In the Fleischer landscape, anything was possible, and seemingly nothing was off limits. In New York, meanwhile, Fleischer created a grungy, often dangerous urban world for its characters to navigate. From its home in California, Disney was laying the groundwork for the idyllic, fantastical fairy tales that would soon dominate its oeuvre. The dueling studios’ styles were diametrically opposed. After a makeover, Betty became the first fully human, fully female animated character.Īt its height in the 1930s, Fleischer Studios was a giant in animation, rivaled only by Disney. She appeared in the Fleischers’ “ Talkartoons” series as the girlfriend of main character Bimbo and was such a success that the studio promoted her to its star. Initially, Betty was depicted as a dog with a button nose and floppy ears. Her constantly shifting design offers an intriguing case study of how representations of women-including fictional ones-are shaped by censorship, the public’s response and changing conceptions of morality. Betty’s appearance continues to evolve today, with the character donning ripped jeans, joggers and sneakers, and overalls in merchandise and on social media. Beneath that iconic look, however, is a more complex story of aesthetic transformation, from what Heather Hendershot, a media historian at MIT, describes as a “flapper-secretary-adventurer” in the early 1930s to a “middle-class homemaker” by the end of the decade. The enduring image of Betty is a flapper in a strapless minidress, with a garter peeking out above her knee and large hoop earrings in her ears. … They would come for the Betty Boop cartoon.” “She’s a big hit,” says Katia Perea, a cartoon scholar at City University New York, “and she’s a big hit in the same way that Felix the Cat is a big hit, where she was drawing audiences to the movie. Tattoos also represent a woman who is very feminine but not immoral but can reveal her sexuality as the given occasion calls for based on her choices.At a time when cartoons were largely opening acts before a featured movie, Betty’s stardom was an outlier. The key representation of a Betty Boop tattoo would be of a woman aware of her sexuality and who is in control of it. This tattoo motif can represent a lot of different things, depending on how she is depicted. Flapper women were the first women to freely display and flaunt their sexuality in a way that was considered extreme in their day but would be viewed as quite normal today. She originated from the era of Jazz flappers. There are different types of tattoos that are dedicated to the sexuality of Betty Boop, which made her the queen of the big screen of the 1930s. Not surprisingly, Betty Boop is popular with men because of her pin-up girl status, but also with women, as a result of her sexy but safe image. But, by the 1930s, she evolved into the innocent skirt-lifting girl, pulling it down only to have it pop up again, whose trademark was “boop-boop-a-doop.”Īs an icon of pop culture, as well as considered a collectible, Betty Boop has also made her way into tattoo art, as some other cartoon characters did. Oddly enough, the quintessential coy flapper and the first in a long line of sexy cartoon characters, Betty Boop, actually started life as a dog, modeled on French poodle. There were more than one hundred and fifty Betty Boop cartoons produced, the last one being in 1939.
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