Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Short Synopsis
The film opens in live action with Cab Calloway and his orchestra playing "St. James Infirmary". Then Betty Boop is at the dinner table with her strict old-world parents, who scold her for not eating her hasenpfeffer. Her father rants until his head turns into a phonograph. Betty runs to her room singing "They Always Pick On Me", writes a farewell note and phones her boyfriend Bimbo, and the two run away from home together. Night falls as they cross the countryside, ghostly shapes appear, and they take shelter in a cave. Inside is a ghostly walrus, who sings "Minnie the Moocher" in Cab Calloway's voice, gliding and shuffling with Calloway's own dance moves. As he sings, the cave fills with skeletons, ghosts and condemned prisoners. Terrified, Betty and Bimbo flee all the way home, and Betty dives into bed under the covers, with the note to her parents torn up.
Why It Matters
- The walrus is the reason to watch. The Fleischers filmed Calloway dancing and rotoscoped his movements, so the ghost glides with his distinctive sliding steps, while the cave's ghouls act out the song's lyrics in a parade of macabre images. It is one of the great marriages of jazz and animation.
- The film brought the rotoscope back into prominence, after the process had fallen out of use in the mid-1920s, and it helped make Betty Boop a star. Animation professionals voted it number 20 in the 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons.
Notes and Trivia
- It premiered at New York's Rivoli Theatre alongside Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
- Koko the Clown makes a cameo, popping out of an inkwell while Betty writes her note.
- Calloway appeared in two more Betty Boop cartoons, Snow-White (1933) and The Old Man of the Mountain (1933).
- See also: Snow-White (1933).