The edgy imagery of “Minnie the Moocher” is enhanced once it is grafted onto the cartoon’s setting. She messed around with a bloke named Smokey Īnd he showed her how to kick the gong around.Ī performance of the song’s sequel, “Kickin’ the Gong Around,” in The Big Broadcast (1932) actually features a live-action Calloway miming the snorting of cocaine as he sings. More insidiously, she hangs around with a cocaine-using (“cokey”) boyfriend who introduces her to opium in a tidy euphemism: In her most innocuous moments, Minnie the Moocher counts her million-dollars’ worth of nickels and dimes with Midas-like greed and lives the good life, even though her wealth is rooted in miniscule coins and her lavish lifestyle seems vaguely doomed by virtue of the song’s minor key tones and funereal-sounding conclusion. ![]() “Minnie the Moocher,” with its tales of jazz-era excess, might seem like an odd match for a ghoulish cave scene that eventually offers us ghosts, skeletons, and giant skulls in addition to the humanoid walrus, but consider how delightfully unsavory the song’s lyrics are even without the cartoon’s creepy-crawly treatment. While sheltering in the cave, Betty and Bimbo spy an upright ghostly walrus (a rotoscoped Cab Calloway) who sings and dances to Calloway’s hit “Minnie the Moocher” with Betty and Bimbo trembling to one side. We also see regular Betty Boop cartoon characters: a miniature version of Betty’s friend Koko the clown is briefly pictured emerging from an inkwell as Betty writes a farewell letter to her parents, and Betty climbs out of a window to meet another frequent companion, the dog-like Bimbo, and runs away with him.Įverything changes when Betty and Bimbo arrive at a far-off spooky cave, where the cartoon transforms into something unique and truly special. There is some standard cartoon magic when her father turns into a phonograph as he lectures her, and again shortly afterwards when she runs off to the staircase and sings a self-pitying song that the anthropomorphic banister chimes in on. Betty and her parents are shown sitting around the dinner table in a domestic scene, where Betty refuses to eat Hasenpfeffer mush for dinner and is scolded. Watching the opening of Minnie the Moocher, we might be tempted to think it is an ordinary early Betty Boop cartoon (that is, insofar as any early and pre-Code Betty Boop cartoon can be ordinary). Animated by Willard Bowsky, Ralph Somerville, and Bernard Wolf. Starring Cab Calloway and His Cotton Club Orchestra, Mae Questel, and Billy Murray. ![]() Of the three cartoons, Snow-White in particular reaches dizzying heights of complexity and coolness, but all three short films are important artifacts of jazz history and are particularly notable for their contributions to the shaping and styling of jazz celebrity in the popular imagination. ![]() While Calloway was not the only jazz musician to be featured in Fleischer Studios’ Betty Boop cartoons (Louis Armstrong notably appeared in I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You ), his contributions to both the jazz and the animation worlds through his work with the Fleischers was impressive, especially because of the cartoons’ groundbreaking use of rotoscope technology to graph Calloway’s signature dance movements onto the bodies of his cartoon avatars. ![]() From 1932 to 1933, jazz musician, songwriter, and bandleader Cab Calloway was featured in three pre-Code Betty Boop cartoons as a singer and dancer: Minnie the Moocher (1932), Snow-White (1933), and The Old Man of the Mountain (1933).
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