Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Betty's car runs out of petrol in hillbilly country. She walks up to the nearest shack to ask for help, and the landowner, Zonk Peters, and his large, barefoot, bearded family take her for an attacking Hatfield and meet her with shotguns. Betty disarms them by dancing. Within a minute the whole Peters clan has caught the rhythm; they fetch out fiddles, jugs, washboards and a saw, and the feud is forgotten in a square dance that spills out of the cabin and over the hillside, with Betty leading. When it is time to go, her new friends fill her petrol tank with a jug of corn drippings from the still, and the car roars off down the mountain faster than it came up.
Why It Matters
- The hillbilly cartoon was a late-1930s staple, and this one has two advantages: Pinto Colvig, Disney's Goofy, as the head of the clan, and the Miami unit's enthusiasm for mountain music, which it animates with a jug band's bounce; the moonshine-as-petrol ending is the best gag of the last Betty Boop season.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, and it is one of the final Betty Boop cartoons, the series ending three months later with Yip Yip Yippy; the redesigned, more realistic Betty of 1938-39 is on display, taller and less doll-like than the character of five years before.
Notes and Trivia
- An instrumental version of the song from So Does an Automobile is heard on the soundtrack.
- Colvig had worked for the Fleischers before, and returned to Disney in 1941.
- See also: So Does an Automobile (1939), Rhythm on the Reservation (1939), The Scared Crows (1939).
