The Domesticated Betty Boop

Baby Be Good (1935)
Starring: Mae Questel (Voices of Betty Boop and Little Jimmy)
Director: Dave Fleischer
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Betty tries to convince a misbehaving child to go to sleep for the night.

By 1935, Hollywood filmmakers had completely surrendered to the morality clauses of the Motion Picture Production Code (MPPC), and the risque escapes that had made Betty Boop so popular with movie-goers were well behind her. In fact, they were so far behind her that in "Baby Be Good", she's a homemaker and the mother of a bratty toddler.

I've repeatedly read comments from critics that the MPPC ruined the Betty Boop series. While I agree that what I've sampled of the post-1934 Boop cartoons for the most part don't have the same edge as the earlier ones--some were so dull I doubt I'll bother revisiting them for a write-up in these parts--I disagree that the series was ruined. There is still plenty of inventiveness in and fun to be had watching some of the tamer exploits of the domesticated Betty. Animation-wise, this one is every bit as good as older Betty cartoons, with detailed characters and backgrounds. The music is, as always, omnipresent, catchy, and fun.

One disappointment for me is that "Baby Be Good" is almost completely free of the surreal, borderline horrific craziness that had once been the series' hallmark. What we do get of that sort of content is very tame and mostly relegated to the cautionary bedtime story that Betty relates to her bratty kid. Overall, the "reality" of Betty's world is quite sedate compared to what she lived through in her younger days--although the kid's antics are every bit as cartoony as hers were in the old days... and we even get a little old-school weirdness bleeding through from the fairytale to reality at the end.

"Baby Be Good" is embedded below, via YouTube. Please take a few minutes and check it out!



I suppose I should mention that I think Jimmy is fortunate that he gets his looks from his mother instead of his father, who I presume is Bimbo. To illustrate what I mean, here are a couple of pictures with Betty and Bimbo together...

AND--for the historically minded and detail-oriented readers out there, I should add that I am aware that the Little Jimmy character predates Betty Boop's creation by about 25 years. Maybe it's because of a misspent youth reading comics where characters co-existed in the same universe, or the years I spent working on properties with sprawling continuities that didn't always quite fit together, but when I first came across Boop cartoons with Little Jimmy in them, he immediately became her son in my mind/"head-canon". We can discuss who the father might be, but Jimmy will always be Betty's son to me when they're sharing the screen. (The Little Jimmy character originated in a newspaper strip distributed by the same syndicate that handled Popeye's printed home. I assume that the same sort of deal that led to Popeye sharing the screen with Betty was at work when it came to Little Jimmy's animated appearances.)