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In the 1920s, the world of animated cartoons was the Wild West. The same group of animators all worked for each other, began their own studios, worked for other studios, went bankrupt and built new studios. There were Bray Productions, Van Beuren Studios, Terry Toons, Barré Studios. All populated by a circulating cast of the pioneers of movie cartoons: Paul Terry, Walter Lantz, John Bray, Amadee Van Beuren, Pat Sullivan, Ub Iwerks, Vernon Stallings, Earl Hurd, Grim Natwick. And, of course, Max and Dave Fleischer, and Walt Disney.

Among them, they created a whole series of popular cartoon characters that populated the silent era of animation: Bobby Bumps, Colonel Heeza Liar, Felix the Cat, Oswald Rabbit, Ko-Ko the Clown, Milton the Mouse, Krazy Kat, Farmer Al Falfa, Mutt and Jeff, and an early, non-cat-and-mouse version of Tom and Jerry.

There were popular series, such as the Aesop’s Fable animal cartoons and Disney’s early Alice cartoons.

I watched tons of these old, silent cartoons as a kid when they were licensed to TV syndication. In those early years, television was desperate for content and these cartoon mice and cats filled up the after-school hours. They were part of the cultural landscape for early Boomers; they are now largely lost to prehistory and archivists. Some may be found, usually in fuzzy, bad prints, on YouTube.

By the end of the 1920s, two studios stood on top of the pile. On the West Coast, via Missouri, there was Disney; in New York, there were the Fleischer brothers.

The two studios were poles apart. Disney was bland and inoffensive; the Fleischers were urban, surreal and ballsy. Disney came up with Mickey Mouse, who, while visually identifiable, is about the most innocuous character in the history of animation. What is Mickey’s character? Well? He has none.

But in New York, the Fleischers created the “Out of the Inkwell” series, combining live action and animation. In most of these short cartoons, the dominant brother, Max, would open a bottle of ink and out would pop his characters, or he would draw them and they would come to life. His chief character was Ko-Ko the Clown (later, just Koko).

Max Fleischer was an energetic inventor and came up with many of the techniques since common in animation. He held some 200 patents. Fleischer was an artist and could draw fluently. Disney, by contrast was an indifferent draftsman, but, in contrast with the hapless Fleischers, he was a world-class businessman who went on to found an empire of cartoons, films, TV shows and amusement parks. Disney made his cartoons for a researched audience; the Fleischers made their animations for themselves. By the end of World War II, they could no longer compete.

But what a run they had, beginning with Koko, followed by Bimbo the dog and then, paydirt — Betty Boop was born. She arrived in this world at the same time as talkies. It is impossible to imagine Betty without her voice.

Disney often claimed to have made the first animated cartoon with sound, in the 1928 short, Steamboat Willie, with Mickey Mouse. But by then, the Fleischers had been running cartoons with sound for four years. They pioneered the “bouncing ball” sing-along cartoons. And for that, Steamboat Willie is hardly a “talkie” — there is no dialog in it, only sound effects. And compared with Disney’s later slickness, it is a surprisingly crude cartoon. The Fleischers were miles ahead of Disney technically.

Betty first appeared in the 1930 cartoon Dizzy Dishes. Fleischer asked one of his animators, Grim Natwick, to come up with a girlfriend for their established character, Bimbo, and Natwick whipped up a sexy poodle. She has only a bit part in Dizzy Dishes, singing onstage, while the hero, Bimbo, sees her and falls in love. Betty has long doggy ears and a dark, wet doggy nose.

Later, Betty evolved into a Jazz-Age flapper with human ears and nose, and a sexy bareback dress, short enough to show off her garter.

Betty got her own series of cartoons, and from 1930 to 1939, she starred in 90 releases. Her career spanned two eras in early film history — the pre-Code days until 1934, and then the clamp-down by the Catholic Legion of Decency and the Hollywood Hays Code, which put quite a crimp in Betty’s style.

After her first 30 films, the Code kicked in. In her final pre-Code short, Betty Boop’s Trial (June, 1934), Betty turns her back on the camera, flips up her tiny skirt to show off her panties and bottom.

It’s hard now to recognize just how shocking and adult the Betty Boop cartoons could be. The Fleischer cartoons were made for grown-up audiences, not just kids. There were sex, violence, gritty urban scenes and even a recognition of the Great Depression. She was, after all, a Jazz-Age independent woman.

And despite some unfortunate blackface scenes, Fleischer films were surprisingly integrated. African-American musicians Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway star in several Boop-toons. I don’t want to make too much of this, there are still some horrid African cannibal stereotypes and some blackface in several of the cartoons. But the Fleischers seem to have been fairly progressive for their time. Some of their cartoons were refused showing in the South.

And Betty was a Jazz Age Modern Woman — at least before 1934. Racy and risque, she dances a topless hula in Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle (1932); prances before the fires of hell in a see-through nightie in Red Hot Mamma (1934); has her dress lifted up to show her underwear in Chess-Nuts (1932).

Betty’s virtue is frequently besieged and there is little subtlety over what her signature phrase means in 1932’s Boop-Oop-A-Doop. Betty is a circus performer and the giant beast of a ringmaster lusts after her. In a creepy Harvey Weinstein move, the ringmaster paws all over Betty and implies that if she doesn’t do what he wants, she will lose her job. Betty sings “Don’t take my boop-oop-a-doop away.”

By the end, she is saved by Koko the clown and her virginity is safe. “No! He couldn’t take my boop-oop-a-doop away!”

In the 1933 Betty Boop cartoon, Popeye the Sailor, she only appears briefly, doing the topless hootchie-coochie dance she did in Bamboo Isle, joined by Popeye onstage, also wearing a grass skirt. The short introduced Popeye in his first appearance in an animated short.

As Betty became tamed and dowdy after 1934, her popularity waned just as Popeye’s grew, eventually overtaking her as the Fleischer’s prime property.

By the end, in 1939, Betty had turned into a swing-music figure. Her head-to-body ratio had subsided. Her skirts lengthened and her neckline rose. Then she disappeared.

The Fleischers continued making Popeye cartoons, lost their company to Paramount Pictures, who then fired the brothers. Their last project with Paramount was the stylish Art-Deco inspired Superman cartoons.

Betty had a resurgence, not as a cartoon star, but as a pop-culture star and even a feminist icon, in the 1980s, with a merchandising boom. She then appealed to a generation that may not even have known she had been an animated cartoon star.

__________________________

“Don’t take my boop-oop-a-doop away!”

— “Boop-Oop-A-Doop,” 1932

__________________________

When Betty Boop was introduced in 1930, Fleischer animator Grim Natwick based her look and sound on popular singer Helen Kane, who had a baby-voice and scatted as she sang. In 1932, Kane sued the Fleischers over their use of her image. It came to trial in 1934.

“Your honor,” said Kane’s lawyer to Justice Edward J. McGoldrick, “we contend this character [Betty Boop] has Miss Kane’s personality her mannerisms her plumpness, her curls, her eyes, and that she sings the songs Miss Kane made famous.” A style Kane called the “baby vamp.”

Kane (1904-1966) was born in New York and by age 15 was performing professionally. She achieved popularity in the 1920s on stage in vaudeville and on Broadway. She recorded 22 songs and made seven films in Hollywood. Her trademark was a squeaky baby voice and scat singing. But her style of singing was going out of fashion by the early 1930s, although she continued to find work onstage. When Betty Boop came out, she sued the Fleischers for $250,000 (equivalent to about $5 million today). The trial lasted two weeks and filled the newspapers with juicy stories.

Betty Boop was described in the court case as “combin[ing] in appearance the childish with the sophisticated — a large round baby face with big eyes and a nose like a button, framed in a somewhat careful coiffure, with a very small body of which perhaps the leading characteristic is the most self-confident little bust imaginable.”

Kane’s lawyers made a tactical mistake by basing their claim on the fact that she uses scat syllables in her singing, including the famous “Boop-oop-a-doop.” Kane claimed to have invented the practice of singing nonsense words to music, a claim too easily disproven.

The Fleischers’ lawyer demonstrated that Kane had seen a juvenile Black performer, Baby Esther Jones, who shared a manager with Kane, and that Baby Esther (also sometimes called L’il Esther) used the same scat singing and baby voice before her.

Kane caricature and Sweet Betty

Trial transcripts can be quite a kick in the pants to judicial dignity. Asked what Baby Esther did on stage, the manager said, “She sang the chorus and during her choruses, we had four bars omitted, which we called the break, of so-called ‘hot licks.’” Question: “During those breaks or ‘hot licks,’ what did Baby Esther do?” Answer: “A funny expression in her face and a meaningless sound.” Q: Will you tell us what those sounds were?” A: “At various times they differed, they sound like ‘boop-boop-a-doop,’ and sometimes…” Kane’s lawyer then objects. So Fleischer’s lawyer rephrases:

“Give us as nearly as you can how they sounded?” A: “I could do it better if I had rhythm with it.” Q: “Give us the sounds.” A: “Boo-did-do-doo.” Q: “Where there other sounds besides the one that you have just mentioned?” A: “Yes, quite a few.” Q: “Will you give us as many as you can remember?” A: “Whad-da-da-da” Q: “Others.” A: “There are quite a few — ‘Lo-di-de-do’” Q: Any others that you recall?” A: “Sounds like a time she would make a sound like sort of a moaning sound, finished off with ‘de-do’”

According to one newspaper account, “That’s when the court stenographer threw up the sponge and admitted he couldn’t spell such things.”

At one point, film of Betty Boop and film of Helen Kane were shown, without sound, to compare their styles.

Another newspaper account reported “Except for the occasional throat-clearings of a roomful of attorneys, it was strictly a silent performance, the court having ruled agains any audible ‘booping.’

“Miss Kane’s attorneys strove vainly to have the sound tracks included, saying they wished to show how Betty Boop has ‘simulated our voice and our style of singing,’ but Justice McGoldrick ruled that any ‘booping’ would be incompetent, immaterial and irrelevant.”

Kane with three women who voiced Betty Boop in the cartoons

The fact that Betty Boop was clearly based on Kane (later readily admitted by Boop designer Grim Natwick) hardly mattered. The judge ruled that the sound of a voice cannot be copyrighted, and that the nonsense syllable singing was quite common beyond its use by Kane and found for the Fleischers.

Three of the women who voiced Betty Boop in the Fleischer cartoons had all been participants earlier in a Helen Kane imitation contest. They had all performed, outside the Boop-toons as Kane knock-offs.

The knowledge that Betty Boop imitated the White Kane who imitated the Black Baby Esther has recently raised the specter of “cultural appropriation” — a concept that has now become something of an ethical fad. I know of few things sillier or more pointless.

After all, Baby Esther was known as a “Little Florence Mills,” imitating that singer. The actual Mills took over on Broadway from Gertrude Saunders in the 1921 hit, Shuffle Along. Each performer borrowing from the previous.

In the Fleischer trial, the famous pianist and composer, Clarence Williams testified that he’d been using the scat technique since 1915. Very few things have virgin birth; most things are developments of other things. We could make the claim that scat began with Stephen Foster and Camptown Races and its “doo-dah, doo-dah” or trace it back to the 16th century and Josquin de Prez’s frotolla El Grillo, where the singer imitates the sound of a cricket.

As the Fleischer trial judge ruled, “the vocables ‘boop-boop-a-doop’ and similar sounds had been used by other performers prior to the plaintiff.”

The whole issue of cultural appropriation is bothersome, to say the least. I am not talking here about cases such as when an Anglo artist sells his work as Indian art, pretending to be Native American. That isn’t cultural appropriation, it is simply fraud. But when an artist finds something from another culture that piques his interest and creativity, well, that’s just normal. Everybody is always borrowing from everybody else. It is how culture moves forward.

Is spaghetti cultural appropriation because the tomato came from indigenous cultures in the New World?

Mexican Japanese and Filipino spaghetti

How about when spaghetti makes the journey back to the Americas and becomes Mexican chipotle spaghetti. Or further travels to Japan with added daikon, or to the Philippines, where they add hot dogs (pace Sheldon Cooper)?

In the Columbian Exchange, the New World gave the Old not only tomatoes, but corn (maiz), cacao, vanilla, potatoes and tobacco.

The Old gave back to the New grapes, onions, apples, wheat, to say nothing of swine, cattle, horses and honey bees.

So, today, there is nothing more typically Navajo than satellite dishes and pickup trucks.

It’s all a great mix, and to forbid such churn is to stall human progress. Culture is never static but always on the move. “Traditional” is always a museum-piece.

I’m not making a case here for blackface minstrelsy — such things are rightfully seen as appalling. But should that mean that Vanilla Ice should not rap? Or that Jessye Norman shouldn’t sing opera? That we should all be stuck in our particular silos and never learn from others?

George Harrison should never have learned the sitar? That Sergio Leone should have left the plot of A Fistful of Dollars to Akira Kurosawa?

That Cubism should be trashed because Picasso became fascinated by African masks?

This isn’t to say there aren’t egregious examples, but they mostly concern stereotyping — which is to say, ignorance, a failure to see what is actually going on in the other culture. finding something good and useful in another culture and adapting it is rather different, even if you take the original completely out of context.

Cross-fertilization is not only one of the pleasures of culture, but one of its essentials. Culture is a group enterprise, not an individual one, and it lives through free exchange.

The current blather about cultural appropriation reminds me, more than anything else, of the Victorian fear of the body and sex, like calling legs “limbs.” It is blue-stocking puritanism and to hell with it.

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Oppositions and Pendulums: Part 1

February 3, 2015

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INTRODUCTION

Art keeps changing. What is popular in one century is laughed at in the next. Victorians hated the undisciplined libidos of the Romantics; the 20th Century has found the Victorians cloying, sentimental and insincere.

But what causes these changes in taste? It is too often believed that styles change merely out of boredom, as if we got tired of one look and were attracted to the glittering novelty of the next.

And while there is certainly something to the idea of the bright, shiny and new, there is also something deeper and more meaningful.

For art history is not just a history of shifting styles, but of changing sensibilities. The transformation of one age into the next — of the Renaissance into the Baroque, of Neo-Classicism into Romanticism, of Modernism into Postmodernism — is a transformation of ideas.

Making a point (or two)

I say it isn’t merely fashion, but fashion isn’t either. Perhaps you get some idea of what I mean if we look at the Maidenform bra, for instance.

Here it is, as hard as cardboard and pointy as a dart. It molded the female form to a rigid contour. I remember when it used to be called the “nose cone” look.

But if you consider the time that gave birth to the nose cone, you recognize it was the Eisenhower ’50s. It wasn’t merely the bra that was rigid. Men wore starched shirts then, too. Suits and ties were required attire at the office.

Wives wore highly structured dresses, with darts and sizing, and a mask-like make up, with red lipstick and black mascara. Their hair was held stiff, too.

And what was the political climate? It was also stiff. People were expected to conform. Those who didn’t were suspect. Investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. There was a conventional idea of what the ideal was. You can see it in the TV shows of the time.

Leave It to Beaver? The Donna Reed Show? Dragnet.

Interestingly, the ’50 lasted through the ’60s. But at the end of that decade, something happened. The rigid bra went out. So did the structured clothes. So did the stiff ideas.

These things are all connected.

The ’60s, by the way, lasted into the middle of the ’70s, when the ’80s began. Our idea of decades in this century is a little cockeyed. Still, we call the ’60s the ’60s and everyone knows what we mean, even though what we mean is the years between 1968 and 1974. That was the ’60s. All over in a flash. I remember — the flashing, that is.

It was a retreat from what seemed like inauthentic artifice into what seemed at the time to be authentic naturalness. “Natural” became the adjective of the decade. I remember one shampoo that advertised “100 percent all natural natural ingredients,” which, of course, promised only that whatever natural ingredients made it into the bottle, were actually natural.

Black America began wearing a hairstyle they called the “Natural.”

And we had the “braless” look. Even bras offered the braless look.

If the ’60s seemed like a reaction to the stuffy ’50s, it was. But it was a wide shift in sensibility. The art changed; the music changed; the politics changed; the philosophy changed.

Artifice vs. artlessness

Before there was stiff underwear, in the 1920s, when things were looser mentally, emotionally and morally, underwear was looser, too.

And we can see the reassertion of the artificial, parodied by Madonna in the 80s.

Like the change that occurred at the time of the Reformation, more emphasis was placed on individual freedom of thought and less on the authority of power. Martin Luther wanted everyone to be able to read the Bible, and not have the book only interpreted by a priestly class. Abbie Hoffman (admittedly a lesser intellect, although I don’t think that insults Hoffman) wanted to make up his own mind about the Vietnam War instead of taking Lyndon Johnson’s interpretation of it.

I can recall hearing over and over from our elders at the time that “Johnson has facts we don’t know; we have to trust him.” Well, it turned out he was as clueless as anyone. We of my generation thought we’d never make that mistake again.

Over the centuries, each definable age is a reaction to the one that went before. The Renaissance reacted to the Middle Ages. The Romantic Age to the Neo Classical age before it. Victorianism to the Romanticism and Modernism in the 20th Century to the Victorianism which it hated.

But what underlies these changes is a curious series of pendulums.

“Meta-pendulums”

You know how you keep hearing that the pendulum only swings so far before reversing direction — so that the Sexual Revolution is replaced by the New Chastity — or so we’re told. The swing to the political left is slowed and eventually we swing back to the right. Hello Mitch McConnell.

These swings are, in fact, the very stuff of cultural change and we can see them through the art that embodies them.

When we see the change from Winckelmann’s exulted Classicism to Delacroix’s exotic Moorish women, we are seeing a change in ideas.

What is curious is that these same pendulum swings keep recurring.

There are a bunch of them, and their “swing cycle” is irregular, so that the same ideas don’t occur at the same time: Some ideas have a longer cycle, some a quick turnaround. They never all line up quite the same way twice, which is why the various “romantic” periods in art — the Gothic, the Baroque, the Romantic — are not at all identical.

What I want to do is to take a look at a few of these swinging pendulums to get a feel for the changes they bring. And perhaps narrow them down to a few “metapendulums.” Those larger ideas that hold the smaller ones like melon balls in a hollowed out melon half.

An endless list

I made a list of some of these oppositions. My notebook went on for three pages. I stopped at 63 pairs of recurring ideas when I realized I could really go on for days adding to the list.

Here’s one example: How the middle of the 19th Century in France valued the historical (and religious and mythological) painting, like this David version of the death of Socrates. It was noble, formal, elevating. It taught the moral lessons that thoughtful people believed should be taught.

But there was a reaction to it. That reaction gave us Impressionism, which gave up the past for the everyday present, like this barmaid in Manet’s painting.

I said these shifts recur. In the 1950s, for instance, the serious minded Abstract Expressionists, like Mark Rothko, expected their paintings to be morally and spiritually elevating.

What followed? The everyday present, like Warhol’s soup cans.

The whole history of art keeps running back and forth through these issues, over and over, but never quite the same way — because other pendulums are also swinging back and forth at the same time, and their combined periods never quite in synch, so that the change from David to Manet is also a shift from a hard-edged style to a soft, fuzzy edged style, and between Rothko and Warhol comes the swing from abstract to realistic.

Among those 63 pairs of ideas — oppositions you might call them — are familiar ones. Here are a few of them:

Interest in the universal — Interest in the particular

Intellect primary — Emotion primary

Clarity — Complexity

Unity — Diversity

Religious — Secular

Edification — Entertainment

Reinforce ethos — Challenge ethos

Style — Content

Artificial — Natural

Social — Cosmic

Codification — Exploration

Stasis — Energy

Embrace past — Ignore Past

Internationalism — Nationalism

Emblematic (allegorical) — Mythic (symbolic)

Incarnation — Transcendence

Scientific realism — Emotional realism (“Truthiness”)

Nature as a desert — Nature as a cathedral

Vocation — Inspiration

Single creator — Atelier

Talent — Genius

Epic — Miniature

Dramatic — Lyric

Old form — New form

Irony — Sincerity

Discrete disciplines — Mix and match art forms

Depiction of emotion — Expression of emotion

There are many more. I’m sure you can come up with a bunch. But I don’t want to merely make a list.

The general and the particular

Because, as I was listing, I noticed that these ideas began to fall into larger patterns. They tend to group together, though some of the items in my list overlap, one category turning up as an item in another category.

But I want to look at the larger movements.

The first category is the rivalry between the universal and the particular. In some ages, we have wanted our art idealized. If we are going to paint a madonna, she should look like a woman, or better yet like all women, that is like Woman with a capital W. Especially if we harbor religious feelings about it, we don’t want our Madonna to look like Eleanor Roosevelt.

The 18th Century was one that believed in the importance of universalizing their art.

Samuel Johnson wrote in 1750 that “Poetry cannot dwell upon the minuter distinctions, by which one species differs from another, without departing from that simplicity of grandeur which fills the imagination.”

Or, in another place, “All the power of description is destroyed by a scrupulous enumeration; and the force of metaphors is lost, when the mind by the mention of particulars is turned more upon the original than the secondary sense, more upon that which the illustration is drawn than that to which it is applied.”

Nothing in real life is perfect, wrote painter Joshua Reynolds in his famous Discourses. The artist must never attempt to imitate real life too closely, he says, but rather, “he learns to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object. This idea of the perfect state of nature, which the artist calls the ideal beauty, is the great leading principle by which works of genius are conducted.”

Only 30 years later, English artist and poet William Blake wrote in the margins of his copy of Reynold’s Discourses:

“To generalize is to be an idiot.”

He goes on to say: “To particularize is the alone distinction of merit. General knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess.

“What is general nature? Is there such a thing? What is general knowledge? Is there such a thing? Strictly speaking, all knowledge is particular.

“Distinct general form cannot exist. Distinctness is particular, not general.”

Reynolds, if he painted a Madonna, would make sure she didn’t look like any live human being, but like the idea we have of the perfect form.

Blake, painting a Madonna, would certainly have made her look, if not like Eleanor Roosevelt, at least like some living, breathing woman he could see with his actual eyes.

And this is despite the fact that Reynolds is mainly a portraitist, making pictures of individuals — which he idealized in his paintings. And despite the fact that Blake makes mythological pictures of gods and spirits — which he meant to look like distinct personalities.

This issue between general and specific, universal and particular, recurs like all these ideas.

Hellenic and Hellenistic

It is the first major shift in Western art one sees, not counting the prehistoric art (which also follow most of these patterns). But beginning with the art of ancient Greece, we can see it reaching its height in the 4th Century, with such sculptures as the Elgin marbles and the frieze carvings of various temples.

The Classical Greeks believed in idealized beauty, in the general and universal, as you can see in these lithe, stripped down figures.

But after the Macedonian invasion, under the reign of Alexander the Great, in the period we call Hellenistic, the main shift is in the naturalness of the art. The statues take on a movement and individuality unheard of in earlier Athens.

You can see the distinct face of the wrestler with his broken nose or the boy pulling a thorn from his foot. (You can also see the shift, mentioned above, from the morally elevating tone of the Classical period, to the everyday activities depicted in the Hellenistic).

But just look at the faces, the Classical impassiveness and idealization,

and the Hellenistic warts and all portrait.

You can see the pendulum go back and forth, with early Roman art tending to imitate the Classic Greek, and Imperial Roman art again embracing the particular. Once you have seen a Roman portrait bust, there is not doubt you could pick its model out of a police lineup of a crowd at a bus station. They are so distinct.

In the Middle ages, first in the declining Roman period and the Romanesque, individuality is downplayed and figures, especially in the growing Christian church, tend to be generalized. But in the great Gothic period that flowered in the 11th and 12th centuries, the figures again become individualized. So much so, that the hundreds of figures carved into the side of, say, Chartres Cathedral, are as distinctive as movie stars’ faces.

During the Renaissance, figures are once more idealized. In the Baroque, they are individualized. In the Rococco, generalized, in the Romantic era, individualized. In the Academic painting that followed, they were again generalized. Impressionism put back their individual character. Modern art simplified the figures and generalized them — all of Modigliani’s figures seem interchangeable, for instance, or Brancusi’s idealized women. But particularity and distinct figures reappear with Pop and the following Postmodernism.

Back and forth the pendulum goes.

I have dwelt on this one pair of opposites rather a long time, just to get the feel of what I mean.

But, I also want to point out the subset of ideas that follow the fight between the universal and particular.

NEXT: Part 2 — More pendulums

—Richard Nilsen

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Oppositions and Pendulums: Part 1