Imaginary Worlds - Betty Boop and the Hays Code

Episode Date: January 20, 2021

Betty Boop is a beloved cultural icon, but she was controversial in her heyday. I talk with Mark Fleischer – grandson of Betty Boop’s co-creator Max Fleischer – and Mark’s wife Susan Wilking Horan about how the character was created and why she still endures. I also talk with film critic Marya Gates and Professor Thomas Doherty about how the Hays Code, which censored Betty Boop, had a profound impact on the moral universe of Hollywood films, and why this defunct production code is still influencing movies up to this day, especially with fantasy entertainment. Today's episode is brought to you by BetterHelp and Amazon's Faraway Collection. Want to advertise/sponsor our show? We have partnered with AdvertiseCast to handle our advertising/sponsorship requests. They’re great to work with and will help you advertise on our show. Please email [e-mail] or click the link below to get started. Imaginary Worlds AdvertiseCast Listing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body Deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. I mentioned in my last episode that Camelot was my escape from

reality last year. Well, reality is still pretty scary. And my other happy place that I go to for comfort are old cartoons, especially the cartoons from Fleischer Studios like Popeye, Superman, and especially Betty Boop. Okay, how many of you are tapping your feet right now? One of the things that I really like about Betty Boop is that she wasn't for kids. The cartoons were made with the understanding that they would be played before adult feature films. That was absolutely true. They were not intended for children, as cartoons came to be. That is Mark Fleischer, the grandson of Max Fleischer, one of the creators of Betty Boop. The other thing I love about the Fleischer cartoons is that they feel so contemporary

compared to Disney, which was their main rival back then. Betty Boop incorporated real jazz musicians like Cab Calloway into the animation. You can look at Betty Boop as probably the first music video, the way Max brought in the cultural musical icons of his day. But as I started looking into the history of Betty Boop and the context in which she was created and censored, I was surprised to learn that even though she's a character from a certain time and place, what happened to her in those cartoons and the reaction to her in the real world speaks to a lot of issues today. In 1930, Betty Boop made her debut as the girlfriend of a dog character called Bimbo. And Betty Boop in this cartoon is supposed to be a dog herself.

And audiences responded to her so positively, Fleischer Studios decided to give her her own cartoons and to humanize her, which was not difficult. She just had a button nose and droopy dog ears, which they turned into earrings. In those days, movies were usually preceded by a cartoon in the theaters. Obviously, the main attraction would be the movie that was playing. would be the movie that was playing. Betty Boop became so popular that some of the theaters started giving her top billing on the marquee, which is quite extraordinary for the intro act.

But the character ran into controversy early on. In 1932, a performer named Helen Kane sued Fleischer Studios because she said that Betty Boop was based on her. And she did have a point. This is what Helen Kane sounded like. And I feel so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, Max Fleischer, won the lawsuit. Max Fleischer showed that Betty Boop was not based on a human being, and certainly not one human being. In fact, they were able to prove that Helen Kane had stolen her act

from a Black performer named Baby Esther. This is the only recording that I could find of Baby Esther. Whatever kind of appropriation is going on here, clearly both human performers and a cartoon character were all doing what we would call today the sexy baby voice. But the judge found there were other aspects of Betty Boop that defined her as an original character. And those qualities are pretty interesting. Tom Doherty is a professor at Brandeis who focuses on early 20th century film. He says a lot of what makes Betty Boop stand out

are the situations that they put her in. She's often misremembered as a carefree flapper from the 1920s, but she's from the 30s. And Tom says her cartoons epitomized the fears of the Great Depression. You know, Max Fleischer and Fleischer Studios famously said, if it can happen in real life, it's not animation. You know, you look at the Fleischer cartoons and they're so surrealistic. They're kind of expressionistic, nightmarish at times. And that might be where you really see some of the Great Depression coming into the Fleischer studio work, when they go into these catacombs and subterranean worlds that are sort of dark and spooky and scary and skeletal.

When I talked with Mark Fleischer, his wife, Susan Wilking Horne, joined us on the call because she's become an advocate for Betty Boop as a character. In fact, she wrote a book called Betty Boop's Guide to a Bold and Balanced Life. In 1932, there's an old cartoon called SOS. This cartoon is interesting because it's the first time we see Betty really afraid. And the cartoon goes on to instruct everyone watching the cartoon how to face that fear and overcome it. I'm so scared, oh, I can't stand it. Must be something we can do. It's getting late. In 1934, she was in a cartoon called She Wronged Him Right,

where she is facing real-life issues like eviction and the loss of her home. No more money in my case. Things have gone from bad to worse. In watching these old cartoons, I can't help but notice another real-life parallel. The classic Betty Boop scenario is a male character lusting after her until she escapes. Like in the cartoon where she's facing eviction, the landlord makes sinister advances towards her. I love you more and more and more, dear. You're looking younger every day.

You never were so sweet before, dear. Or take the 1932 cartoon Boo Boo Badoop, where Betty's working at a circus. The ringmaster sneaks into her tent. He stands over her, caressing her legs while she covers her chest. Do you like your job? And he whispers in her ear. Well, I think if I were you, I'd go to someone else. You better come out with me tonight. She slaps him. No, there'll be no more Boo-Boo-Badoop out of you. And then he chokes her until she can get away. No, there'll be no more poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo-poo- and girls in the early 30s are often balancing their virtue, if you will, with their need for

employment or sometimes just a meal where they'll meet a guy on the street. And if it's the 1920s, you're not going to get picked up on the street. But if it's the 1930s and the guy comes by and offers you a meal, you're probably going to go along with them because you're literally hungry. And you don't see it that much in the 20s. Girls have more freedom, and they're not under the kind of economic distress they're going to be after the stock market crash. When I mentioned this to Mark Fleischer, he quickly went to grab an issue of The New Yorker from the second month of the Me Too movement. The November 2017 issue of The New Yorker, the cover, had a man standing before a big window exposing himself. Going in front of the window was the Thanksgiving Day Macy's parade with Betty Boop as a balloon looking in with a look of surprise

and horror on her face. And the interesting thing about that is we did not know this cover was coming out until it hit the stands, which showed that the editorial staff of The New Yorker felt that Betty Boop was the right character, the right personality to carry one of the most important conversations that was going on in this nation and internationally at the time. Anthony Comegna But the biggest concern about Betty Boop in the 1930s was not her safety on screen, but her sexuality. A coalition of Roman Catholics were worried that this cartoon character was a bad influence on girls, even though the cartoon was supposed to be for adults. This group was actually worried about a lot of things in the movies,

and in 1934, they became part of a censorship board called the Hays Code, which created strict guidelines for what you could show on film. Mariah Gates is a film critic who used to work at Turner Classic Movies, and she says the issue that the censors had with Betty Boop was an issue that they had with a lot of real-life actresses at the time. She really represented that flapper aesthetic, which was, you know, personified by people like Joan Crawford

and Clara Bow, who they were these women who drank a lot and they danced all night and they slept around and they were unapologetic about the fact that they controlled their own destiny and marriage wasn't necessarily the next step for them unless they chose it. When the code came in, it was like, oh no, you can't, women cannot be dancing all night and without being punished. And I think you saw that in the evolution of Betty Boop, where she went from being this fairy girl about town to being basically a housewife. Again, Mark Fleischer and Susan Wilking Horan. I think overall she was the only Fleischer character that was really affected by the Hays Code.

They kind of started looking at Betty Boop as a live human being. They lost their perspective. You know, Betty Boop is sexy, although I've never thought that she's sexual. But there is a sexiness to her. And so the bodice went up and the skirt went down, the garter got lost. The bodice went up, not just went up to her neck, but she had a collar. But also the storylines changed. I mean, she was suddenly, she was a housewife with a baby. Well, it's such a mystery to me because she suddenly shows up with the baby.

a mystery to me because she suddenly shows up with the baby and how did she have a baby well and and that was one of the points of the code which which was never to show the um the results of having sex did did this new revamped betty boop did did it um make her less popular i mean so much of her appeal was the boop boopop-de-doop-de, you know, kind of sexy, not sexual, but sexy character. I think it killed the character as a popular icon of its day. Although Susan says the studio never gave up on its subversive sense of humor, like in the cartoon A Language All My Own, which came out after the Hays Code was installed. In this Betty Boop cartoon, Betty flies around the world and goes to Japan. And there are sections of the cartoon.

Some are in English and some are in Japanese. Now, the parts that are in English are squeaky clean and Hays Code approved. But when Betty Boop sings in Japanese, it translates to, come to bed with me and we'll boop-boop-a-doop. And the Hays Code and the people who were enforcing it had no idea. But in the end, Fleischer Studios just couldn't compete with studios like Disney, which were very Hays Code friendly. And in 1942, Fleischer Studios shut down and sold their inventory to Paramount.

In the early 70s, the Fleischer family got the rights back to Betty Boop. Not the original cartoons. They're still owned by Paramount. But they got the rights to make new cartoons and to license the character. But instead of trying to restart the studio and make new cartoons, they decided to focus on making Betty Boop merchandise. And she became a worldwide brand, especially with women's clothes and accessories. Without a single media production behind her. And I can't think of many cartoon characters that have ever

done that. Again, Mark Fleischer. Betty is really like a blank screen. People project what they want to see in themselves onto Betty Boop. How so though? I feel like she is still a very distinctive character. Yes, she is. But as a character, she represents qualities that people want to see in themselves. So they're identifying with her. That's why if you try to do a Betty Boop movie, you try to do a Betty Boop television series, and you have to say who she is, you're also saying who she is. And that's a very tricky thing. You're also saying who she is.

And that's a very tricky thing. Mariah Gates agrees it would be difficult to bring Betty Boop up to date. Because she's almost like a baby doll, but also an adult. And then you have double entendres. I feel like today's standards that would not pass literally at all. There would be too many questions, too many think pieces. Because the sexy baby voice is something that gets made fun of now, like in the movie In a World. I said I don't know where you'd get a smoothie around here at all. I'm so sorry. Okay, thanks so much. Yeah, no worries. Or on the show 30 Rock. I want you to talk in your real voice. This is my real voice. And the whole sexy baby thing isn't an act.

I'm a very sexy baby. I can't help it if men are attracted to me. But Mariah still sees Betty Boop as an empowering character. She's almost feigning being a baby, you know, because she handles herself pretty well and gets out of a lot of these situations and never puts herself in the situation. She just gets in, like,

it's like the men around her are causing all this trouble. And she's, half the time, she's just like trying to water her plants or like walk to the store. She encapsulates just how hard it is to be a woman, like walking down the street practically. Again, Susan Wilking Horan. What has survived through all the years

is still her basic personality, that fierce independence and confidence and courage. And even though people tried to repress her originally, she survived and she is still with us today and more popular than ever. People tried to repress her originally. She survived. And she is still with us today and more popular than ever. Now, around the same time that the Fleischer family got the rights to merchandise Betty Boop, about a half century ago, the Hays Code was lifted. And it was replaced with a modern rating system that we have today. But the Hays Code is not ancient history.

In fact, we are still feeling the effects of the code in subtle ways, especially with fantasy entertainment. We'll find out why after the break. Let's rewind back to the very beginning and look at why the Hays Code came about. Because Tom Doherty says the censorship of Betty Boop was part of a much bigger story that began with the invention of the talkies in 1927. After sound comes into cinema, all the kind of ellipses and allegorical insinuations of the silent era suddenly are verbalized. And so in the late 20s, you start getting language and scenes

that you might have been able to get away with in the silent era, but have now, because sound makes everything more explicit and more realistic, become all that more explicit. And the Hays Code went into effect in 1934, but it was actually written four years earlier in 1930 by a man named Will Hays, which is why it's called the Hays Code. And when the code was first written in 1930, the studio said that they would abide by it, but there was nothing in place to make them do it. in place to make them do it. March of 1930, when they say they will agree to the code, is also the onset, you know, the first months of the Great Depression. And for the first time in the history of the motion picture industry, the box office starts declining and the Hollywood studios start throwing anything on the screen that they think might attract an audience. We typically think of films from the 1930s

as quaint, old, black and white movies. But the films from the early 30s were surprisingly racy. There were violent gangster films like Scarface, the original film from 1932, not the Al Pacino remake, where the main character is lusting after his sister. In Red-Headed Woman, Jean Harlow sleeps her way to the top and gets away with it. And in the film Morocco, Marlena Dietrich kisses a woman on the mouth while she's wearing a man's tuxedo. And this is also the heyday of Betty Boop.

The Roman Catholic group that had been pushing for the production code, which the studios were ignoring, felt betrayed. So they formed a group called the National Legion of Decency, which organized boycotts. And when Franklin Roosevelt came to power in 1933, Catholic voters were a big part of his coalition. And FDR was coming up with all these new government agencies, and the studios were worried that he could create a government censorship board any day. So before that could happen, they decided to set up an agency in-house that would force them to abide by the Hays Code. Now, there were positive aspects to the Hays Code, like you're not supposed to disparage anyone's religion or nationality.

And of course, it banned a lot of the sex and violence that had been on screen. But Tom says it went much deeper than that. And this is in some ways you might call the genius of the production code and the way the Roman Catholics wanted to do censorship. The Roman Catholic censorship, as enunciated in the production code, isn't a matter of just clipping things out of films. What the Catholics wanted to do is they wanted to get into the process in pre-production. They wanted to promulgate values. They wanted to put things into movies, not just take things out. So what you find is this moral universe that's promulgated. I always say that contrary to popular belief, not every Hollywood

film ends happily, but every classical Hollywood film ends morally. After the production code comes in, the moral universe at the end of the film is reasserted. But morality is subjective. In fact, let's go back to the issue of sexual harassment, which was satirized in Betty Boop cartoons. Well, first of all, these stories just didn't come up as much after 1934, because it actually states in the Hays Code that authority figures must be seen in a positive light. And Mariah says when the movies did depict abusive bosses under the Hays Code, like in two different films starring Ginger Rogers. Where her backstory is basically she was attacked by a boss and she pushes him and he falls out a

window and dies and she goes to prison. You look at those plots now and she would be covered under self-defense on both of those. But overall, sexuality was swept under the rug. If you look at the pre-code era in particular, most films that had to do with sex had to do with unmarried people. And when you hit 1934 in July, when it flipped over, you saw things like The Thin Man, where the first Thin Man, they are a married couple, but there's supporting characters that are unmarried that are floating you know, floating around and dealing with their sexuality. And then as that series progressed, it was more and more about this nuclear family. And they didn't just have this, you know, cute married couple and a dog.

They started to have a baby. The plot lines were less and less about sex and more and more about business and other things. and less about sex and more and more about business and other things. The code ended in 1968, partially because the old studio system was falling apart and being replaced with more of a free market. But Mariah says once sex and nudity was allowed on screen, the roles for women in some cases got worse. Like the studio system, the one thing the studio system did well was it stood by creating the star image and star power and making sure you had a new Betty Davis movie. You had a new Joan Crawford movie. You had a new Russell and Russell movie. And when that fell apart, I think you lost something in terms of having strong women fight for stronger representation of women in cinema.

representation of women in cinema. And Tom says the values of The Hays Code did not end in 1968 because those classic films are the movies that today's filmmakers grew up on. All of those movies still live in our imagination. So there are some directors that even today you might think of are very production code friendly. This actually used to be one of the assignments I'd give to my students at Brandeis. I'd send them to a movie over the weekend and say, analyze this film via the production code guidelines. Tell me if the film passes the production code or defies the production code. And a surprising number of mainstream Hollywood movies wouldn't pass the production code in terms of maybe language or violence. But if you just take out some of the words, you can kind of redesign the film to make a production code friendly.

Virtually every Steven Spielberg movie, I think, could pass the production code with just a little fiddling around the edges in terms of the dialogue. Right. Or a George Lucas film. Much of what comes out of Walt Disney, which has some of the, obviously the most successful franchises on the planet, are production code movies, which have a kind of moral universe. So think of Spider-Man. Your superpowers are this responsibility you have, this duty. They're not there for your own pleasure, but you have to repress your pleasure in order to fulfill your duty as a superhero. And that's kind of like Casablanca, right? Or It's a Wonderful Life.

But when female heroes have similar storylines, like Rey in the new Star Wars trilogy, or Black Widow, or Wonder Woman, the same moral conundrum can be a problem. A lot of critics have said that these movies are implying that women have to sacrifice having loving partners or families if they want to do their best work. And the depiction of sexuality in these movies is also influenced by the Hays Code.

Although there are moments when it slips, like in the first Wonder Woman movie, when Diana says to Steve Trevor, I've read all 12 volumes of Cleo's treatises on burglary pleasure. They came to the conclusion that men are essential for procreation, but when it comes to pleasure,

unnecessary. Again, Mariah Gates. That was one of the moments where you thought maybe it was going to lean into the fact that Wonder Woman canonically is a sapphic character and the fact that it didn't even lean that

way I think speaks to some of this code stuff of not really being able to show not just sexuality but specifically same sexsex relationships. Because that was another big part of the code. And so I think with Wonder Woman, what's fascinating is it's the one film

that kind of got to be a little sexy, but only heterosexually. Or look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Before Marvel was bought by Disney, movies like Iron Man had a layer of political commentary, and it was also kind of sexy, or even sleazy. The very first one, 2008, Tony Stark is definitely a bedhopper, but by the end of his character arc, he's a married man, right?

And these are not bad values. I mean, Tony Stark's character arc is actually quite noble. But as the franchises got bigger and bigger and costlier, they had to appeal to the widest possible audience around the world. And the values of the old production code became like a blueprint for how to make that work, whether it was done intentionally or not. Now, it may seem like a stretch to trace these modern special effects blockbusters back to old black and white movies. But Mariah says it's not as far back as we think. Cinema being such a young art, something that happened 70 years ago is way more seen in what's still being made than, say, painting, where painting is thousands and thousands and thousands of years old. You know, it's evolved a lot more from the nascent stage, whereas cinema is a blip in terms of how old it is. And I think you see that in Marvel cinema, especially now that Marvel cinema is 13 years old this May.

Right. So you have like a whole generation of kids who are now adults who that is the cinema they know. And in it being informed by a whole century before it, they don't if they don't have that context, they don't understand how it became what it became. And then it's harder to think of cinema as being anything else. Which brings me back to Betty Boop. I keep thinking about what Mark Fleischer and Mariah Gates said, that bringing Betty Boop into the modern world would be too problematic. And I have no doubt that if they did modernize her, they would do it with the best of intentions. But it wouldn't feel like her anymore, because it's impossible to imagine new stories without building upon the last 87 years of filmmaking.

I mean, these are movies we can't unsee. We tend to think of entertainment properties as things that should live on forever, creating endless content for the fans and always generating more money for whoever owns the IP. But sometimes the most respectful way to handle a beloved character is to leave them in their time and place. Betty Boop is a time capsule, but she's also timeless, partially because the problems that she faced are, unfortunately, timeless. Censoring them can't make them go away. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Tom Doherty, Mariah Gates, Susan Wilking-Horne, and Mark Fleischer, who says that his grandfather, Max, made a big change to the character of Popeye, who had only appeared in comic strips before Fleischer

got the rights to make Popeye cartoons. In the cartoon strip, the hook that Popeye had is that he would stroke the head of a mythical hen, which would give him luck. Max looked at that and said, boy, that's kind of weird. And so he moved away from stroking the head of a hen to giving him spinach, which didn't bring him luck, it brought him strength. I'm also not entirely sure if stroking his magical hen would have passed the production code, but it would have led to a lot of great jokes and internet memes. By the way, my NYU class on creating your own podcast starts earlier this year on February 4th.

I also have an advanced podcasting class, which begins in March. You can sign up at the NYU website and the classes are virtual. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweeted E. Malinsky and Imagine Worlds pod. If you really like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or do a shout out on social media. That always helps people discover imaginary worlds. The best way to support the show is to donate

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