Betty Boop

Do-Gooder
Full Name	Betty Boop
Alias(es)	Betty
Origin	Talkartoons: Dizzy Dishes
Occupation	Singer, dancer, actress
Powers / Skills	Singing, dancing, acting
Hobby	Music and singing
Goals	N/A
Family	N/A
Friends / Allies	N/A
Enemies	N/A
Type of Hero	Damsel

Betty Boop is the main protagonist of the cartoon series of the same name, originally called Talkartoons but renamed to her’s after she became more popular and the main character.

Betty is a 16-year-old girl dealing with the various misadventures of show business and other adventures. Her cartoon shorts ran both as precursors to movies and as their own self contained TV episodes ranging from 1930 to 1939. She has become an icon in cartooning. An anthropomorphic dog named Bimbo accompanies her as her boyfriend and was the original main character before her. Despite Boop's age and the lightheartedness of her misadventures, Boop's risque cartoons have famed her as one of the world's first cartoon sex-symbols.

Many a media has featured her using the term "Boop" in many things she says, presumably as a pun.

Physical Appearance

Based on the singer Helen Kane, despite her age, Betty has a huge eyes, long eyelashes, a high-pitched voice and a svelte, slender body. She is usually depicted in a red off-shoulder dress (which made her a sex-symbol), but she also has worn a wide variety of different outfits and often changes clothing.

Personality

Betty Boop has a kind, sweet and happy-go-lucky personality, being a very cheery person and is kind and nice to many who meet her. Although, she is very clumsy in her several appearances. Betty is quite naive and innocent and is not too bright, but isn’t completely dimwitted either showing some levels of wit. However, despite her sweetness she is not a complete push over and can be quite sassy. She enjoys singing and dancing and is mainly a jazz singer.

Filmographical Appearances

1930s

• Dizzy Dishes
• Barnacle Bill
• Mysterious Mose
• Accordion Joe

List of Actors and Actresses of Betty Boop

• Margie Hines (1930–1932, 1938–1939)
• Ann Rothschild (1931–1933)
• Harriet Lee (1931)^[1]
• Mae Questel (1931–1938, 1988)
• Kate Wright (1932, 1938)
• Bonnie Poe (1933–1934)
• Victoria D'orazi (1980)
• Desirée Goyette (1985)
• Melissa Fahn (1989, 2004–2008)
• Cheryl Chase (2002)
• Grey DeLisle (2009-present)
• Heather Halley (2014)^[2]
• Sandy Fox (Since 1999 official voice for King Syndicate worldwide)
• Cindy Robinson (official-commercials)

Gallery

Trivia

• Betty Boop’s canon race and ethnicity is a white Ashkenazi Jewish girl. She has had alternate depictions as a Native American, in one short when she was still a dog, and Samoan, which only appeared very little times but first appeared in a short that featured a musical group called the Royal Samoans and Betty’s animations were based on movements and rotoscoped from a female member called Lotamuru.
• Betty Boop’s exact weight and body type varies from chubby to skinny depending on the artist or animator with the only remaining consistency typically being that she is curvy. It seems that the person she was originally a parody of, Helen Kane, was considered to be “plump.”
• Betty Boop was originally just a simple parody and caricature of Helen Kane that was only meant to appear in a few shorts making a very limited appearance. However the character became popular and her popularity is the reason why she became a recurring character.
• While Max Fleischer may have developed Betty Boop into human Betty Boop and gave her several characteristics, along with some other animators developing her as well, it was Grim Natwick who is the true creator of Betty Boop and he was always consistent on how he came up with her.
  • Grim Natwick also designed Disney’s Snow White and based her look off of Betty Boop.
• Betty Boop’s character as a dog often gets called “prototype Betty Boop” or “Proto-Betty Boop” by fans. The dog version also has a mixed reaction by fans with some preferring the human version of Betty as, aside from being more used to her, she is a fully developed character with an actual personality while the dog was just an underdeveloped prototype of what she would become that didn’t have a fully realized character or personality yet. Other fans may prefer dog Betty feeling it was more interesting and that her becoming human was more boring. There are also fans who love both.
  • Among those at Fleischer Studios, many staff members found dog Betty to be ugly and even more uncanny the more she looked human over time and thus made her human and never wanted to go back to her dog self again.
• Despite often being incorrectly called, and sometimes even known for, being the “first ever female main character of a cartoon” that title goes to Gertie the Dinosaur by Winsor McCay. While Gertie only appeared in one short, there is also the high possibility of other female characters, who predated Betty Boop, who had their own cartoon series but either lacked or lost the popularity as time went on and/or their cartoons became completely lost to time.
• Betty Boop and Bimbo are often called the first human and anthro couple in animation by some people, even being called the “original Roger and Jessica Rabbit” by some. But there seems to be some human and anthro couples who predate them in animation even if they are more obscure. Toby the Pup and his human girlfriend for example, while clearly being inspired by Betty and Bimbo, had cartoons that only showed before Betty Boop officially became a human and was still a dog. His human girlfriend has a name that sounds similar to Betty, while the audio doesn’t make it too clear, it is probably the name “Bessy.”
  • A common rumor was that Bimbo the Dog was removed simply because the Hays Code didn’t approve of his interspecies relationship with Betty Boop. While it is true that the Hays Code and people down at Hollywood found their relationship “suspicious” they are not the reason for him being removed entirely as a character. In the documentary Betty Boop: Queen of Cartoons, it is explained that the real reason was because many of the people who worked on cartoons actually didn’t like the character and felt negativity towards him. When Betty Boop and Bimbo’s relationship became an interspecies one they complained even more and while Max Fleischer did like Bimbo, the complaints were getting to be enough and he was more focused on Betty Boop at this point who proved to be a more popular and successful character than Bimbo. Max Fleischer gave Myron Waldman, who would later go on to create Pudgy, the responsibility of removing Bimbo. Myron said that he was “tickled silly because I never liked him.” Reportedly, the audience did not care for Bimbo and Betty’s relationship being an interspecies and were presumably neutral to it. Ironically, Pudgy, who was a replacement for Bimbo, became a disliked character among the audience and fans and there are many fans who feel like that downfall of the series started with Bimbo’s removal. On another note, some other rumors state that Bimbo was originally a character called Fitz the Dog, another Fleischer Studios character, or that Bimbo became Pudgy the dog, neither of which are true as both people at Fleischer Studios, and their associates said all characters are their own different characters, not to mention Pudgy’s creator not liking Bimbo.
  • It has been common fan speculation by those who know of Bimbo that in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, that the reason Betty says that Jessica Rabbit is a "lucky girl" for being married to Roger is because she was able to remain with her anthropomorphic lover while Betty was not. Bimbo was actually supposed to make an appearance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit along with Betty Boop in a scene with several other "lesser known" characters but this was scrapped.
  • Ironically, another example of a human and anthro pair who predate Betty Boop and Bimbo would be Alice and Julius the Cat from the Alice Comedies, which were created by Fleischer's very own infamous rival Disney. While most of the time Alice and Julius would be depicted as friends there were occasional moments Julius would be portrayed as Alice's love interest. Something doubly ironic is that, while Alice was played by several live action girls, she still was in a cartoon world and by technicality would be another example of a female main character in a cartoon who predated Betty Boop and unlike Betty Boop and Bimbo, Alice was always the main character and Julius was always the secondary character.
• The people who worked on Betty Boop said they view the characters as “animated actors” with many shorts being a show within a show type situation. So a lot of the time all characters are doing is simply acting out but the people who worked on the cartoon also indicated in some instances the characters are acting how they regularly do in their normal environment. It hasn’t been specified which shorts are just characters acting and what is just them acting normally but in shorts like where they are taking a role based on another story, like a fairy tale or movie for instance, that is them just acting. It is also shown in some media, such as some shorts even breaking the fourth wall, deliberately showing them acting. This was also discussed in the Betty Boop: Queen of Cartoons documentary.
  • The crew members also have an official image of how they view the characters and what officially applies to them and what may not. For example some relationships of the characters such as Willy Wolf, while his most well known role is a short where he antagonizes Betty in a take on Little Red Riding Hood, their canonical relationship is actually that they are friends and he is not an enemy of Betty despite his most well known role. This is part of the “animated acting” thing that the characters have.
• Betty Boop has many animal friends, but a lot of them get ignored, even by many fans, because they can be confused as simple background characters or sometimes their given roles for a short won’t show them as friends. It seems to also be lesser known or obscure knowledge even among hardcore fans that a lot of the shorts is just characters acting so what may be an enemy or stranger in one short is actually a friend of Betty behind the scenes.
  • While Bimbo is the one who is mentioned the most when it comes to characters who have been removed, many forget that all of Betty’s friends and cast members have been removed during pre-code with entirely different characters for post-code. Only very few post-code characters are actually liked by people, with many fans not liking the post-code era.
• While many people are under the misconception Esther Jones was Betty Boop's direct inspiration, this is not true as she is more of an indirect one as Betty Boop's own creator, Grim Natwick, was always consistent with how he made her and how Helen Kane was the person she was a caricature of but Helen Kane also copied off of Esther Jones act. It should also be noted Esther was was a child performer who copied off another black celebrity known as Florence Mills but unlike Helen, Esther Jones was always known to be an open copy rather than lying about being "original" and everyone loved Esther because she was like a "baby successor" to Florence Mills. Finally, Florence Mills was a successor to another black woman named Gertrude Saunders who is the "female originator of scat" and Gertrude came up with many scat noises and was a very rich and influential women of her time. Esther Jones has been called the "black grandmother" of Betty Boop by some and in turn, Florence Mills and Gertrude Saunders could be considered a black great-grandmother and black great-great-grandmother respectively.
  • The last time Esther Jones was ever heard about in history was when she was around her mid-teens, the only known photographs of her was when she was a child. Not many people know Esther Jones was a child and that it was her main appeal as a performer as, while Betty Boop is 16, Esther Jones was a child much younger than Betty and only started coming close to Betty's age around the time of the infamous court case with Helen Kane. Ironically, Esther Jones never cared about the Betty Boop character in the first place and never showed up to the court case, while now lost footage of Esther was shown at the court case to show Helen wasn't original, she was never involved herself. Esther was getting older and her career as a child performer was dwindling at the time so all she cared about was focusing on her career. The last time she was mentioned in history was in a newspaper talking about the court case and it is unknown what else Esther was doing or did in life after her career.
  • One of Esther Jones' nicknames given to her was "Miniature Josephine Baker" as she was another famous and influential black celebrity of the era. Josephine Baker is another woman who has been incorrectly cited as an inspiration for Betty Boop and given how Esther Jones is not only confused for being a direct inspiration but has also been confused with other black celebrities, this could potentially be another reason why. Josephine Baker, while never officially stated to be an inspiration for any form of Fleischer material, does share some coincidental similarities with Betty Boop such as having a similar appearance, both being American and French at some point (Josephine being an American woman who moved to and became French by nationality, Betty once being a French poodle living in America), Josephine being of Indigenous heritage and Betty Boop being depicted as Native American once and both being jazz singers, dancers and actresses.
  • Helen Kane's appearance was also copied off a white celebrity known as Clara Bow, however many women at the time were also copying the look of Clara Bow because she was a very popular celebrity of the time. Clara Bow has also been one of the many women who incorrectly gets cited as the initial inspiration for Betty Boop. While later influence from her could be possible, she was never the planned original reference for Betty Boop. Max Fleischer would sometimes lie about Clara Bow being Betty's inspiration but if this was out of misremembering or intentional lying, presumably after being soured by Helen Kane trying to sue his company's successful mascot, is unknown. There have also been Clara Bow-like depictions of female characters in cartoons before Betty Boop as it was such a popular look for many girls to have.
  • When it comes to later influence for Betty, some of her voice actors seemed to also have influenced the character either as she was evolving or some times after she was already developed. Some of her voice actors have also been incorrectly called her original inspiration by some people.
  • Betty's original and main hair color is a black haired brunette, however there is also some people who falsely claimed Betty Boop was "originally" a redhead. The depictions of Betty Boop as a redhead are just very rare alternate depictions of the character and it was nothing more than to show off color. It is unknown if the red hair actually had some influence from an actual person, while it may possibly be inspired by Clara Bow, it could have also been inspired by Little Ann Little, one of Betty's voice actors. Little Anne Little claimed it was the actual inspiration for her depiction of red hair however she is also known to often lie a lot such as claiming to be the "first" Betty Boop voice actor which isn't true, so her claim remains dubious at best. Something that is known is that Little Ann Little was considered to be the "perfect model for Betty Boop" as they saw her as the exact size for the character and she would often dress and perform as the character for a while.