Talkartoons is the name of a series of 42 animated cartoons produced by Fleischer Studios and distributed by Paramount Pictures between 1929 and 1932. It is a sister series to the Fleischer's successful Screen Songs cartoons. Betty Boop got her start in this series, which quickly made her the star of them and, circa 1932, became Betty's own standalone series altogether.
A quick history of the series can be found on this article
, courtesy of The Other Wiki.
Filmography
1929
- Noah's Lark: October 25
1930
- Marriage Wows: January 8
- Radio Riot: February 13
- Hot Dog: March 29 - First appearance of Bimbo.
- Fire Bugs: May 9
- Wise Flies: July 18
- Dizzy Dishes: August 9 - First appearance of the Betty Boop prototype; first appearance of new title card design.
- Barnacle Bill: August 31
- Swing You Sinners!: September 24
- Grand Uproar: October 3
- Sky Scraping: November 1
- Up to Mars: November 20
- Accordion Joe: Deccember 12
- Mysterious Mose: December 26.
1931
- Ace of Spades: January 16
- Tree Saps: February 3
- Teacher's Pest: February 7
- The Cow's Husband: March 13
- The Bum Bandit: April 3
- The Male Man: April 24
- Twenty Legs Under the Sea: May 5
- Silly Scandals: May 23: First time Betty Boop is named.
- The Herring Murder Case: June 26 - First Talkartoon appearance of Koko the Clown
- Bimbo's Initiation: July 24
- Bimbo's Express: August 22
- Minding the Baby: September 26
- In the Shade of the Old Apple Sauce: October 16
- Mask-A-Raid: November 7 - First appearance of the human Betty Boop
- Jack and the Beanstalk: November 21 - Final appearance of the dog-eared Betty Boop
- Dizzy Red Riding Hood: December 12
1932
- Any Rags?: January 2
- Boop-Oop-a-Doop: January 16
- The Robot: February 5
- Minnie the Moocher: February 26
- Swim Or Sink (S.O.S): March 11
- Crazy Town: March 25 - Features custom title design.
- The Dancing Fool: April 8
- Chess-Nuts: April 13
- A Hunting We Will Go: April 29
- Hide and Seek: May 26
- Admission Free: June 10
- The Betty Boop Limited: July 1
Tropes:
- Art Evolution: The earliest shorts had a stiff, newspaper comic-esque aesthetic (accentuated by their lack of gray tones) to the animation (presumably due to the aforementioned shorts being among the final Fleischer shorts to utilize the paper-cutout animation process utilized throughout the Out of the Inkwell cartoons, as well as the first Screen Songs). This was immediately done away with as soon as the studio converted to cel animation and got Grim Natwick on board the staff, who helped beef up the animation of the Fleischer cartoons considerably.
- Bimbo went through multiple redesigns until settling on being a cute, big-eyed dog with a sweatshirt and shoes.
- Betty Boop too, going through an Anthropomorphic Shift.
- Animation Bump: Some parts of the shorts would feature backgrounds that were animated in perspective, a fairly challenging feat to do for an animator.
- A scene from "The Bum Bandit", where several different backgrounds were used to create a successive first-person zoom-up shot to a gun-wielding Bimbo.
- Any scene from the 1930-31 shorts animated by Grim Natwick, typically identifiable through their distorted, 'jittering' motion (allegedly attributable to Natwick 'stretching' the designs of the characters in consecutively-different directions in between key poses), which incongruously amounts to some of the most fluid and 'spontaneous' animation in the entire Fleischer catalogue.
- Breakout Character: Betty Boop, who eventually got her own series.
- Carnivore Confusion: Humanlike spiders who want to eat the equally humanlike flies in "Wise Flies".
- Construction Is Awesome: Demonstrated in "Sky Scraping".
- Deranged Animation: As is typical of the Fleischers' early-30s style (effectively a bizarre amalgamation of mechanical, evenly-timed motion, characters continuously 'twitching' to sync with the background score and abrupt, randomly-implemented interpolating gags), some of these shorts are just plain nutty, especially compared to Disney's product from around the same time. "Swing, You Sinners!!", the lesser-known "Twenty Legs Under the Sea" and "Bimbo's Initiation" in particular stand among the most esoteric animated shorts in existence.
- The Everyman: Bimbo, of course.
- Expy: Bimbo is an expy of the earlier Max Fleischer cartoon dog Fitz, from Out of the Inkwell.
- Extreme Omnivore: The customer in "Dizzy Dishes" waiting for his roast duck ends up eating his plate and cutlery and even one of the table legs.
- Mickey Mousing: Prevalent, as it was in early sound cartoons.
- Mind Screw: "Swing You Sinners!" and "Up to Mars".
- Rotoscoping: Used in "The Cow's Husband", "Minnie the Moocher" and "Crazy Town".
- Running Gag: "Grand Uproar" had a fat hippo moving his way through the theater seats and knocking a patron out of his seat at the end of the row. The third time around, the annoyed patron pulls out a fold-up chair and sits in the aisle.
- Snakes in My Pants: Happens to Noah in "Noah's Lark".
- Split Hair: Inverted in "Dizzy Dishes", where the tip of Bimbo's knife is sliced off by the hair.
- Weirdness Magnet: Poor Bimbo.
