Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Betty, modestly dressed, visits a fortune teller, the swami-like Professor Bimbo, whose assistant is Koko the Clown and whose interest in his client is not professional. In his crystal ball he shows Betty her life: her infancy, then a vision of herself shipwrecked on a jungle island, where she loses her clothes and improvises a grass skirt and lei. She sings a few lines of Irving Berlin's "All by Myself" before a troop of ghosts carries her off to a jungle hut, from which a strong young sailor on horseback rescues her. Back in the shop Betty is appalled by the vision, until the elderly swami pulls off his false beard and reveals himself as the sailor. Their embrace is interrupted by the ghosts, who burst out of the crystal ball and chase the two through a time portal back to the island, where the head ghost rips off Betty's dress to reveal the grass skirt beneath. Betty and Bimbo trick the ghosts into running off a cliff, and the film ends unresolved.
Why It Matters
- The three-act structure, with the crystal-ball vision as a film within the film, is unusually elaborate for a 1933 short, and the ghosts, white sheets with legs who pour out of the ball and through a hole in time, are among the Fleischers' happiest spooks; the island sequence is the pre-Code Betty at her most undressed.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, and it is one of the Betty Boops most often cited for the frankness that the Production Code would stamp out the following year, after which Betty's skirts lengthened and her boyfriends vanished.
Notes and Trivia
- The title puns on "Is my palm red", a vaudeville joke about blushing.
- David Tendlar, co-animator, later directed Popeye's Insect to Injury.
- See also: Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle (1932), Betty Boop's Ker-Choo (1933), Betty Boop's Museum (1932).