Since all the other bloggers seem to be doing it.  Here’s possibly the most bizarre Betty Boop cartoon ever made, and that’s really saying something for the old, pre-Hays Code Betty Boop cartoons. This one is from September 1932.

It’s interesting to consider that this was just before the third and most brutal wave of Great Depression bank failures were about to hit. Times were pretty bad when this cartoon was made. These cartoons were produced under mostly grind-them-out conditions as inexpensive “shorts” for the movie houses to run between features. Before the Hays Code the film industry in the U.S. was pretty free-wheeling and it was all still new enough that creative producers felt free to experiment. All that would soon be crushed by the Hays code, not to be rediscovered in America anyway, until the 1960s.

This cartoon pokes fun at a patent medicine and health craze that was sweeping the country at the time. Anyone could sell anything as a wonderful cure for damn near everything that ailed a person. Considering a lot of those little bottles contained opiates and cocaine it’s no wonder a lot of the customers felt simply marvelous afterward. But most of them did absolutely nothing. Kinda like the zillions of pill bottles you see in the Diet Supplement section of your grocery store today. Betty’s sales pitch for Jippo is a hilarious take-off of the song Now It’s Time to Fall in Love

The ukulele riff at the end of the cartoon…when things Really start getting weird…is Nobody’s Sweetheart by either Billy “Red Pepper Sam” Costello or Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, who voiced the character of Jiminy Cricket in Disney’s Pinocchio – my sources disagree here. I had no idea until recently that this song was about a prostitute (I told you this was pre-Hays Code). Which shouldn’t have surprised me because at the end of Betty Boop’s Snow White (another very surreal cartoon) the clown sings (and dances to a rotoscoped Cab Calloway) The St. James Infirmary Blues, which is about a man dying of syphilis he’d caught from an unfaithful lover. Take that Cartoon Network…

The kid at the end who gulps down Jippo is turning into Frederic March’s Mr. Hyde. That film had just been released and was a big hit. It probably gave all the kids in the audience nightmares. But then that damn clown gave me nightmares. Those old Max Fleischer cartoons were like that. They had a gritty feel to them that the Fleischer’s lost when they moved their studios from New York to Florida. And they could peer into our dark fears in a way that Disney never went near. A really good example of that is Play Safe, about a kid who likes trains too much for his own damn good. The dream sequence in it is very, very creepy.