Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
A gala opera is staged for the Little King and his queen, and the small round monarch is bored within minutes. He slips out of the royal box in search of fun and sees a poster for Betty Boop at the vaudeville house down the street. After a struggle with a pretzel vendor over the price of a pretzel, he takes his seat as the curtain rises on Betty's Wild West act, in which she rides, ropes and does tricks with her horse. The king is enchanted, climbs onto the stage and joins her in a song and dance, and is caught in the act by the furious queen, who drags him back to the royal carriage. As it drives away Betty is hiding on the running board, holding the Little King's hand.
Why It Matters
- Otto Soglow's Little King, the wordless comic-strip monarch who preferred common pleasures to royal ones, had his own Van Beuren cartoon series in 1933-34, and this guest appearance in a Fleischer film is the only time the two studios' characters shared a screen; Soglow himself worked on the story.
- With its copyright unrenewed, the cartoon is public domain in the United States. It is one of the last Betty Boops to put her on a stage as a performer, and the Wild West act is a late flicker of the vaudeville Betty of 1932-33, now in a long skirt and chaps.
Notes and Trivia
- The pretzel-vendor routine is a Soglow gag lifted from the strip.
- Van Beuren had dropped the Little King series after ten cartoons.
- See also: Making Stars (1935), Not Now (1936).
