricaturized look makes this more apparent. As an animated actor while in the film role she was given she may have been acting out as a “genuine native” but “behinds the scenes” she was someone in brown-face.
    • A common hoax that gets spread around was that “Betty Boop was black (or to be more general a POC) but got whitewashed as they couldn’t stand a black (or POC) female character to be considered beautiful so they made her white” but even black women and other women of color in Fleischer Studios animation were depicted as racial caricatures even if they were meant to be beautiful, sexualized or the love interest or lust object of a white male character. There were some minimal times when beautiful or sexualized women of color in Fleischer animations were not drawn as explicit caricatures, at least not as much as compared to their male counterparts, but these women were not black but rather “eastern” woman such as what are indicated to be lighter skinned South and West Asian women. This is likely due to the fact that certain South and West Asian people, especially lighter skinned ones, can often be considered “white passing.”
      • Even if that wasn’t the case a “beautiful and/or sexualized female person of color character” in the Golden Age of Animation would not be “whitewashed by racists” but rather censored for being racist, a stereotype and objectifying by more progressive and anti-racist people years later as people of color, including ones considered beautiful, were allowed in cartoons but were essentially treated like animated minstrel shows for a white audience. Even when there were attempts to be “progressive” with POC characters of the era they tend to receive criticism for still containing even a bit of racism like falling into caricatures or stereotypes. One apt yet infamous example would be one of the infamous banned Looney Tunes shorts “ Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs” which is a parody take on Snow White with black characters, drawn like caricatures, instead and the main female character named “So White” who is meant to be a beautiful yet hyper-sexualized character and wasn’t drawn like a caricature but is meant to be portray a Jezebel stereotype. Supposedly this was made to be “positive” representation for black people back then as they didn’t have much representation but today it is highly contested if that was either the case of it it justifies the usages of stereotypes, but either way, it is an important thing to bring up when discussing this racial cartoon history.
      • If one is to ask “given how Betty is still an ethnic minority through being Jewish then why isn’t she drawn as a caricature?” The simple answer can be that the company that owned her, Fleischer Studios, was Jewish and thus she was representing their own group. An even simpler answer is that given how she was meant to be a throwaway parody of Helen Kane, a woman who was merely a white woman of German and Irish descent, she was not conceived as Jewish during this stage and it was later added when she stopped being “the Helen Kane parody” to “Betty Boop.” Ironically, while Betty may be of descent of a “Germanic” nationality, she never seemed to have ever been depicted as Irish or it is unknown if she had ever been depicted as Irish during her prototype phase. This further goes to show that just because someone or something is based on another someone or something that they won’t match every single quality or trait about them.
  • While Max Fleischer may have developed Betty Boop into human Betty Boop (with human in this context meaning the “final” version) and gave her several characteristics, along with some other animators developing her as well, it was Grim Natwick who is the true creator of Betty Boop and he was always consistent on how he came up with her.
    • Grim Natwick also designed Disney’s Snow White and based her look off of Betty Boop.
  • Betty Boop’s character as a dog often gets called “prototype Betty Boop” or “Proto-Betty Boop” by fans. The dog version also has a mixed reaction by fans with some preferring the human version of Betty as, aside from being more used to her, she is a fully developed character with an actual personality while the dog was just an underdeveloped prototype of what she would become that didn’t have a fully realized character or personality yet. Other fans may prefer dog Betty feeling it was more interesting and that her becoming human was more boring. There are also fans who love both.
    • Among those at Fleischer Studios, many staff members found dog Betty to be ugly and even more uncanny the more she looked human over time and thus made her human and never wanted to go back to her dog self again.
  • Despite often being incorrectly called, and sometimes even known for, being the “first ever female main character of a cartoon” that title goes to Gertie the Dinosaur by Winsor McCay. While Gertie only appeared in one short, there is also the high possibility of other female characters, who predated Betty Boop, who had their own cartoon series but either lacked or lost the popularity as time went on and/or their cartoons became completely lost to time.
  • Betty Boop and Bimbo are often called the first human and anthropomorphic couple in animation by some people, even being called the “original Roger and Jessica Rabbit” by some. But there seems to be some human and anthro couples who predate them in animation even if they are more obscure. Toby the Pup and his human girlfriend for example, while clearly being inspired by Betty and Bimbo, had cartoons that only showed before Betty Boop officially became a human and was still a dog. His human girlfriend has a name that sounds similar to Betty, while the audio doesn’t make it too clear, it is probably the name “Bessy.”
    • A common rumor was that Bimbo the Dog was removed simply because the Hays Code didn’t approve of his interspecies relationship with Betty Boop. While it is true that the Hays Code and people down at Hollywood found their relationship “suspicious” they are not the reason for him being removed entirely as a character. In the documentary Betty Boop: Queen of Cartoons, it is explained that the real reason was because many of the people who worked on cartoons actually didn’t like the character and felt negativity towards him. When Betty Boop and Bimbo’s relationship became an interspecies one they complained even more and while Max Fleischer did like Bimbo, the complaints were getting to be enough and he was more focused on Betty Boop at this point who proved to be a more popular and successful character than Bimbo. Max Fleischer gave Myron Waldman, who would later go on to create Pudgy, the responsibility of removing Bimbo. Myron said that he was “tickled silly because I never liked him.” Reportedly, the audience did not care for Bimbo and Betty’s relationship being an interspecies and were presumably neutral to it. Ironically, Pudgy, who was a replacement for Bimbo, became a disliked character among the audience and fans and there are many fans who feel like that downfall of the series started with Bimbo’s removal. On another note, some other rumors state that Bimbo was originally a character called Fitz the Dog, another Fleischer Studios character, or that Bimbo became Pudgy the dog, neither of which are true as both people at Fleischer Studios, and their associates said all characters are their own different characters, not to mention Pudgy’s creator not liking Bimbo.
    • It has been common fan speculation by those who know of Bimbo that in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, that the reason Betty says that Jessica Rabbit is a "lucky girl" for being married to Roger is because she was able to remain with her anthropomorphic lover while Betty was not. Bimbo was actually supposed to make an appearance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit along with Betty Boop in a scene with several other "lesser known" characters but this was scrapped.
    • Ironically, another example of a human and anthropomorphic pair who predate Betty Boop and Bimbo would be Alice and Julius the Cat from the Alice Comedies, which were created by Fleischer's very own infamous rival Disney. While most of the time Alice and Julius would be depicted as friends there were occasional moments Julius would be portrayed as Alice's love interest. Something doubly ironic is that, while Alice was played by several live action girls, she still was in a cartoon world and by technicality would be another example of a female main character in a cartoon who predated Betty Boop and unlike Betty Boop and Bimbo, Alice was always the main character and Julius was always the secondary character.
  • While many people are under the misconception Esther Jones was Betty Boop's direct inspiration, this is not true as she is more of an indirect one as Betty Boop's own creator, Grim Natwick, was always consistent with how he made her and how Helen Kane was the person she was a caricature of but Helen Kane also copied off of Esther Jones act. It should also be noted Esther was was a child performer who copied off another black celebrity known as Florence Mills but unlike Helen, Esther Jones was always known to be an open copy rather than lying about being "original" and everyone loved Esther because she was like a "baby successor" to Florence Mills. Finally, Florence Mills was a successor to another black woman named Gertrude Saunders who is the "female originator of scat" and Gertrude came up with many scat noises and was a very rich and influential women of her time. Esther Jones has been called the "black grandmother" of Betty Boop by some and in turn, Florence Mills and Gertrude Saunders could be considered a black great-grandmother and black great-great-grandmother respectively.
    • The last time Esther Jones was ever heard about in history was when she was around her mid-teens, the only known photographs of her was when she was a child. Not many people know Esther Jones was a child and that it was her main appeal as a performer as, while Betty Boop is 16, Esther Jones was a child much younger than Betty and only started coming close to Betty's age around the time of the infamous court case with Helen Kane. Ironically, Esther Jones never cared about the Betty Boop character in the first place and never showed up to the court case, while now lost footage of Esther was shown at the court case to show Helen wasn't original, she was never involved herself. Esther was getting older and her career as a child performer was dwindling at the time so all she cared about was focusing on her career. The last time she was mentioned in history was in a newspaper talking about the court case and it is unknown what else Esther was doing or did in life after her career.
    • One of Esther Jones' nicknames given to her was "Miniature Josephine Baker" as she was another famous and influential black celebrity of the era. Josephine Baker is another woman who has been incorrectly cited as an inspiration for Betty Boop and given how Esther Jones is not only confused for being a direct inspiration but has also been confused with other black celebrities, this could potentially be another reason why. Josephine Baker, while never officially stated to be an inspiration for any form of Fleischer material, does share some coincidental similarities with Betty Boop such as having a similar appearance, both being American and French at some point (Josephine being an American woman who moved to and became French by nationality, Betty once being a French poodle living in America), Josephine being of Indigenous heritage and Betty Boop being depicted as (or acting as a) Native American once and both being jazz singers, dancers and actresses.
    • This now removed PBS article is reported as being the very reason misinformation about Esther Jones, the way she was connected to Betty Boop and overall history about both of them went from not just simply being a viral thing on the internet (as that appears to be spawn from misinformed social media posts and memes that got many likes, shares and views and/or from people with large followings) but into mainstream mass media as well. Because of this, things like other “professional” and big name news programs/journalists, commentators, TV show hosts, celebrities, public figures .etc would cause this to spread out even more than it should have had this mistake not been made. While PBS did not create the misinformation they were probably the number one biggest contributor in spreading it as, as far that is currently known, before then it was only a “popular internet hoax” akin to other popular cartoon myths, hoaxes and urban legends you see often mentioned online but seldom to never discussed by mainstream media. PBS would later make an article replacing it to correct their error called “Betty Oops” but this was years later and the damage had already been done. Not to mention that, as someone else put it, all the article did was just correct a lie with another lie as it just tells a different lie on Betty’s origins yet again and only crediting Max Fleischer as the creator with no mention of Grim Natwick.
    • While Wikipedia is infamous for having a mixed amount of legitimate and illegitimate information, here is at least that article that is meant to be of the actual Baby Esther that is meant to be involved within the discussion rather than the other people she gets often confused with.
    • Helen Kane's appearance was also copied off a white celebrity known as Clara Bow, however many women at the time were also copying the look of Clara Bow because she was a very popular celebrity of the time. Clara Bow has also been one of the many women who incorrectly gets cited as the initial inspiration for Betty Boop. While later influence from her appears to be possible, she was never the planned original reference for Betty Boop. Max Fleischer would sometimes lie about Clara Bow being Betty's inspiration but if this was out of misremembering or intentional lying, presumably after being soured by Helen Kane trying to sue his company's successful mascot, is unknown. There have also been Clara Bow-like depictions of female characters in cartoons before Betty Boop as it was such a popular look for many girls to have.
    • When it comes to later influence for Betty, some of her voice actors seemed to also have influenced the character either as she was evolving or some times after she was already developed. Some of her voice actors have also been incorrectly called her original inspiration by some people.
    • Given how the character was initially made for the purpose of being nothing more than a throwaway parody of Helen Kane in a short that was only in black and white, it is ambiguous if Betty would have had the same hair color as Helen Kane, a different hair color or if much thought was put into it in the first place. All currently known concept art for her debut, Dizzy Dishes, just shows uncolored sketches. As the character would get her first redesign as they were trying to find a way to rework her into her own character, rather than just a parody, a concept sketch by Grim Natwick where she is shown with different clothing and hair from her Dizzy Dishes design has her with bright red hair and other colors on the rest of her appearance. As of now this is the only known art of “proto Betty” that shows her with red hair and over the years Grim would depict Betty with different hair colors, including blonde a color that doesn’t seem to have ever been part of 1930s Betty’s design, but would mostly draw her with black hair likely because this is the color she is mostly known for. In the 30s Betty’s hair was most often black but would occasionally be depicted as different types of red hair in official art and her only colorized film that may or may not have been done just for the sake of showing off cinecolor. It is unknown if the red hair actually had some influence from an actual person, while it may possibly be inspired by Clara Bow, it could have also been inspired by Little Ann Little, one of Betty's voice actors. Little Anne Little claimed it was the actual inspiration for her depiction of red hair however she is also known to often lie a lot such as claiming to be the "first" Betty Boop voice actor which isn't true, so her claim remains dubious at best. Something that is known is that Little Ann Little was considered to be the "perfect model for Betty Boop" as they saw her as the exact size for the character and she would often dress and perform as the character for a while. Betty’s most famous voice actor Mae Questel apparently also had red hair, albeit more auburn or “reddish brown” according to some people where as redheaded Betty is either seen with either “fully” red hair or orange red hair.
      • As Betty’s prototype self had continuous design inconsistencies until she gained her more recognized look, it could very well be a possibility (albeit a speculated one) that her early color palette may have actually been inconsistent or undecided. Her fur color is known to change and aside from trying to remake a design over and over, the color changes could be for artistic purposes. Some shorts have her with lighter fur as it can look better for that environment and others with darker fur for a potential similar reason. While it is very likely that her first and most commonly used fur color was meant to be paper white, as that is a common fur color thought of for poodles, the reason could also just be that it was drawn on a paper white background.
      • Online, there would be a small group of people who would claim that Betty Boop was “originally a redhead” and use her only colorized film, Poor Cinderella, as their “proof.” They often use this to counter argue against “Betty Boop was black” claims and discussions with some even under the belief of the “gingercide” idea. While Betty certainly wasn’t black and red hair was something she would occasionally have, until more confirmed sources with solid proof get discovered, as of now it may not be entirely certain that Betty was originally meant to have canon red hair (or at least not as a consistent trait) as the current evidence for that appears to be a bit shaky and based more on speculation than anything else. There have been alleged claims that creator Grim Natwick and historians had confirmed the character to originally or actually be a redhead but a source on where this supposedly comes from is unknown. Given how the misconception about her being black is much larger and more prominent than the debatable possibility that she may have been originally or “consistently” a redhead, the attempts of the crowd trying to push for her being a redhead and/or experiencing another case of “gingercide” have often been unsuccessful.

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