Fleischer's Snow-White

The Fleischer studio cartoons of the early 1930s are among my favourites of all time.

Their attitude is different than the happy musical setting you’ll find in a Harman-Ising cartoon for Warner Bros. The Fleischer cartoons are bleaker, nightmarish at times, and, given the musical artists featured, not very white. In urban New York, that meant alcohol, drugs and illicit sex.

Jerry Beck’s “The 50 Greatest Cartoons” (JG Press, 1998) skips past Swing You Sinners! (1930), but includes three great Fleischer cartoons in its top 20. Number 19 is the Betty Boop version of Snow-White. Unlike the Walt Disney feature version, the dwarfs here are not likeable with child-like personalities. They’re zeroes. Instead, we get Betty in the title role, Bimbo and Koko as palace guards who rescue Betty, the Wicked Queen and her magic hand mirror.

The songs given to Betty (Mae Questel) are fairly ordinary, but the cartoon gets into bizarre territory when the four characters go into a mystery cave and Koko acquires Cab Calloway’s voice and sings “St. James Infirmary Blues,” with Betty in an icy “coffin” (she is still alive and moving) and the clown into a high-stepping ghost enacting the lyrics. It’s a far cry from Foxy singing “Smile, Darn Ya, Smile.”

A real highlight is the background art in the cave sequence. I suspect some of you have seen this video, but it’s new to me. Someone has managed to clip together the panned backgrounds from two scenes. It must have taken forever to get around the characters that take up most of the foreground. Then there’s always a problem (as I have discovered trying to do the same thing) of making the black-and-white tones from one frame match another. I don’t have fancy software to help; I use an ancient version of MS Paint. I gather that’s what this person has done.

You can see a video of the backgrounds below.



To look at the background recreation from frames, you can go here.

We’ve posted Film Daily’s review of the cartoon elsewhere on the blog. Here are some capsule comments in The Motion Picture Herald of the day:

SNOW-WHITE: Betty Boop—Clever cartoon that features “Saint James Infirmary Blues” sung by Cab Calloway. I featured this in my advertising and believe that it helped.—H. B. Schuessler (Martin Theatres), LaFayette Theatre, LaFayetts, Ala. Small town patronage.

SNOW WHITE: Betty Boop, Cab Calloway—One of the very best cartoons we have shown. It deserves billing. Running time, 9 minutes.—A. B. Jefferis, New Piedmont Theatre, Piedmont, Mo. Rural and small town patronage.

SNOW-WHITE: Betty Boop—good filler on any program. Running time, one reel.—D. E. Fitton, Lyric Theatre, Harrison, Ark. Small town patronage.

PICK-UP: Sylvia Sidney, George Raft—Dated this with Paramount short “Snow White” and RKO “Century of Progress.” Patrons liked feature and business was excellent, due probably to extra draw of the shorts, which we had advertised heavily. Played October 1-3.—Avece T. Waldron, Blue Moon Theatre, Oklahoma City, Okla. Suburban family patronage.

And from the March 1933 issue of the journal of the National Board of Review:

SNOW WHITE (Talkartoon)—Paramount. Family audience. Junior matinee.

Yup. Entertainment suitable for children. Approved by censors. Depression-era kids were a hardier lot than the “Oh, you can’t show guns on Saturday morning cartoons. Think of the children!” Mind you, you couldn’t show kids a cartoon cow’s udder back then. Every generation has its ridiculousness.

Calloway was a Fleischer favourite, appearing first in Minnie the Moocher (1932), then in Snow-White and, finally, The Old Man of the Mountain (1933).

While Doc Crandall got the sole animation credit for this short, the background artist isn’t credited. That’s a real crime.