In New York, meanwhile, Fleischer created a grungy, often dangerous urban world for its characters to navigate. From its home in California, Disney was laying the groundwork for the idyllic, fantastical fairy tales that would soon dominate its oeuvre. The dueling studios’ styles were diametrically opposed. After a makeover, Betty became the first fully human, fully female animated character.Īt its height in the 1930s, Fleischer Studios was a giant in animation, rivaled only by Disney.
Betty boop infant costume series#
She appeared in the Fleischers’ “ Talkartoons” series as the girlfriend of main character Bimbo and was such a success that the studio promoted her to its star. Initially, Betty was depicted as a dog with a button nose and floppy ears. Her constantly shifting design offers an intriguing case study of how representations of women-including fictional ones-are shaped by censorship, the public’s response and changing conceptions of morality. Betty’s appearance continues to evolve today, with the character donning ripped jeans, joggers and sneakers, and overalls in merchandise and on social media. Beneath that iconic look, however, is a more complex story of aesthetic transformation, from what Heather Hendershot, a media historian at MIT, describes as a “flapper-secretary-adventurer” in the early 1930s to a “middle-class homemaker” by the end of the decade. The enduring image of Betty is a flapper in a strapless minidress, with a garter peeking out above her knee and large hoop earrings in her ears. … They would come for the Betty Boop cartoon.” “She’s a big hit,” says Katia Perea, a cartoon scholar at City University New York, “and she’s a big hit in the same way that Felix the Cat is a big hit, where she was drawing audiences to the movie. At a time when cartoons were largely opening acts before a featured movie, Betty’s stardom was an outlier.
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