YMMV / Betty Boop

• Adaptation Displacement: Nowadays, most people have probably seen more Betty Boop-merchandise than actual Betty Boop-cartoons.
• Awesome Music: The series is full of memorable songs, including the following;
  • Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher" number, from the eponymous short.
  • Cab Calloway's "The Old Man of the Mountain", once again from the eponymous short.
  • "St. James Infirmiry Blues", sung by Cab Calloway in "Snow White".
  • "You Gotta Have Pep", sung by Betty in "More Pep".
  • The entire "Hells Bells" music number from "Red Hot Mamma".
  • The "How'm I Doin? (hey hey)" number from "I've Heard".
  • The title songs of the shorts "Mysterious Mose", "Barnacle Bill" and "Any Rags?"
  • "Poor Cinderella" is a slow mournful tune that is gorgeously sung about how she only finds romance in dreams.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Betty herself in the old Bimbo cartoons, and it was her popularity that caused her to ascend to stardom while leaving Bimbo (the main character!) to fade into obscurity.
  • Betty's grandpa, Grampy, who was a minor recurring character, is quite well liked by fans of the series, and considered one of the few good things to come out of the later Betty Boop shorts, mainly due to his off the cuff inventing nature and jovial personality making him very likable and gag friendly. He even headlined a Color Classics short "Christmas Comes But Once A Year" by himself!
  • Sally Swing, despite only appearing in one of the original cartoons, is a surprisingly popular character among fans of the series. It's gotten to the point she now pops up regularly in modern artwork for the series.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: In "Making Friends", Pudgy ends up doing exactly what Betty wanted him to do—"Go out and make friends with the world." Unfortunately for Betty, his newfound friends happen to be a batch of rascally wild animals who proceed to tear apart Betty's house upon arrival!
• Fair for Its Day: "Making Stars" features Betty hosting a talent competition of babies of various ethnicities and genders to show off what they can do; a way to show how they could have a future. While many of them are SERIOUSLY egregious racial stereotypes (especially the three African babies chained together by a safety pin) they aren’t treated any differently from each other by Betty Boop or the audience. Each baby is given their fair chance and treated with respect.
• Fridge Brilliance: In "Red Hot Mamma", Betty wanders into hell and proceeds to sing the jazzy "Hell's Bells" musical number. This could have been a subtle satire on how Jazz was considered "the devil's music" at the time.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Betty Boop was pretty popular in Japan in her heydays (Where she is known as "Betty-chan"); she even got a special specifically made for Japanese audiences, "A Language All My Own" where Betty sings in Japanese. Osamu Tezuka was a fan of Betty Boop, so he tended to draw his characters with large eyes akin to Betty's... and considering the influence he had on anime and manga as a whole, Japan got onboard with the concept of putting sexy girls in their cartoons!
  • She's still pretty popular there, from getting a themed cafe to Kyary Pamyu Pamyu dressing up as her for an event.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • One of the songs featured in the new iOS game Betty Boop Bop has Betty sing about how happy she is to be reunited with Bimbo.
  • The titular character in "The Little King" ditches a boring opera he was attending with his wife and winds up at a theater where Betty is performing. One of the first things he does is buy all of a vendor's pretzels and proceeds to hand them out to the crowd for free.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: When Betty falls Down the Rabbit Hole in the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-inspired Betty in Blunderland, she opens a jam jar, causing comedian Ed Wynn to pop out. Almost twenty years later, Disney's Alice in Wonderland would feature Ed Wynn voicing the Mad Hatter.
• Les Yay: Betty Boop/Sally Swing
• Moe: Betty herself qualifies as this thanks to her absolutely adorable appearance and her endearingly innocent and childlike personality and voice.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • In "The Bum Bandit", Bimbo tries to rob a train, but Betty as Dangerous Nan McGrew, his wife whom he abandoned, is on board. She kicks his ass and orders him to take responsibility for their children.
  • In "Snow White," the evil queen has transformed into a dragon. How does Bimbo defeat her? By turning her inside-out!
• Parody Displacement: Betty's design took inspiration from then-superstar Clara Bow. Clara's popularity dwindled when talkies emerged and now even classic film fans often don't know of her.
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • Pudgy the Puppy, Betty’s pet dog from the later shorts, is often seen as a very bland replacement of Betty's more vivid boyfriend, Bimbo the Dog. He is widely disliked by fans of the cartoons, mainly for his overbearingly cloying nature and lack of any personality, and having many shorts centered around or co starring him didn't do the series any favors.
  • Fearless Fred is also seen as this, being a very one dimensional heroic love interest to Betty.
• Retroactive Recognition: In "The Betty Boop Movie Mystery", Betty was voiced by the recording studio's then-teenaged secretary, Melissa Fahn. Said secretary would go on to do bigger and better things.
• Seasonal Rot: The second half of Betty Boop's output was devastated by The Hays Code's extremely prudish rules regarding sensual scenes, which forced Paramount's management to tell Fleischer to make their works more family friendly. Gone was Betty Boop's boop-oop-a-doop and Bimbo and in came the housewife dress, with plenty of the shorts turning out more bland and generic. While the later cartoons aren't all bad - especially the episodes featuring her Grampy and the one-off friend character Sally Swing (which has since been resurrected in modern media as Betty's BFF) - Fleischers' inability to add any interesting new elements to the series made the series never recover, and it got to the point that the last cartoon was a one-shot that featured no Betty whatsoever. Talk about going out with a whimper.
• Signature Scene: The "St. James Infirmary" sequence in Snow White (1933) is one of the series' most iconic scenes, thanks to the song itself, the rotoscoped dancing, and the striking surreal visuals. Merchandise is even sold specifically of the ghost form that Koko takes during the number.
• Sweetness Aversion: Again, Pudgy the Puppy when he gets the central focus on episodes takes grating levels of cuteness in comparison to the ones focused on Betty herself. The short "The Swing School" is the best example of this with addition of him being in a school full of cute animals coupled with them singing "La-la-la-la".
• Values Dissonance:
  • Betty's supposed to be a sex symbol, but she's also underage in some locations (according to a 1932-interview with Fleischer, she's supposed to be 16-years-old). On the other hand, the cartoons tend to play fast and loose with Betty's age.
  • Several of the shorts feature Blackface and racial caricatures of Native American and Chinese people. Her old cartoons only get a pass because of the historic conditions back then.
  • Next to figures like Jessica Rabbit, it's hard to imagine a time when Betty Boop was considered genuinely racy and provocative. This is lampshaded in Rabbit itself, where Betty (who's now waiting tables) nostalgically notes that "I still got it!" next to one of Jessica's performances.
• Values Resonance: In the cartoon "Judge for a Day" Betty experiences numerous people with habits that personally bothered her, or public pests as she refers to them as, and she imagines how she would punish them if she were judge for a day. Now most of them come across as Disproportionate Retribution, but at least one of them, the smoker who blows smoke in peoples' faces, she is absolutely in the right about. As smoking is a serious taboo and health risk, and puffing smoke in other peoples' faces is spreading that risk to them, which is not good.

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