Cartoon Royalty
Lest we forget, funny paper hero Popeye was first introduced to movie audiences in a Betty Boop cartoon. Two things happened next: the really ugly, bulgy limbed sailor became, against all odds, an animated idol, and Betty’s job description was immediately expanded. Ms. Boop was now occasionally called on to chaperone other comic strip types in their bids for film stardom. So-o-o-o-o, today we get “Betty Boop and the Little King.”
Funny thing though. The Little King had already had his own cartoon series over at RKO/Van Beuren studios a couple of years earlier than this 1936 film. The RKO boys had bent over backwards trying to imitate New Yorker cartoonist Otto Soglow’s French curve drawing style (successfully) and wispy humor (a little shaky there.) But now the tiny monarch was on the Paramount ranch, and Max Fleischer was having none of that minimalist crappola — L.K. is plopped into a three dimensional world and outfitted with a dippy voice (he never said boo in the funnies.)
This one neatly fills out our ‘On with the Show’ theme, with Betty giving a command performance of her Vaudeville act. You people with over active imaginations can make what you will out of that song she sings (”I take a rope around wherever I go…”) but the final shot pretty much lays it on the line as to the idea of His Majesty and Betty having a Little Thing on the side.
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