Betty Boop's Bizzy Bee - Toonstalgia

Toonstalgia: Betty Boop's Bizzy Bee

A Fleischer Studio Cartoon

Directed by Dave Fleischer
Animated by Seymour Kneitel and Bernard Wolf
Betty Boop, Voiced by Little Ann Little

Rating: Don't eat the food.

"Made of pen and ink. She can win you with a wink. 

Ain't she cute? Boop-boop-be-doop. Sweet Betty."

-Betty Boop's Bizzy Bee

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Betty Boop is a chef at a lunch wagon where everyone goes to get fill up on her wheat cakes. Bimbo and Koko visit her lunch counter. Everyone overindulges. Even the moon needs to take a break to recover from Betty's cuisine while a lamp fills in.

Details noticed after a dozen views

The orchestra used easily recognizable music melodies like "Singing in the Bathtub" when the plates are bathing and "A Bicycle Built for Two" when a little chef is riding an egg beater in a bowl. This is part of the style of the cartoons at the time. The orchestra used these common songs as shorthand like animators used visual symbols. Koko's soup is shown to be cold by the flies skating on it, a joke that has been repeated a thousand times.

The man with big round ears could be a reference to Mickey Mouse who debuted four years earlier or possibly a common image used to indicate a mouse in the same way the the big oval jaw with two clearly defined nostrils. He just looks a lot like Mickey.

Little Ann Little, the voice of Betty Boop

Betty is voiced by Little Ann Little. She had the look of Betty and won the role through a contest by Paramount. According to her dance teachers, she was a precocious kid. They would let her into class even when her parents couldn't pay because they "found themselves enjoying a free vaudeville show whenever Ann was around" (The Winnipeg Evening Tribune, June 13, 1930).

Sources

Betty Boop's Bizzy Bee. Dir. Dave Fleischer. Perf. Little Ann Little. Paramount Pictures, 1932.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Boop%27s_Bizzy_Bee

(1930, June 13). Stage. The Winnipeg Tribune, pp. 6.