BETTY BOOP’S RED HOT JAZZ
The Fleischer cartoons from the Betty Boop era were largely music-driven gag fests. The cartoons’ nominal narratives merely provided a launch point for the animators’ often jazz-inspired flights of fancy. Like “Uncle” Max himself, stars from Paramount feature films often appeared in live-action cameos. Musical stars, including Maurice Chevalier, Rudy Vallee, Ethel Merman, Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway, all appeared in Betty Boop cartoons. The exposure these shorts afforded black jazz performers in particular helped popularize the nascent American art form during the 1930s. At the time, the groundbreaking inclusion of black performers in the cartoons resulted in threats to the studio from the Ku Klux Klan.