Infantile Activities
We’re on the last branches of the family tree in our final Relatively Speaking Week offering. The cartoon is “Baby Be Good,” a 1935 Max Fleischer production starring Betty Boop, a film that raises a couple of provocative issues.
Question One: Who the hell is that kid? Is he supposed to be another one of those cartoon nephews with a suspiciously strong family resemblance? Or did, in fact, our sweet Betty give birth, and is now warbling her way through single parenthood (no trace of a father figure here — biological dad must still be in the inkwell.) Nobody tells us anything!
Question Two: Why was Paramount so ingenious about cranking out CHEATERS? I mean these guys left Disney in the dust when it came to creative ways of filling out the production schedule with minimum effort. This team pioneered the inventive re-use of old footage in their cartoons (remember howPopeye was always taking five and showing us film clips of his previous adventures?) Now here’s a little gem where the writers have engineered a repurposing of all the animation halfway through the story — they just re-run it backwards! And they get away with it! Brilliant!
Olympic size laughs next week!
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