Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Koko the Clown is drumming up custom for a fifty-cent sightseeing tour of the natural history museum, and Betty Boop is his only passenger. Inside, the exhibits are already restless, with the stuffed animals and fossils twitching as the tour passes, and when closing time comes Betty is accidentally locked in. The skeletons climb down from their displays, a dinosaur's bones reassemble, mummies stir, and the whole collection comes to life and goes after her through the dark galleries in a long chase, singing and rattling, until Bimbo breaks in and rescues her. The plot, such as it is, exists to get Betty alone in the dark with the Fleischer studio's favourite subject, animated skeletons, and the film is one long nocturne of bones and shadows.
Why It Matters
- The dancing skeletons and reassembling fossils are the Fleischers at their most macabre, a direct descendant of the Skeleton Dance and the Talkartoons' Swing You Sinners!, and the museum setting, with its drawers of specimens and shadowed halls, is one of the studio's richest backgrounds of the early 1930s.
- The film has been a staple of Halloween compilations; it belongs to the brief period in late 1932 when the Betty Boop series was finding its tone, before the character settled into the domestic comedy of the Code years.
Notes and Trivia
- Koko, the studio's original star of the 1920s, had been demoted to Betty's supporting player.
- Reuben Timinsky, the second animator, worked under that name before shortening it.
- See also: Swing You Sinners! (1930), Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle (1932), The Skeleton Dance (1929).
