Friday 15 September 2017

Betty Boop Kills Bugs Dead

There’s something about Fred, Betty Boop’s newly-militarised boyfriend, in Something About a Soldier (1934). He’s frightfully dull. The declamatory reading from a book gets stale after a while. Mercifully he appeared in, what, only two cartoons?

And it turns out Fred and his army are at war against—mosquitoes. One of Betty’s finest, this ain’t. Tex Avery did it a lot funnier in those Raid commercials 60 years ago.



A bullet hits its mark. Crash and burn mosquito!



Betty gets an SOS and shows up with a tanker-truck of DDT or some bug spray that probably isn’t environmentally-friendly in our day and age. It wasn’t friendly to the mosquitoes. The gas forms fists and strangles them.



Mosquito carnage. Whoever animated this scene had some experience killing insects. The mosquito on the left in the foreground even shudders a bit after crashing.



No, I don’t know why Betty and Fred are fighting mosquitoes.

Hicks Lokey is animating for Myron Waldman in this cartoon, along with some uncredited Fleischer types.

3 comments:

  1. He appears in three cartoons, if I can recall (including this one). He makes an early appearance in "Betty Boop's Trial" and makes a surprise comeback in "The Romance of Betty Boop"..

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  2. Freddie also appeared in "No, No, a thousand times No!!"

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  3. It probably should be remembered that the Army Corps of Engineers had a great deal of expertise in mosquito control, dating back to the construction of the Panama Canal. In this vein, compare this cartoon to the Chuck Jones-directed Snafu cartoon "It's Murder She Says," where you see the Army run Anopholes Annie out of business.

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