Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Betty Boop's Swing Band is touring the West by bus and stops at a Native American reservation. The residents, drawn in the war-bonnet-and-blanket caricature of the period, are curious about the instruments and borrow all of them, but do not know what they are for: a tuba becomes a watering can, a drum a cooking pot, a trombone a slide for a papoose, a saxophone a pipe, a clarinet a peashooter. Betty takes a kettle drum, demonstrates its proper use, and the beat catches; one by one the borrowed instruments are turned to music, the braves find the swing, and the reservation ends the film in a jam session with Betty conducting and the band's bus rocking in time.
Why It Matters
- It is the penultimate Betty Boop cartoon, and its plot, swing music civilising the natives, is a period piece in the worst and most representative sense, with the Fleischer caricature of Native Americans on full display; as a swing musical it is bright, with the misused instruments the only real gag and a good one.
- The cartoon's copyright was not renewed and it is public domain in the United States. It is one of two travel cartoons that closed the series in the summer of 1939, and the last on which Myron Waldman, the animator who had shaped the post-Code Betty and created Pudgy, worked.
Notes and Trivia
- Yip Yip Yippy, released five weeks later, ended the Betty Boop series without Betty appearing in it.
- The misused-instruments gag was used again by Famous Studios in several Screen Songs.
- See also: Musical Mountaineers (1939), The Scared Crows (1939), Pioneer Days (1930).
