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1. Using this technique, a singer used his or her voice as if it were just another instrument in the band, but he or she could also use scat singing to convey meaning, either through context or attitude;
2. In this way, scat singing was very much dependent on the talent of a particular performer to convey his or her intentions indirectly;

​ One of the great scat singers of the day, Cab Calloway, actually recorded a song called “The Scat Song” in 1932 including the following lines:.

Is Betty Boop kid friendly?

Betty Boop has been the subject of many an animation. From her first appearance in the heyday of jazz to her beloved place in modern entertainment, Betty Boop has been a favorite of both children and adults for decades. She went from salacious Depression era settings to the more light hearted image she has today and has won the hearts of millions. Via/ Wiki Commons The character began her long career in the short Dizzy Dishes released in 1930 from Fleischer Studios. Betty Boop appears here as a dog, with a canine nose and long, droopy ears. This explains why in later cartoons her boyfriend, Bimbo, is a dog despite the fact that she is depicted as a human, her long ears transformed into earrings. This fact was rectified after the Hays Code of 1934 prohibited the romantic pairing of a human and an animal in film.

But, the ditzy cartoon character actually has quite a murky and fascinating past. But, even in her first cartoon, Betty Boop has her signature black curls and baby talk voice. In Dizzy Dishes she’s shown performing in a nightclub amongst a bevy of oddball characters and anthropomorphic objects.

The night club resembles the famed Cotton Club in New York and this fact comes into play later on in this fascinating story. Via/ Wiki Commons By 1932, Betty Boop had become human and she also was doing a fantastic job of lifting people’s spirits in the midst of the Great Depression. Often depicting scandalous situations, some have argued that Betty Boop was never meant to become children’s entertainment, but was strictly for the adults. Cartoonist, Max Fleischer, was thought to have based the character on another famous performer of the era: Helen Kane.

• The nightclub performer would go on to have tumultuous career on Broadway, radio, TV, and film, but would never win the official title of having been Fleishcer’s inspiration;
• In a lawsuit that lasted from 1932-1934 Kane was given no compensation or acknowledgement for Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop character;

His council had argued that Betty Boop had started out as a dog and was never even intended to be a likeness (or even a regular character) – and they had won the case. Helen Kane depicted alongside Betty Boop at the start of the trial. Via/ Internet Archive Helen Kane went on to perform in her famed Boop style, as well as a more universally appreciated standard style. But, many now believe that Kane’s character, with baby talk and signature lines, was actually based on another performer.

Back at the Cotton Club, which opened in 1922, the performers on stage were to become some of the most well-known African American musicians of the era. The name harkened back to the cotton fields of the South and sadly the entertainment was intended only for white audiences.

It’s here that a young sensation named Baby Esther (not to be confused with Little Esther decades later) made her debut, using the Boop style that made risqué lyrics suddenly acceptable, years before Kane was recorded doing so. Via/ NYPL Baby Esther, AKA Esther Jones, AKA Gertrude Saunders, was quite popular in 1920s Harlem and even went on to become a showstopper in Paris, dubbed the next Josephine Baker! However, she faded from prominence and little is known about her life overall. There are some who say that there was a long tradition of this baby-talk Boop style in Vaudeville , but few records from the era exist which would prove or disprove these claims. Did Fleischer see Baby Esther perform and never admit it, fearing another lawsuit? Is that why the night club in Dizzy Dishes looks like the Cotton Club? Did Helen Kane and Baby Esther take their inspiration from what was a long-standing Vaudeville tradition? We may never know the answers to these questions. Baby Esther in the 1920s. Via/ Wiki Commons It was this murky history which led to the outcome of the Kane-Fleischer trial. Helen Kane may not have invented the Boop style, but if she didn’t create it then she certainly couldn’t sue Fleischer for compensation or the rights to Betty Boop..

Why is Betty Boop so popular?

One after another, voice actors appeared before the judge. This was no ordinary courtroom testimony—they were there to squeak Betty Boop’s signature “boop-boop-a-doop. ” It was 1934, and Betty Boop was on trial. The cartoon vixen was an unlikely candidate for a lawsuit—and for popularity.

She “was never intended to be a continuing character,” says animation historian Ray Pointer, author of The Art and Inventions of Max Fleischer. In fact, the original 1930 version of Betty Boop, created by Fleischer Studios, wasn’t even human.

Rather, she was a talking, singing French poodle with long, floppy ears. Animator Max Fleischer. (Credit: Science History Images/Alamy Stock Photo) But soon, Betty’s ears became earrings and she was reinvented as a human being. The new Betty Boop was a vivacious flapper who drove a car, did popular dances and showed plenty of skin. Her wide eyes and sexy looks were a hit with audiences—as was the fact that she was a clear parody of popular singer Helen Kane.

The squeaky-voiced jazz singer was known for her sexy lyrics and baby-like singing, and Betty Boop delivered a spot-on imitation. Kane’s delivery—including her signature “boop-boop-a-doop”—was “a theatrical staple going back years,” says Pointer.

Like the vaudeville performers that preceded her, Kane used her little-girl voice to deliver lyrics that would have been shocking in the mouth of another singer. The New York Times called her “the most menacing of the baby-talk ladies”—a reference to a vaudeville phenomenon also used by performers like Fanny Brice and Irene Franklin. The original caption to these images claimed that Betty Boop was based on Helen Kane, before the lawsuit in May. Audiences would have recognized the send-up of Kane, now a Paramount star. But so did Kane herself—and when she experienced economic hardship due to a layoff, she took legal action against the animation studio. She sought $250,000 in damages and no further showings of Betty Boop cartoons— and claimed that phrases like “boop-boop-a-doop, boop-boopa doop, or boop-boopa-do, or boop-a-doop or similar combinations of such sounds or simply boop alone” were her own—part of what she called her “baby vamp” act.

1. Two years before Betty Boop’s debut, Kane had skyrocketed to fame with the song “That’s My Weakness Now,” which used the phrase “boop-boop-a-doop” as shorthand for sex;
2. But Max Fleischer, the animation pioneer who owned the studio, didn’t back down;

He brought three women to court who had voiced Betty Boop—each of whom claimed they hadn’t imitated Kane and did their Betty Boop voices to prove it. The judge watched footage of Fleischer cartoons and Kane performances. Scroll to Continue Eventually, says Pointer, “the court stenographer threw up his hands.

Some of the testimony became almost hilarious. ” The press had a field day with the concept of a performer attempting to protect her popular “boops. ” It seemed like Kane had a legitimate case—and her lawsuit made it all the way to the New York Supreme Court.

But it stalled there, thanks to the origins of her signature sound. The Fleischers trotted out a number of witnesses who claimed they’d heard “boops” and baby talk in nightclubs, cabarets and vaudeville theaters before Kane became famous. The Betty Boop Show, 1971. (Credit: AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo) And then came talk of Baby Esther, the stage name of an African-American performer named Esther Jones. Baby Esther’s manager claimed that Kane and her manager had seen Jones perform in 1928, then copied her style.

This was corroborated by Kane’s manager, says Pointer. Baby Esther herself was not available to testify, but Fleischer Studios provided a screen test—now lost—of Jones that convinced the judge Kane had copied the singer.

To this day, there are no confirmed photos or recordings of Jones, and Jones herself never testified in the lawsuit. Nevertheless, says Pointer, “It was just so silly they wanted to get on with it,” bringing the lengthy lawsuit to a close without staging a widespread search for Jones.

1. Kane lost the case, and Betty Boop kept on booping;
2. A vindictive Max Fleischer even gathered his Betty Boop voice actors on camera to make fun of the lawsuit during a newsreel—and not long after, Betty Boop herself appeared in a cartoon called “Betty Boop’s Trial;

” As for Kane, she faded from popularity. When she died in 1966, the New York Times recalled her as a “once giggly, wiggly brunette”—and told the story of how she squandered her fortune on a failed clothing company. (Moviestore collection Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo) A Boop-related lawsuit may have seemed silly, but it pointed to the outrageous popularity of Betty Boop. Her sexually suggestive dancing, squeaky voice and seductive costume, complete with garter, captivated audiences. Her songs were racy enough to raise eyebrows, but not explicit enough to make the cartoons unacceptable. “That’s why they were fun,” says Pointer.

Even though she was given a more modest makeover after the passage of the Hays Code in 1934, she stayed popular until she was discontinued in 1939. The dog-turned-doll-like heroine has lived on through syndication and merchandising since television’s early days.

Though the flapper age was over by the time Betty Boop took to the screen, she was beloved by Depression-era audiences. “The public embraced her because [she] reminded them of the carefree days of the 1920s,” says Pointer. And as the most unique human woman cartoon character of her day, she became a fan favorite.

Why does Betty Boop wear a garter?

Garters are articles of clothing and are narrow bands of fabric fastened about the leg, which are used to keep up stockings, and sometimes socks. In the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, they were tied just below the knee, where the leg is most slender, to keep the stocking from slipping. The advent of elastic has made them less necessary from this functional standpoint, although they are still often worn for fashion.

Garters have been widely worn by men and women, depending on fashion trends. Garters were popular in the 1930s and 1940s, and were a convenient way for ladies to carry small valuables, in place of a small purse[citation needed.

In Elizabethan fashions, men wore garters with their hose, and colorful garters were an object of display. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, “cross braced” garters are an object of some derision. In male fashion, a type of garter for holding up socks has continued as a part of male dress up to the present, although its use may be considered somewhat stodgy.

For the modern, more liberated woman of the 1930s, garter belts and roll garters offered a newfound sense of freedom and liberation. Not only did they secure a lady’s stockings without the use of awkward, pinching metal clips, they freed women entirely from the restriction and discomfort of girdles! Betty’s garter wasn’t just a fashion statement; it was one of the symbols of her status as a modern, liberated woman.

For more conservative elders, the image of young women dancing with flashes of a garter belt showing represented everything scandalous and provocative about the fashions of day, making the placement of the garter belt as much a statement about a woman’s status as the wearing of it.

There is a Western wedding tradition for a bride to wear a garter to her wedding , to be removed towards the end of the reception by the groom. This garter is not normally used to support stockings. This practice is often interpreted as symbolic of deflowering, though some sources attribute its origin to a superstition that taking an article of the bride’s clothing will bring good luck.

In the Middle Ages, the groomsmen would rush at the new bride to take her garters as a prize. Today, the practice of removing the bride’s garter is traditionally reserved to the groom, who will then toss the garter to the unmarried male guests. This is performed after the tossing of the bouquet, in which the bride tosses her bouquet over her shoulder to be caught by the unwed female guests.

According to superstition, the lady who catches the bouquet and the man who catches the garter will be the next man and woman among those in attendance to be married (though perhaps not to each other).

The ceremony often continues with the man who catches the garter obliged to place it on the leg of the lady who caught the bouquet. Traditionally, the pair are obliged to share the next dance. Prom garters were common in the 1960s & 1970s, and often conferred on the date as a souvenir.

If the date received the garter, it was typically hung from his rear-view mirror. Beginning in the mid-2000s, it has become common in the United States for young women attending a high school prom to wear a garter, usually designed to match the style and color of the young woman’s dress.

The prom garter may be worn throughout the evening and is sometimes given to the young woman’s date as a souvenir. A young woman may also choose to keep the garter rather than give it away, as a token of her prom night. In some cases, young people may participate in a “garter and tie” dance (often hosted by the high school as part of the prom), during or after which either the young woman herself or the young woman’s date removes the garter and exchanges it for the date’s tie.

1. In cases like this where the garter is given early in the evening, the young woman’s date may wear it on his arm for the remainder of the evening;
2. In areas where prom garters are common, it has become a tradition for young women to pose for a picture with other female friends before the prom, in which they pull up the skirts of their dresses to display their prom garters, which are generally worn a few inches above the right knee;

The giving or taking of the prom garter may or may not have the same sexual implications that are associated with wedding garters; however, the giving of the prom garter is often interpreted as publicly designating the pair as a romantic couple.

How old was Betty Boop when she died?

Betty Boop and Esther Jones (Twitter) Vaudeville performer Esther Jones was known on stage by many names, including “Baby Esther,” “Little Esther,” “Farina’s Kid Sister,” and “Miniature Florence Mills,” is widely, although not universally, credited with being the inspiration for the Betty Boop cartoon character. Jones was born Esther Lee Jones in 1918 in Chicago, Illinois, to William Jones and Gertrude Jones. She formerly began singing, dance, and acrobatics training at 4, and by 1924, when she was six years old, Jones won first prize at a Charleston dance contest in the city.

• In 1928, the Jones family moved to Harlem, New York;
• At seven, Jones was later known for adopting the popular singing style, scat, which emphasized the baby-style of “b” and “d” sounds and nonsense syllables such as Boo-Boo-Boo’ and ‘Doo-Doo-Doo;

‘ Consequently, she was a sought-after child performer in the city, and was a fixtured entertainer in the famous Cotton Club and the Everglades Nightclub in New York City during the latter years of the Harlem Renaissance. She added to her entertainment fame by become an extraordinary black-bottom dancer.

In 1929, Jones was taken to Spain, where she was called “La Pandilla. ” Later she performed before Sweden’s Queen Sophie Marie Viktoria and King Gustaf V, in Stockholm. Despite her notoriety, she also experienced blatant racism when denied a glass of milk in an American-operated restaurant in Stockholm.

The business, however, was forced to close after her treatment there became public knowledge. Jones performed at the Moulin Rouge, Casino de Paris, and the Empire in Paris, France. There she was dubbed the “Miniature Josephine Baker. ” While in Europe, she was paid an average $750 per week for her performances and by age 11, Jones was the highest-paid child on stage globally.

After performing, Jones would go backstage to play with dolls. Whenever she performed, both parents were in attendance. In 1930, Fleisher Studios in Hollywood introduced the cartoon character Betty Boop. Jones, however, received no royalties or performing credits despite the fact that a lawsuit would eventually expose Betty Boop’s true origins.

The lawsuit ironically was brought by Helen Kane, a white performer, who sued Fleisher Studios for appropriating her “Betty Boop” character without her permission and without the payment of royalties. Over the course of the Fleisher Studios v. Kane trial, it was revealed that Kane had begun mimicking Jones’ scat act and even sang the same song, “I Want to Be Loved By You’ including the “Boop-Boop-a-Doop” reference.

When Kane lost the lawsuit, other studios felt emboldened to promote the Betty Boop character but it recognized neither Kane or Jones as the source. In 1934, Jones, now 16, performed in Philadelphia at a midnight benefit performance for the NAACP.

That same year, she gave a stellar performance at the American Embassy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil at the request of then Ambassador Jefferson Caffery. Brazil’s President Getúlio Dornelles Vargas, was in the audience and praised the performance and performer.

1. By 1940, however, the entertainment career of now 22-year-old Esther Jones, was over;
2. She was no longer a child singing or dancing sensation;
3. Esther Jones, now widely credited with influencing the iconic sex symbol Betty Boop, died in 1984 in New York City from liver and kidney complications;

She was 66. Regardless of her role in the development of the Betty Boop cartoon character, Jones should be remembered as a child star with a brief but remarkable career in the entertainment industry. Do you find this information helpful? A small donation would help us keep this available to all.

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How old would Betty Boop be today?

Official Age – Betty debuted as a anthropomorphic dog woman in Dizzy Dishes and again as the fair maiden in Barnacle Bill. In The Bum Bandit she is shown raising a family of 17 with Bimbo and in Mysterious Mose is shown living alone in a haunted house. But in Minding The Baby , Betty is depicted as being younger. She is a French poodle in a majority of her earlier appearances.

1. In the 1933 cartoon Betty Boop’s Birthday Party , Betty is 13 turning 14;
2. Reason for Betty’s age drastically changing is because Max Fleischer couldn’t decide an age range for her;
3. Betty is young because her cartoons (though they have an adult nature to them) were made for children;

The children of the 1930s who used to watch the cartoons, did not get the adult puns. The puns were made for adults, as Betty Boop cartoons would sometimes be an opening attraction when theaters were debuting feature films. For example when Helen Kane starred in Dangerous Nan McGrew in 1930 and it was shown in the theater, Betty Boop’s debut cartoon Dizzy Dishes was shown to the audience prior the film.

1. Betty Boop’s official age is 16;
2. However in other media she is a woman as she was once the mascot for Hooters;
3. In Betty’s 1980s reboots she is a woman;
4. In The Romance of Betty Boop she lives a single life while working in a shoe store, and in Betty Boop’s Hollywood Mystery , when Lola DaVille demands for Betty’s arrest, she calls Betty a woman;

Betty is also depicted as a woman in a majority of merchandise which is sold in a sexual nature. For example merchandise in which Betty is depicted as a Playboy Bunny. Betty Boop is possibly 18+ in all other franchises and merchandise. Her age is never officially specified. The only youngest person to ever voice Betty Boop was actress and singer Bonnie Poe , from the age of 17 on radio. When Poe turned 18 on the 6th of March 1933, she played Betty in person in Hollywood on Parade , released on the 10th of March. Being a fictional character from 1930 makes Betty’s age irrelevant. In fictional franchises, character concept design and character age range can be changed to suit the expectations of the demographic in which the said companies who own these fictional characters are trying to reach out to.

But what is known is that she is a woman. At Universal Studios she is portrayed by women. The people who voiced Betty Boop through the years were all women. In media today, Betty is classed as being a 90-year-old woman due to her creation in 1930.

In 2023, Betty Boop will be 100. For reboots and or remakes for example Betty Boop Now , Betty is a teenager, because as a cartoon character that is the demographic she would appeal to. The Betty Boop Zombie Love franchise that debuted in 2013 makes fun of Betty’s age, only with that franchise Betty is undead.

Is Betty Boop white?

Photo: Fleischer Studios / Ronald Grant In her first cartoon in nearly three decades, which appeared online in February, Betty Boop steps out of a car into a windy street, her short black dress flaring. She rescues the designer Zac Posen — who is ensnared in monstrous vines — with nothing but a glare, and turns men arguing on the sidewalk into grinning fools with a wink and a smile. She’s sexy, independent — and well aware of both, something that has made her iconic since her debut as a character 87 years ago.

1. “As a cartoonist, I consider Betty Boop the eighth wonder of the world,” Frank Caruso, the vice-president of comics and cartoons syndicate King Features, said in February when asked about the surreal new animated short, Betty Goes A-Posen , a three-part collaboration with the fashion designer;

“When Max Fleischer dipped his pen into the inkwell,” Caruso continued, evoking the Viennese-American animator who created the legendary cartoon character, “out came a masterpiece that would influence generations of artists, animators, musicians, and fashion designers.

1. ” The new cartoon is part of what Jennifer Wolfe of Animation World Network called “a larger Betty Boop campaign,” signaling that the character is experiencing a cultural resurgence;
2. Last month, Posen also unveiled two new dresses inspired Betty Boop, one a flounce-hemmed mini ($250) and the other a floor-length mermaid gown ($550), both in Betty Boop Red; MAC Cosmetics released a sultry red lipstick on Valentine’s Day also named Betty Boop Red; the March issue of Woman’s Day features “Heroine of Hearts,” a comic by King Features starring Boop that promotes women’s health; and the famous flapper even stars in a new American play, Collective Rage: A Play in Five Boops, featuring five different versions of the Jazz Age character, the very title of which evokes her signature catchphrase, “Boop-oop-a-doop;

” The play, which made its West Coast premiere in Pasadena’s Boston Court Theater in February and is running through March 19, focuses on gender and sexuality, but also evokes race, as one of the Betty Boops is black. Betty Boop, it seems, continues to dance across the stages of media, makeup, and memories alike.

• Yet behind her there’s a ghost, a figure who follows her everywhere, but who’s hardly ever seen: The all-too-often-forgotten African-American cabaret singer named “Baby” Esther who, arguably, truly gave birth to the cartoon character, yet rarely receives credit for it, and whose story, in many ways, tells a larger tale about America itself;

Betty Boop began as both a parody and a powerful symbol of unabashed sexuality, a combination she would retain, to varying degrees, throughout her lifespan in the media. She first appeared in 1930 as an anthropomorphic cartoon canine in the short Dizzy Dishes , where she sang, danced, and wagged her ears.

A year later, she had transitioned into a human character, her flappy ears morphing into her now-famous hoop earrings. At once ingenuous, gentle, and kind, she was a female figure who stood out in the world of American animation and comics; whereas early characters like Minnie Mouse were often largely just copies of male figures in women’s clothing, Betty Boop was unique.

Unlike Olive Oyl in “Popeye” or Minnie Mouse, she wasn’t defined by her relation to a more famous male character; she was the main figure all on her own. Over time, she became more and more of an overt sex symbol in black-and-white and color alike, her cleavage and curves clear for all to see.

• On the one hand, Betty Boop was a creation of the heterosexual male gaze, with an endless parade of lecherous male characters trying to see under her skirt, yet on the other hand she wore power like a light shawl, her image an in-your-face depiction of unashamed sexuality;

(Indeed, in Posen’s cartoon, she uses her sex appeal almost like a superpower, and Posen even called her “the ultimate femme fatale and feminist. “) She was a stereotype, yet she also defied stereotypes of what female cartoon characters could do onscreen.

An early promotional ad describes her as “the first and only feminine cartoon star. ” In two 1932 shorts, Betty Boop, long depicted as a virgin, even has to try to fend off grotesque male characters who try to rape her, which she is saved from by screaming for help; these were among the earliest cartoons to depict sexual harassment so explicitly.

And she could be subversive in other ways, too: In one episode, she changes clothes onstage from a dress to a man’s suit, a transformation all the more striking because it subtly suggests a possible queer context for the character. However, her freedoms were short-lived.

The National Legion of Decency — which was staunchly Catholic — and the Hays Code both appeared in the 1930s, and they defined and censored “objectionable content” in motion pictures; as a result, Betty Boop soon began wearing far less revealing clothing.

As if proof that the character was largely a sex symbol, she fell off in popularity after this enforced modesty. But she was too potent an icon to disappear, and she kept reappearing, adorning everything from candy bars to a Tokyo diner and making a colorful cameo in a 2012 Lancôme commercial for Hypnôse Star mascara.

From the start, Betty Boop was modeled after multiple women. Fleischer created the character largely as a parody of the then-popular white singer, Helen Kane, but he also wished to evoke one of the most visible sex symbols of the Roaring ‘20s, the popular American actress Clara Bow.

Squeaky yet coquettish, almost alien yet alluring, Kane’s voice was unforgettable, babyish in its extreme nasality and yet beautiful all the same, and it was almost impossible not to hear Kane in Betty Boop’s haunting, silly yet lovely singing. Kane, who had become famous by the time Fleischer’s parody came out for her scat-inspired line boop-oop-a-doop , even resembled her more than Bow.

The first woman to voice Betty Boop was Margie Hines; several voice actresses later, Mae Questel, who would also go on to voice Olive Oyl, became Betty Boop’s best-known voice, even returning in 1988 to voice her in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

As if to cosmically drive the satire home, Questel had won a Helen Kane–look-alike contest in 1925. Perhaps no one saw the character’s resemblance to Helen Kane more than Helen Kane, though. She notoriously sued Fleischer Studios in 1932 for, Kane declared, stealing her singing style and catchphrase, which she claimed she’d invented.

1. However, while Kane was indeed a model for Fleischer’s character, Betty Boop would not exist if not for Esther Jones;
2. Esther Jones sang in the 1920s, her beautiful, unusual voice a signature of the Cotton Club in Harlem;

Boop-oop-a-doo , she would say as she performed in her flirtatious siren’s tone, her dark bob of hair fluttering. In a rare photo of Jones, she is smiling as she sits, her eyes penetrating and kind. Her voice and scat phrases sound strikingly like Kane’s and, in turn, Betty Boop’s.

• That was no coincidence;
• Kane had seen Jones perform in the Cotton Club in 1928; Jones’s manager Lou Walton revealed that he had coached Jones on how to scat, the type of singing popularized by black musicians and singers like Louis Armstrong, and Jones herself, Walton said, repurposed scat techniques into boop-oop-a-doo;

In the lawsuit, Fleischer, along with all of Betty Boop’s voice actresses, testified that the flapper was, ultimately, not based off of Helen Kane but was rather a composite of many figures. The defense even brought out archival footage of Baby Esther singing, which had come from the earliest days of sound recording.

• It was the nail in Kane’s legal coffin;
• Baby Esther, it turned out, had invented Helen Kane, and, by extension, Betty Boop;
• Indeed, as jazz scholar Robert G;
• O’Meally wrote in the anthology Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies , Betty Boop “had, as it were, a black grandmother in her background;

” She, O’Meally added, “also had a black grandfather” in Armstrong. However, Baby Esther had disappeared and was presumed dead by the time the court case was cleared in 1934, 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 2011 without once mentioning Jones. When Jones does get mentioned in mainstream sources, it’s often only in passing, as in The Definitive Betty Boop.

And, regardless of Jones’s indirect influence, the cartoons of the 1930s that Betty Boop stars in are far from racially progressive. In perhaps the most extraordinary example, a 1932 cartoon begins with Louis Armstrong and his band providing the background music for Betty Boop’s trip into a jungle with her sidekicks, Bimbo and Koko the Clown; they are attacked by a tribe of black-skinned cannibals, who kidnap Betty Boop, and, in a particularly cringeworthy scene, Armstrong’s own face, giant against a dark sky, chases her beleaguered sidekicks, Armstrong’s visage morphing into an animated big-lipped caricature straight out of the iconography of minstrel shows.

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.

) It’s telling, but unsurprising, that Fleischer was able to invoke Esther Jones as a legal defense against Kane in one breath and continue to produce such racial stereotypes in the next. Perhaps it’s fitting that Betty Boop is best known in black and white.

Her character itself is obviously white, yet would be inconceivable without black artistic tradition — and the same is true of America as a whole. Betty Boop is an indelible icon of the Jazz Age; jazz, which developed partly out of classical music, was created by African-American artists.

In 1970 in Time magazine, responding to a peculiarly tone-deaf question from a reader who wanted to know what America would look like without black people, Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man , argued that America would not, could not, be America without black people.

The query was an “absurdity,” a “fantasy”; to varying degrees, Ellison declared, almost every aspect of the country — from slang to music to economic injustice to the existence of iconic American writers like Twain or Faulkner — is inextricably intertwined not only with the legacy of slavery but with African-American cultural production, yet these ties are all too often forgotten, if not deliberately obscured.

That the white Kane took the black Jones’s style of singing and attempted to claim it as her own is one of the most common, frustrating narratives in America. Silly as she can be, I love Betty Boop. That she’s still strutting her stuff in 2017, eyes as starry as ever, suggests she’s here to stay.

1. In her way, after all, Betty Boop — with her confident sexuality, her innocence and experience, her contradictions, her interweaving racial history — is a symbol of America;
2. Knowing the more complex story of her origins should only make Fleischer’s creation richer;

I want to believe in an America where we can acknowledge our fraught racial pasts and still influence each other to create beautiful, disquieting art, no matter who we may be — a world where we never forget our phantoms, but learn from them, all the same.

And this, to me, is why it’s only fitting Betty Boop reappear time and time again: She is us, in part. The next time she sings, we should listen not just for Kane, but for the ghost behind her, who should never have been a ghost in the first place.

The Forgotten Black Woman Behind Betty Boop.

Where is Betty Boop now?

Tattoo Timelapse – Betty Boop Tattoo

In July 1934, new provisions of the Hays Code went into effect, requiring new levels of censorship for Hollywood movies, including animated works. This would impact Betty Boop quite a bit: She had worn increasingly skimpy, tight-fitting outfits showing lots of animated skin. But under the Hays Code, Betty’s sexuality was toned down. She would be depicted wearing full dresses or skirts and stopped shaking her hips and winking in the intro segments to her cartoons. Today, the original Betty Boop short films are owned by Paramount Pictures and licensed to Olive Films. Rights to the character herself are owned by Fleischer Studios but licensed to King Features Syndicate.

Where did Betty Boop originate?

Esther Lee “Baby Esther” Jones, a Black Chicago woman and well-known singer of the 1920s, is the initial inspiration for the cartoon character, Betty Boop, who first appeared in the 1930s. Jones’ musical compositions fell under the growing Jazz community.

Yet, her child-sounding voice and popular ” Boop-oop-a-doo ” performance at Harlem’s Cotton Club landed her a recognizable role in the musical community. Jones used scat, a singing technique used in jazz composed of dynamic and nonsensical syllables instead of words, which can, at times, sound similar by comparison to create the  ” Boop-oop-a-doo ” performance.

This signature “Boop-oop-a-doo” expression landed Betty Boop in a court trial in the 1930s– the plaintiff being Helen Kane. Kane was an American singer and actress in the 1920s, famously known for her song “I Wanna Be Loved By You,” which features a similar rendition of Jones’ ” Boop-oop-a-doo.

• ” Kane filed a New York Supreme Court lawsuit in May of 1932 against Max Fleischer, the Fleischer Studios, Inc;
• , and the Paramount Publix Corporation;
• As the lawsuit’s popularity grew and Helen Kane’s fame drew attention, Esther Jones was cast aside alongside her influential work;

Lou Walton, Jones’ manager, testified in the case claiming that Kane had seen Jones’ performance and developed her rendition of “Boop-oop-a-doo. ”  Walton had coached Jones on how to scat, allowing her to develop her own vocal signature. The trial consisted of other witnesses, including those who produced the recorded voices of Betty Boop, testifying inspiration did not stem from Kane but rather from other figures.

During which Fleischer and Fleischer Studios Inc. also brought out the first recordings of Jones’ vocal performance, now evidence that had been deemed as lost, which lost the case for Kane Shortly after, Fleischer and Fleischer Studios Inc.

did not publicly acknowledge Jones’ influence on Betty Boop outside of the trial. Fleischer Studios Inc. admitted that Kane served as a visual model reference for the animated character known as Betty Boop, but verbal inspiration stemmed from Esther Jones.

As for Jones herself, there is no evidence suggesting she testified at the trial since her manager at the time could not pinpoint her location. Although she may not have personally been active in the case, Jones’ influence within the jazz community can be found through the development of scatting.

Betty Boop herself plays a part in also increasing the interest in Jazz music at the time. In “The History of Animation,” author Charles Solomon, argues “Fleisher won the case by proving that a black entertainer named Baby Esther had previously used the phrase before either Kane or Questel.

Why does Betty Boop wear a garter?

Garters are articles of clothing and are narrow bands of fabric fastened about the leg, which are used to keep up stockings, and sometimes socks. In the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, they were tied just below the knee, where the leg is most slender, to keep the stocking from slipping. The advent of elastic has made them less necessary from this functional standpoint, although they are still often worn for fashion.

Garters have been widely worn by men and women, depending on fashion trends. Garters were popular in the 1930s and 1940s, and were a convenient way for ladies to carry small valuables, in place of a small purse[citation needed.

In Elizabethan fashions, men wore garters with their hose, and colorful garters were an object of display. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, “cross braced” garters are an object of some derision. In male fashion, a type of garter for holding up socks has continued as a part of male dress up to the present, although its use may be considered somewhat stodgy.

• For the modern, more liberated woman of the 1930s, garter belts and roll garters offered a newfound sense of freedom and liberation;
• Not only did they secure a lady’s stockings without the use of awkward, pinching metal clips, they freed women entirely from the restriction and discomfort of girdles! Betty’s garter wasn’t just a fashion statement; it was one of the symbols of her status as a modern, liberated woman;

For more conservative elders, the image of young women dancing with flashes of a garter belt showing represented everything scandalous and provocative about the fashions of day, making the placement of the garter belt as much a statement about a woman’s status as the wearing of it.

There is a Western wedding tradition for a bride to wear a garter to her wedding , to be removed towards the end of the reception by the groom. This garter is not normally used to support stockings. This practice is often interpreted as symbolic of deflowering, though some sources attribute its origin to a superstition that taking an article of the bride’s clothing will bring good luck.

In the Middle Ages, the groomsmen would rush at the new bride to take her garters as a prize. Today, the practice of removing the bride’s garter is traditionally reserved to the groom, who will then toss the garter to the unmarried male guests. This is performed after the tossing of the bouquet, in which the bride tosses her bouquet over her shoulder to be caught by the unwed female guests.

According to superstition, the lady who catches the bouquet and the man who catches the garter will be the next man and woman among those in attendance to be married (though perhaps not to each other).

The ceremony often continues with the man who catches the garter obliged to place it on the leg of the lady who caught the bouquet. Traditionally, the pair are obliged to share the next dance. Prom garters were common in the 1960s & 1970s, and often conferred on the date as a souvenir.

If the date received the garter, it was typically hung from his rear-view mirror. Beginning in the mid-2000s, it has become common in the United States for young women attending a high school prom to wear a garter, usually designed to match the style and color of the young woman’s dress.

The prom garter may be worn throughout the evening and is sometimes given to the young woman’s date as a souvenir. A young woman may also choose to keep the garter rather than give it away, as a token of her prom night. In some cases, young people may participate in a “garter and tie” dance (often hosted by the high school as part of the prom), during or after which either the young woman herself or the young woman’s date removes the garter and exchanges it for the date’s tie.

In cases like this where the garter is given early in the evening, the young woman’s date may wear it on his arm for the remainder of the evening. In areas where prom garters are common, it has become a tradition for young women to pose for a picture with other female friends before the prom, in which they pull up the skirts of their dresses to display their prom garters, which are generally worn a few inches above the right knee.

The giving or taking of the prom garter may or may not have the same sexual implications that are associated with wedding garters; however, the giving of the prom garter is often interpreted as publicly designating the pair as a romantic couple.

What race is Betty Boop?

Betty Boop first appeared in the 1930 Talkartoon titled Dizzy Dishes, which was released in 1930. Betty made her debut as a plump anthropomorphic French poodle, with Betty’s voice having been created by Margie Hines, Hines created the voice using her ‘baby doll’ vocalization.

Julia