Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
At an inventors' exhibition Betty, Bimbo and Koko demonstrate a line of labour-saving gadgets to a crowd, singing as they go. The spot remover is a steam-driven machine that removes a stain by cutting the cloth out around it. The cigarette snuffer is a mechanical foot that stamps out the butt and a mechanical hand that sweeps it up. The soup silencer fits music-box parts to a spoon so that slurps come out as a tune. The sweet-corn regulator is a typewriter adapted to feed an ear of corn past the eater's teeth, complete with carriage return. There is a voice recorder, and finally a self-threading sewing machine with a mechanical hand and a roving eyeball. The sewing machine runs amok and begins stitching together everything and everyone in the hall, and Betty and Bimbo escape by umbrella, which turns into a helicopter.
Why It Matters
- The gadgets are Rube Goldberg machines brought to life, and the corn-typewriter in particular has been quoted and imitated ever since, most famously in Chaplin's Modern Times feeding machine three years later; the sewing-machine finale, with the whole crowd sewn into one lump, is the Fleischers' taste for mechanical chaos at full stretch.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States and has been widely reprinted. It anticipates the Grampy cartoons of 1935-37, in which the studio made the eccentric inventor a regular character, and it is one of the last Betty Boops in which Bimbo and Koko share the billing as equals.
Notes and Trivia
- Billy Murray, who voices Bimbo, was one of the best-selling recording artists of the acoustic era.
- Ugo D'Orsi later animated the sorcerer's apprentice sequence in Fantasia.
- See also: Betty Boop's Ker-Choo (1933), Betty Boop and Grampy (1935).