![]() ![]() 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. At a time when cartoons were largely opening acts before a featured movie, Betty’s stardom was an outlier. ![]()
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