The official Betty Boop today is completely different to her s counterpart. King Features have full control over Betty Boop, and they have changed a lot of Betty's image, backstory and origins to market the character to the new generation. Betty's official hair color is black but she was a red head in the short titled Poor Cinderella. At that time there were several different color processes being tried. Walt Disney has secured exclusive rights from to use what was called the 3-strip Technicolor process.
Because Technicolor was unavailable to them in , the Fleischers turned to another color process called Cinecolor in order to make the film. The animators made Betty's hair red in order to take best advantage of the limited color in this process. Betty Boop's official hair color is black and her hair is red in Poor Cinderella Cinecolor and several s Fleischer Studios Adverts. Betty Boop is Caucasian and is Jewish but unlike her parents Mr. Boop , Betty does not follow strict Jewish sects.
Grampy Grandfather , Mr. Some of Betty's family members can fall into the category of non-canon. In the s Betty Boop comic series, in one strip Betty's whole family gather at her home, but in the comic it doesn't mention their relation to Betty. Tillie, Bubby and Billy later stopped appearing in the series, and the series then followed Betty alone on her career.
It is assumed that the boy who makes a cameo appearance in the "family mob scene" is either Bubby or Billy, most likely being Bubby due to the hairstyle. The Samoan people are a Polynesian ethnic group of the Samoan Islands.
Misconception and misinformation spread is that Betty Boop is often mistaken for African-American. Betty has dark skin in that cartoon, but is Samoan not African-American. Betty is not in blackface in the cartoon. She is depicted to be a native Pacific Islander. Betty for these sequences was actually rotoscoped directly from The Royal Samoans. The Samoan hula dancer known as "Mari," "Meri," and mainly Lotamuru , was the reference and or model for Betty Boop in this cartoon.
The character was originally created as an plump anthropomorphic French poodle, which was originally a take on Helen Kane , a popular "Boop-Boop-a-Doop" Paramount Pictures screen star and recording artist, who's career had ended with Paramount in After the release of the short Barnacle Bill , Betty had became slimmer and her design was tweaked. Betty's skin tone was also shaded darker in two shorts that followed Barnacle Bill.
In , Betty's snout had became a button nose, her official design was similar to that of her human form only she was still an anthropomorphic French poodle. In Betty can be seen without her ears in various Talkartoon releases in but it wasn't official until , her floppy long poodle ears became hoop earrings and the character was later changed into a human.
In , Betty started appearing in her own series as the main protagonist. The original canine Betty Boop with the snout was classed as ugly by her creators, due to the fact that she pulled some really ugly faces in her first appearance, which is what prompted them to update her character design and make her appeal to the audience.
Essie suggested that the Fleischers create a girlfriend for Bimbo. Which lead Bimbo to have prototype girlfriends. Betty Co-ed from the Screen Songs feature titled Betty Co-Ed is one of the most notable female characters that is not Betty Boop as featured in the Talkartoon series, Betty Co-ed is a character that was also voiced by Margie Hines , the original voice of Betty Boop.
Some of the prototypes are classed as early versions of Betty Boop, but some are not. The French poodle girl featured above, is one of Bimbo's many nameless girlfriends, who is not Betty Boop. Even after Betty was established in as the French poodle counterpart to Bimbo, Bimbo himself was still actively courting other female characters in Screen Songs and Talkartoons up until Betty became the star of her own series. Betty and Bimbo at the time were formed as a pair of dogs, like for example Disney had Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, a lot of studios used to pair up male and female counterparts.
Other notable characters from other animation studios known for this are Warner Bros. Disney sued the Van Beuren Studios for similarity to Mickey and Minnie in , even though Milton and his girlfriend were established years earlier.
Most studios did this to imitate the success of one another, with Disney being the most successful. Poodles seems to be promptly inspired by Betty Boop's earlier form as a French poodle. By the time Poodles made her debut in the rival animation studios cartoon series, Betty was a human girl.
The animators used Betty's body to animate her scenes, but she is actually one of Bimbo's many girlfriends. This is a nameless flapper girl from the Talkartoon titled Hide And Seek.
Bimbo marries this girl at the end of the cartoon, and she becomes his wife. A list of Bimbo's girlfriends can be seen here. In Bimbo's Initiation , the French poodle version of Betty Boop clones herself, indicating that she is the leader of a sex cult. Which makes Betty Boop a Freemason in that individual cartoon. Betty is the leader of a secret society, the Mystic Order of the Boom Boom a Hotcha, in which she is worshipped by herself, the Betty Boop Clones , an early reference to human cloning.
Betty and her clones ask Bimbo to join the Freemasons, Bimbo declines, so they use several tactics to get him to join. Bimbo refuses to join Betty's secret society, until she reveals her true form to him with a sexually suggestive dance. Only then Bimbo accepts her invitation.
In the Betty Boop cartoon series Betty is seen living in a different home in each and every episode. In Bimbo's Express Betty is shown moving home, which indicates that she might do that on a regular basis, Where as in Minnie the Moocher Betty is shown to live with her parents.
Following the later series Betty lives alone and sometimes with Pudgy. In one contest second place went to Jo Miller in one of the many contests that had been held by Paramount to find a voice for Betty Boop. As Paramount were looking for "Helen Kane" soundalikes.
Helen Kane opened her " Helen Kane Impersonation Contest " and it was held through the country to all local girls in which was judged by Helen Kane and the audience. The girl who looked and sung like Helen and "Boop-Boop-a-Dooped" most successfully was the winner. Second place was a tie with Bonnie Poe and Margie Hines. Helen Kane: "I held amateur contests for amateurs that I thought it would be fun and would stimulate business in the theatre.
Mae later heard there was an audition for Betty Boop, so she auditioned for the role and was given a contract by the Fleischers, and started voicing Betty Boop in , sharing the role with Margie Hines, who was the first and original voice for the character, and later Bonnie Poe and Little Ann Little.
According to Little Ann Little who dubbed herself the original Betty Boop girl, she didn't enter an amateur Helen Kane contest and had been singing baby songs since The Helen Kane contests are a vital part of "Boop" history, because most of the women who entered became the official voice of Betty Boop.
Melissa Fahn was initially the modern day voice of Betty Boop, but later retired from the role. Today Betty Boop is officially voiced by voice actress Cindy Robinson , who states that her Betty Boop voice is sultry and sexy. Above you can hear how Cindy brings Betty Boop to life today. Apart from voicing Betty Boop, she also does the singing for Betty Boop, which is what Melissa Fahn did prior to her retirement.
Betty Boop has appeared in person in two official live-action shorts by Paramount Pictures. Betty is portrayed by Mae Questel in Musical Justice. A-8 , alongside Bela Lugosi. Bonnie Poe performs " My Silent Love " in a live-action sequence. Helen Kane made a small cameo appearance a year before Betty's live-action appearance in Hollywood on Parade No.
A-2 , and two years prior Kane was featured in Paramount on Parade in her own skit performing a "Boop-Boop-a-Doop" number. While Kane had risen to fame in the late s as "The Boop-Oop-A-Doop Girl," a star of stage, recordings, and films for Paramount, her career was nearing its end by Paramount promoted the development of Betty Boop following Kane's decline. The case was brought in New York in Although Kane's claims seemed to be valid on the surface, it was proven that her appearance was not unique.
The most significant evidence against Kane's case was her claim as to the uniqueness of her scat singing style in which she had adapted from an African-American child performer from Chicago who went by the name of Baby Esther , but was better known as Little Esther. Testimony revealed that Kane had witnessed the seven-year-old " Florence Mills " impersonator Little Esther Lee Jones , using a similar scat singing style in her act at the Everglades Nite Club. An early test sound film was also discovered which featured Esther Jones performing in this style disproving Kane's claims that she was the first to "Boop-a-Doop" in song.
It later came out that Kane's style was not unique, and other performers had done it before her. Kane is said to have adapted the scat singing style she heard as performed by Esther and had made it famous. The origination of the style points to Baby Esther's predecessors Florence Mills and Gertrude Saunders , and general African-American night clubs where the scat singing technique is said to have originated. The only claim Kane had that was valid in court was that her "Boop-Boop-a-Doop" routine had antecedent Betty Boop's, as her look was not unique and the baby singing style was quite common among a number of singers.
Grim Natwick who created Betty Boop, admitted that he had used a photograph of Helen Kane to create Betty Boop for the Talkartoon short Dizzy Dishes , but in court Helen couldn't prove this, with most of her claims being thrown out by the judge. The verdict was basically that Helen Kane was not the "first" Boop-Oop-a-Doop singer in the business. By , scat-singing had long been a staple for some Black performers. Clarence Williams, a Black musician, producer and performer testified in the Kane v.
But her manager did, and alleged that not only had Esther been performing that style since , but that he had seen Kane at a club in Manhattan that same year while Baby Esther performed. According to history. The court ruled that Kane could not claim ownership of Betty Boop or her characteristics, since none were unique enough to her that they could be deemed her intellectual property. This more complete history shows us two things: Max Fleischer did not whitewash a Black character when he created Betty Boop.
But Betty Boop was, partially, influenced by fashion and music whose origins can indeed be traced to Black performers. If the original PBS item on that Black History Month listicle had been even a bit more nuanced and complete, it likely would not have become a viral source for the blunt assertion that Betty Boop was Black.
We could have thus avoided this teachable moment. Moving forward, all editorial-style content will be reviewed to ensure it aligns with PBS Standards and Practices.
Every bit of public affairs information that PBS puts on screen or publishes on the Internet, from promotional content to what its news anchors say, is a form of journalism; it must be factual and clear.
Enter some text. As if to cosmically drive the satire home, Questel had won a Helen Kane—look-alike contest in Esther Jones sang in the s, her beautiful, unusual voice a signature of the Cotton Club in Harlem. In a rare photo of Jones, she is smiling as she sits, her eyes penetrating and kind. That was no coincidence.
The defense even brought out archival footage of Baby Esther singing, which had come from the earliest days of sound recording. Indeed, as jazz scholar Robert G. However, Baby Esther had disappeared and was presumed dead by the time the court case was cleared in , and Kane continued to be the face and name most associated with Betty Boop. Kane even briefly starred in a comic she herself had pitched called The Original Boop-Oop-a-Doop Girl after losing the lawsuit, the title of which further obscured Baby Esther.
The popular Canadian YouTube-content producer WatchMojo was able to produce an entire piece on the history of Betty Boop in without once mentioning Jones.
Of course, many early American cartoons contained such imagery; the origins of American animation, as several film critics have noted, are tied to blackface minstrelsy and vaudeville.
The critic Nicholas Sammond takes it a step further, arguing that characters like Mickey Mouse, Bimbo, and Koko actually are minstrels. Her character itself is obviously white, yet would be inconceivable without black artistic tradition — and the same is true of America as a whole.
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