Take a trip with Betty Boop to 'Crazy-Town'

Crazy-Town (1932)
Starring: Mae Questel and Billy Murray (each doing various voices)
Director: Dave Fleischer
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

Betty and Bimbo head down a rabbit hole that leads to the heart of Crazy-Town, a place where everything is the opposite of what you expect.

Betty Boop exists in a world where inanimate objects come to life, people and plants transform themselves into different shapes instantly, and most of the population consists of anthropomorphic "funny animals", so a place called "Crazy-Town" has got to be somewhere where things are even more bizarre.

That isn't quite the case here. Instead, almost everything is opposite of what it should be--fish fly above a pond while birds swim in the water; neighborhoods drive to the trolley car; and when women go to the beauty salon, they don't change their hairstyles, they change their heads! This is all very strange and very fun--although it's a little weird that Betty and Bimbo initially freak out by all the backwardness, since they open the cartoon by singing how they have nothing better to do, so they're going to go crazy in Crazy Town. The cartoon also features some very catchy tunes that I was humming for a good part of the day after watching it, and that I find myself humming as I type this review. Unfortunately, there is a tendency here that I don't recall from other Boop cartoons to drag out almost every gag until it's unfunny. As fun as this is, it feels like instead of coming up with enough wacky concepts to truly fill the run-time, they just padded some sequences... and it drags down this otherwise excellent cartoon.

Still, the good outweighs the bad here, and it's well worth your time to check out "Crazy-Town" (which you can do, right here from this post; it's embedded below, via YouTube). This cartoon is also noteworthy in the sense that it contains some very clear reminders that the "Betty Boop" series was originally made for adult audiences. It should also prove particularly amusing to those out there who subscribe to the notion that "Alice in Wonderland" was inspired by a drug trip.