Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Inaccurate Junk and Disgraceful to the Original Animators, February 11, 2007
I found this dvd terribly overpriced, yet I finally bit the bullet and shelled out.
What a mistake - the narration is inane and misleading in terms of Betty's history (it is made to sound like "Snow White" was an effort by the studio to get Betty back on track and woo the movie-going public - it is in fact one of the earlier Jazz efforts when her skirt was still short) and very little of the narration or interviews provides insight into what made Betty popular in the first place: namely the risque, jazz, "acid" and spooky elements that make up the first few years of her series and appearances in 'Talkartoons'.
The man who should have been interviewed for this special (indeed, should have narrated it)was Leslie Cabarga, who wrote a wonderful book titled "The Fleischer Story" in the early 1970's - a remarkably well researched book, full of enthusiasm, love and respect for the material.
I suspect Richard Fleischer's (son of Max) inclusion in this special was incumbent on Mr.Cabarga's absence, as bickering factions of the Fleischer clan had previously chosen sides over whether to cooperate with Cabarga's research or not.
But the real slap in the face, which affects all viewers and not just those scholarly types, is that more than two thirds of the animation portrayed during this special are re-"black and whited" versions of colorised copies made in the 1980's of the original black and white cartoons.
Worse still, characters in motion are virtually re-drawn and animated at a lower frame rate, making the originally beautiful smooth animation now jerky and awkward - a disgrace to the work of the animators who put so much love and soul into these amazing cartoons, since the work here portrayed is supposed to be of a "historical" and "scholarly" bent.
I've never met a Fleischer fan who claimed that the later, "tame", long skirted, unfunny domestic Betty was an improvement, yet here we are presented with veteran animator Myron Waldman (may he rest in Peace) informing us that he always hated those peripheral elements in Betty's cartoons like the character Bimbo - who I think, along with Ko Ko, only aided Betty's appearances.
Pudgy vs Bimbo? No contest. Perhaps they might have found a Fleischer Studios animator whose opinion of the elements that made Betty's cartoons so popular in the first place was a little higher and not at odds with the lessons of history: namely, that turning Betty into Mrs.Cleaver is what spelled the series' demise, and not, as this special suggests, because her former Flapper looks was somehow out of style with late Thirties America.
Betty and the Fleischer studios animators who created her deserved better.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Betty Boop: Technique-Focused, October 5, 2006
The usual Biography installment has approximately 5 interviewees and you can see the narrator at the beginning and end of the work. This work on Betty Boop had two interviewees and the narrator is never seen. I really think this work was intended to focus on the technical aspects of this cartoon, rather than anything else.
You learn stuff here. Betty Boop was originally a dog-like cartoon. Cartoons were meant for all ages, not just children, and thus they had many double entendres. Cartoons were made by young, American men. In the autobiography of Bart's voice, she said the Simpsons are drawn and painted in Korea. So much has changed in animation.
This film had modern people raving about Betty Boop. However, her popularity could have been proven by showing some famous person from the 1930 raving about her. The narrator says, "Betty Boop offered a female lead character at a time when feminism was unheard-of." WRONG! First-wave feminists organized to get women the right to vote 10 years before Betty's creation. Further, Betty's depiction takes from the 1920s New Woman and a bit from flappers. This work really could have benefited from an interviewee with a academic knowledgeable about feminism and media studies. They say she launched Popeye's career, but I wonder if Olive Oyl were drawn in response/opposite to her.
This work says Betty is still popular. However, it says nothing of her guest appearance in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" It says nothing about the 1990s dance song "Betty Boo just doin' the doo." It seem truncated and incomplete at times.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting and solid introduction to the great Betty Boop, September 19, 2009
I want to start off by taking issue with the one-star review of this documentary. If you look carefully, the errors that are noted are not all that important and some are not errors at all, but merely conflicts with the subjective evaluation of the reviewer. The brute fact is that for the documentary is reliable and interesting. The accuracy is no worse than the other Biography shows. A one-star review is simply absurd. I will concede that it is not a great documentary, but it is also certainly not a bad one. If you want to know about Betty Boop, this will serve as an excellent introduction. I would normally have given it four stars (rounding up a 3.5 star rating), but the one-star rating is so silly that I'm going to engage in a bit of correction.
What is astonishing these days is how often Betty Boop pops up. A Thai restaurant in Lakeview in Chicago that I used to visit constantly features, in addition to a life size statue of Elvis, a four and a half foot tall statue of Betty Boop dressed as a waitress. Checking out of a newsstand the other day I noticed that there were some lottery tickets emblazoned with Betty's visage. A woman I work with decorates her cubicle with images of Betty Boop, and there are a lot of them.
While this DVD does an adequate job of introducing the viewer to the career of Betty Boop, it doesn't come close to substituting for watching the actual cartoons. The problem is that we still don't have a definitive DVD edition of Betty Boop as there was on VHS. I am not aware of what efforts are currently underway. Current DVDs announce themselves as "Definitive" or "Ultimate" but really are reworkings of public domain cartoons. All hint at how great Betty Boop was (and remains). Qualification: I have not yet seen the new two-disc Collector's Edition, which maintains (like some of the others) that it has remastered the original prints. Maybe. There have been so many mediocre versions of Betty Boop that one does well to be hesitant in accepting such claims. But maybe this one is the exception, but until I hear some great reviews or can watch it via Netflix (it is not currently available), I'm going to hold off.
I noticed that the documentary left out clips from the Louis Armstrong short. I can understand why. Cab Calloway's appearances in the Betty Boop cartoons were not racially embarrassing, but Louis Armstrong's was. I once ran a film society and would often order cartoons from distributors to show before the main feature (usually trying to get something from approximately the same time). I showed both "Minnie the Moocher" with Cab Calloway and "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead You Rascal You" with Louis Armstrong. The latter shows Armstrong transforming from an apelike African native into a disembodied head and back again. It is rather hard to watch. The documentary also sloughs over other more controversial aspects of Betty Boop. For instance, the cartoon "Ha! Ha! Ha!" was banned because everyone in the cartoon got high on laughing gas.
So watch this, but be sure to follow it up with a DVD or two or three of Betty Boop cartoons.
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