Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Betty and Little Jimmy, the small, easily distracted boy of Jimmy Swinnerton's newspaper strip, are exercising in an attic fitted with the reducing machines of the day. Betty sings "Keep Your Girlish Figure"; Jimmy answers with a verse about laughing to grow fat. Betty straps herself into a vibrating belt machine and the control jams, so she sends Jimmy for an electrician. On the way he forgets what he was sent for, and the word changes in his head from electrician to magician to politician to musician as he wanders. He finds an old bedspring, pulls out two springs, puts them on his feet and bounces home through the neighbourhood, through a market awning, higher each time, until he flies in at the attic window and his foot kicks out the plug. Betty by now has been shaken as thin as a pencil, with a huge head on a stick body; she and Jimmy laugh so hard that they both swell up like balloons.
Why It Matters
- The cartoon takes the one joke of Swinnerton's strip, a boy who forgets his errand, and builds a film on it, with the Fleischers' delight in reducing machines and distorted bodies for the climax; the pencil-thin Betty is one of the strangest images in the series.
- It is in the public domain in the United States, and it is the second of the Fleischers' attempts to borrow a King Features strip character for a Betty Boop guest spot after Henry; neither led to a series, and Jimmy did not appear again.
Notes and Trivia
- Swinnerton's Little Jimmy ran from 1904 to 1958, one of the longest-lived American strips.
- The belt-vibrator reducing machine was a real and popular gadget of the 1930s.
- See also: Betty Boop with Henry, the Funniest Living American (1935), Betty Boop and the Little King (1936), More Pep (1936).
