Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Betty is putting her small nephew Junior to bed, and he will not go: he bounces on the mattress and paints stripes on the cat with toothpaste. To settle him she tells a fairy tale about a naughty boy. The boy ties a can to a puppy's tail, frightens a hen off her nest, shakes down an apple tree and then chops it down, knocks the clean washing into the mud, throws bricks through a greenhouse and shaves a barber's head. When he steals a bone from a circus lion's cage the lion gets out, and the boy is saved by a fairy, who is Betty in wings and a star-spangled black evening dress. She makes him promise to undo all his mischief, which he does as the film runs the earlier scenes backwards. Junior, not sure he believes a word, nevertheless undoes his own mischief in the same reverse motion and hides under the covers, and Betty closes the door and winks.
Why It Matters
- The reversed-film sequence, with the apple tree reassembling and the bricks flying back out of the greenhouse, is a simple trick used with real wit, and Betty as a fairy godmother is the first clear sign of the post-Code character, the sensible aunt in a long dress who replaced the flapper.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, and it is the first of the Betty Boop cartoons to feature Junior, the nephew, and a puppy who is the prototype of Pudgy, the dog who would carry the series through its last years. Mae Questel is now the sole Betty.
Notes and Trivia
- Myron Waldman, the animator, became the series' main director of the Pudgy films.
- George Steiner, the composer, is uncredited on the original titles.
- See also: Betty in Blunderland (1934), Taking the Blame (1935), Betty Boop and Grampy (1935).