All the Betty Boop cartoon references in 'BOOP! The Musical'

The Broadway show features a new, original story in which Betty adventures through NYC, but it contains homages to her classic black-and-white TV shorts.

It took almost a century for Betty Boop, born as a black-and-white cartoon woman by the pioneering Fleischer Studios in 1930, to have her own stage musical Boop! The Musical on Broadway. Claimed and celebrated as an empowering icon today, her coquettish cadence and scatting sung their way into the hearts of admirers all around the world. She’s embraced by the kids and adults who laugh and clap to Boop!, starring Tony-nominated Jasmine Amy Rogers, stuffed with ornate music and gags by composer David Foster, Tony nominee lyricist Susan Birkenhead, and Tony-winner bookwriter Bob Martin. Boop! reinvigorates Betty, a cartoon of pen and ink, with a new dimension by taking her out of black-and-white ToonTown and teleporting her into the color of 21st-century New York City.

The musical does not waste the opportunity to plant references and easter eggs recognized by animation die-hards while stealthily introducing threads of Betty’s storied history to newcomer Boopheads. Let’s boop-boop-da-boop into the surreal, jazz-soaked history and lore of Betty.

Get BOOP! The Musical tickets now.

“A Little Versatility”

The montage of the “A Little Versatility” toe-tapping opening is a Betty Boop career reel that loosely adapts and abridges real shorts:

• “I am a cowgirl…” - It was in Betty Boop’s literal “dog days” incarnation when she starred in a train robber short 1931 The Bum Bandit. This is one of the few shorts where Betty, voiced by Harriet Lee, does not have her signature coquettish baby voice (often tasked to various voice actresses like Margie Hines, Little Ann Little, Mae Questel, Bonnie Poe, Mae Questel).
• “Now I’m flying biplanes… ” - Betty piloted a plane in the 1935 A Language All My Own.
• A sequence resembles the 1933 short Big Boss, where Betty flees a lecherous boss in an office. The musical instills a modern sensibility where she doesn’t flirt with or return the kiss of said boss. It’s echoed again in the act two incident where Raymond (Erich Bergen), a NYC mayoral candidate, tries to hit on Betty only to earn a deserved whack from her.
• The mustachioed villain in the Big Boss-like scene resembles the dastardly villain who appeared in a few shorts, including the 1935 No! No! A Thousand Times No!!

Betty Boop’s Dog Days

"That was a long time ago. I don't like to talk about that." On the Broadway stage, Betty Boop does not like to talk about her origins as an anthropomorphic French poodle with flappy ears. According to Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries That Inspired the Golden Age of Animation book, David Fleischer told artist Grim Natwick, “Mickey Mouse has Minnie,” and suggested that Bimbo, their anthropomorphic dog character, needed a girlfriend for a popularity boost to compete with Walt Disney shorts. Thus Natwick birthed Betty Boop, the poodle nightclub singer who debuted in the Bimbo-centered Dizzy Dishes on August 9, 1930.

Natwick eventually posed the question to David Fleischer, “What do you want? A dog’s body or a pretty girl’s?” and convinced him through drawings that Betty was more gazeable as a human. So Betty Boop evolved away from her canine incarnation, her ears becoming hoop earrings, and the rest is history.

"What kind of parts do you play?"

Dwayne (Ainsley Melham) asks Betty Boop about her roles, a resume as varied as Barbie’s.

• “Lion tamer” - Betty had her lion-tamer career in the 1932 Boop-Oop-A-Doop.
• “Hula dancer” - Betty danced the hula in the 1932 Betty the Hula Dancer, with music and songs recorded by the Royal Samoans. The dancing model for Betty’s hula dance is often identified as “Lotamuru,” as seen in the short’s opening. It remains one of the few available footage of the Royal Samoans.
• “Racecar driver” - Betty was a race-car driver who ker-chooed her way across the finish line in the 1933 Betty Boop's Ker-Choo.
• “A judge” - Betty proved punitive when she envisioned herself as a mallet-wacking judge in the 1935 Judge For A Day, dreaming of the ways she can reform society and punish offenders by stabbing them in the eye with paper, slapping them on the back, and force them to listen to a saxophone all day.
• “I even ran for president once” - “President Betty Boop” has been on Betty’s CV since the 1932 Betty Boop for President short. There, her song-and-dance campaign platform envisions a world where police officers direct traffic for ducks, trams can travel onto apartment buildings for accessibility (it makes sense in a cartoon), and she abolishes the death penalty by converting the electric chairs into hair salons. She wins the office.

A fangirl’s “Portrait of Betty”

In her “Portrait of Betty” ballet, fangirl Trisha (Angelica Hale) exalts Betty Boop in a litany of praises.

• “Speaks Chinese, just because” is a curious entry on Trisha’s list in that it may refer to Betty’s “Ching Ling Choy” Chinese-caricature act in the 1937 Pudgy Takes a Bow-Wow.
• “Win a dozen games of chess” - Betty Boop had her encounter with chess in the 1932 Chest-Nuts.
• Trisha delights in Betty Boop’s knack for “World Affairs.” It may be a shoutout to Betty Boop’s popularity extending overseas to Japan. Fleischer Studios tailored the 1935 A Language All My Own for its Japanese audience, as Betty Boop herself flew to Japan to perform to adoring Japanese masses. Per his CartoonBrew obituary, animator Myon Waldon consulted Japanese exchange students.

Fleischer cartoon cameos

Crowds of Fleischer character cameos, like Koko the Clown, can be sighted on the curtain art. A keen eye can also spot the face of Betty's cartoon boyfriend Bimbo on a medal given to Betty in “A Little Versatility.”

One New York reporter presses Betty with “Can we expect Popeye?” While the iconic spinach-swallowing Popeye the Sailorman doesn’t appear in the musical, he was Betty’s co-hula dancer in the 1933 Popeye the Sailor short. It also may evoke the fact that there’s a Popeye movie currently in development hell.

Cartoons indebted to Fleischer influences

When Betty Boop hops onto Grandpappy’s Teleportation Chair to escape into the real-world, she’s gobsmacked to experience the color-saturated world of New York Comic Con populated with fans donning cinema, superhero, anime, and cartoon cosplay or paraphernalia. The sight of cartoon stars like SpongeBob Squarepants, Raggedy Ann and Andy, and Pikachu bring to mind how animation across the eras and globe carry the DNA of Fleischer influences.

The Chicago premiere production of Boop! also featured a Superman cosplayer, a homage to the 1941 theatrical Superman, a famous technicolor project by Fleischer Studios.

The Harlem Nightclub

At the Act 1 rouser “Where I Wanna Be,” Betty Boop performing in a Harlem speakeasy may be a homage to Baby Esther, born Esther Lee Jones, an African American performer who once performed in Harlem.

Many know Esther’s name thanks to the Kane v. Fleischer court saga, told in the Out of the Inkwell: Max Fleischer and the Animation Revolution book. In May 1932, singer Helen Kane filed a $250,000 infringement lawsuit against Fleischer Studios, Max Fleischer and Paramount Publix Corporation for exploiting her image and “boop-oop-a-doop” in the creation of Betty Boop. While Esther did not testify at the trial, Esther's manager, Lou Bolton, testified that he coached Esther in a style of scatting and that Kane was present for one of Esther’s acts, one piece of evidence that Kane did not own the boop-boop-boop style. Kane lost her case. Today, Baby Esther and perhaps other unnamed Black women artists are linked to Betty Boop.

"The Old Man Of The Mountain"

It makes sense that Trisha’s favorite Betty Boop short is the 1933 Old Man of the Mountain because it demonstrates Betty’s courage, despite her teeth chattering in fear, as she climbs a mountain to confront the giant Old Man of the Mountain.

The Jazz Titans

Enthralling the Harlem club crowd in “Where I Wanna Be,” Betty namedrops the real-life jazz titans who uplifted her cartoon career: “Let me hear some Louis Armstrong Licks… Fab Cab Calloway for Kicks.” Both Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong contributed songs and their likeness to Betty Boop cartoons.

Footage of Calloway and his band surfaces in the 1932 Minnie The Moocher short, the namesake of Calloway’s song, where Calloway’s idiosyncratic dancing was rotoscoped–a Fleischer innovation–to supply the slithery dancing walrus. Subsequently, Calloway’s voice and rotoscoped choreography embodied the Old Man of The Old Man of the Mountain and Koko of Koko the Clown. In I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You, Armstrong appears as a live-action floating head chasing Betty’s friends as he sings the titular song before the short cutaways surreally to live-action footage of Armstrong and his band, superimposed over the cartoon tribal caricatures. While these shorts platformed the careers of Black musicians, they carry their legacy of offensive Black stereotypes common of the Jim Crow era.

The Hays Code

“This is a kid’s cartoon?” Carol (Anastacia McCleskey), a foster parent herself, inquires about the content of The Old Man Of The Mountain. To which Betty replies, “That was before the Code!” This “Code” Betty alludes to is the Hays Code, a set of self-censorship guidelines that altered the course of American cinema and television.

Betty Boop was among the cartoons targeted by The National Legion of Decency. Much of the Hays Code “Don’ts” targeted displays of sexuality or sexuality going unpunished. By the mid-1930s, it domesticated Betty’s outfit from a sultry flapper short-skirt into a longer skirt with sleeves, sometimes adorned with an apron. The Code neutralized Betty Boop of her risqueness and most of the hallucinatory surreality.

The Bouncing Ball Moon

A hit with the audience each night, one of the funniest visual gags in Boop! is a cartoon-faced moon becoming a bouncing ball for the projected lyrics of Betty and Dwayne’s romantic “Why Look Around the Corner?”. Max Fleischer filed the patent of the bouncing ball in 1925, around the optimal time for his* Song Car-Tunes* short series (1924–1927) that pioneered sound in animation. The Fleischer Studio later revived the series as Screen Song (1931). In the musical, the moon smiling upon Betty and Dwayne’s courtship resembles the one in “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” which featured Betty and Bimbo.

Get BOOP! The Musical tickets now.

Photo credit: BOOP! The Musical on Broadway. (Photos by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)