BETTY’S SPECIAL APPEAL
From the beginning, Betty’s act had a hypnotic effect not just on Bimbo, but on just about everyone and everything in the constantly “morphing” Fleischer universe. Not even inanimate objects were immune to Betty’s charms. Betty always managed to fend off her numerous lecherous suitors without ever quite seeming to understand their behavior toward her. “Do you like your job?” asks Betty’s harassing employer in a cartoon titled “Boop-oop-a-doop.” The lout whispers his desires in Betty’s ear as his hand caresses her thigh in sensuous strokes. First surprised, then enraged, Betty slaps his face in reply, singing, “You can feed me bread and water, or a great big bale of hay, but don’t take my boop-oop-a-doop away!”
At the hands of her Times Square-based animators, Betty achieved a realism of feminine motion said to have been acquired through careful observation of the exaggerated strutting of that neighborhood’s ladies of the night. Certainly the occasional but quite detailed glimpses of Betty’s silhouetted form (which was often revealed by having Betty pass in front of an animated light source) demonstrate the animators’ keen grasp of the feminine anatomy.
During the heyday of such risqué screen sirens as Mae West, the Fleischer animators felt free to allow freak gusts of wind to raise her skirt - decades before Marylin Monroe straddled a subway grate.