Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
In a live-action opening a newspaper reporter interviews Max Fleischer at his drawing board and asks about Betty Boop. Fleischer obliges by drawing her, and she steps out of the inkwell onto the desk, as Koko the Clown had done in the studio's silent films, and performs her greatest hits at his request. The numbers are lifted from three earlier cartoons: her vaudeville impressions of Fanny Brice and Maurice Chevalier from Stopping the Show, the hula from Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle, and the chase with Cab Calloway's ghostly hermit from The Old Man of the Mountain. Between numbers the live Fleischer and the drawn Betty chat. At the end she dives back into the inkwell, splashing ink over the reporter's face.
Why It Matters
- It is the Fleischer studio's own anthology of the pre-Code Betty, assembled weeks before the Production Code enforcement of July 1934 ended the kind of performance it celebrates, and the Out of the Inkwell framing, with Max Fleischer himself as the artist, links the 1934 star to the studio's beginnings fifteen years earlier.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, and it has become the usual way to see the Bamboo Isle hula and the Calloway sequence in one place; it is also one of the last appearances of Max Fleischer on screen with his creation, in the role he had played with Koko throughout the 1920s.
Notes and Trivia
- Lillian Friedman, among the uncredited animators, was the first woman animator at an American studio.
- The reporter's ink-splash is the ending Fleischer used for dozens of Inkwell films.
- See also: Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle (1932), Minnie the Moocher (1932), The Tantalizing Fly (1919).