Studio: Fleischer Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Wiffle Piffle, a small, flapping, hopelessly meek young man with a squeaky voice, proposes to Betty. She turns him down in song: she wants a bronco-busting he-man, a real cowboy, not a weakling. Wiffle takes the hint and goes west to a dude ranch to become one. The ranch defeats him at every turn: the horse will not be mounted, and when it is, will not stop; the lasso catches everything but the steer; the chaps are too big and the hat too small; the cattle stampede over him; the bucking bronco throws him through the bunkhouse roof. He returns to Betty in a body cast, every inch the cowboy in costume and none in fact, and she, laughing, seems to find the effort more endearing than the result.
Why It Matters
- Wiffle Piffle, a character the Fleischers had used in Popeye cartoons and in A Song a Day, is the anti-Popeye, a milksop with ambitions, and the dude-ranch sequence is a tidy parody of the cowboy craze of the mid-1930s, when Gene Autry was the biggest thing in B pictures.
- Its American copyright was not renewed and the film is public domain there. It is one of the few late Betty Boops with a romantic plot at all, the Production Code having made Betty's love life a difficult subject, and the studio solved the problem by making her suitor ridiculous.
Notes and Trivia
- Wiffle Piffle also appears in The Hot Air Salesman a month later, as a door-to-door pedlar.
- Jack Mercer gives Wiffle a voice close to his later Popeye nephews.
- See also: The Hot Air Salesman (1937), No! No! A Thousand Times No!! (1935), A Song a Day (1936).
