Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Betty runs a garage that is also a hospital for sick and injured cars. The patients arrive with human complaints: a taxi with a nervous breakdown, a limousine with indigestion, a police car with sore and flat feet, a jalopy with the shakes, a roadster with a cold in the radiator. Betty, in a nurse's cap, tends each in turn with the garage's tools used as medical instruments, a grease gun for a hypodermic, a jack for a stretcher, a tyre pump for artificial respiration, while singing the title song, whose point is that a car, like a person, gets tired and needs looking after. One by one the patients are restored to health and drive out gleaming, and the police car, its feet cured, leaves at a run.
Why It Matters
- The humanised cars, with faces in their grilles and feelings in their fenders, go back to the Fleischer Ker-Choo of 1933 and forward to Disney's Susie the Little Blue Coupe, and Roland Crandall, the studio's most gifted draughtsman, gives them real character; the song's melody was good enough to be reused in the next Betty cartoon and in a 1940 Popeye.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, and it is one of the better late Betty Boops, a musical set piece rather than a Pudgy story, with Betty in a working role that the Miami unit seemed to prefer for her.
Notes and Trivia
- Instrumental versions of the theme turn up in Musical Mountaineers and in Popeye's Wimmin Hadn't Oughta Drive.
- Crandall had drawn the entire Snow-White of 1933 single-handed.
- See also: Betty Boop's Ker-Choo (1933), Musical Mountaineers (1939).
