1930's Cartoon Review - Betty Boop in Dizzy Dishes (1930)

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 Today we review the cartoon Dizzy Dishes from 1930, starring Betty Boop. This features her original design as a dog (dog ears instead of earrings). She was originally the girlfriend of Bimbo the dog. Eventually, Bimbo left the screen and Betty Boop became her own character. Let's get into it. 

Courtesy of YouTube.com


This was a Fleischer Studios production. Betty Boop is property of Paramount. Popeye is also a Fleischer Studios production. Paramount has everything Fleischer at this point. Fleischer Studios went under after Disney outperformed them and out-marketed them. For more on Fleischer Studios, click this link.

Overall Thoughts

This cartoon was a bit hard to hear the words on at brief moments. Why? Because sound quality in old talkies isn't the greatest. It was 6 minutes at most, but I have thoughts. It mostly stars Bimbo the dog and has one song by Betty Boop (with her boop boop be doop line) while she sings. Bimbo sings that line back to her while falling in love with her performance, while performing with the roast duck he just cooked.

 Courtesy of Imdb.com



The plot, for one, is Bimbo the dog running a restaurant and being the only cook. One particular blotto-looking character (think Pete from Disney, but not) is delayed from eating the roast duck because it performs with Bimbo on stage. Betty gets maybe 1 minute or 30 seconds of exposure. Bimbo is our main character. Long story short, the man eats his table and plates instead of getting his duck and chases Bimbo into the kitchen through the wall. The headless roast duck flies away, strangely. Bimbo gets away by chopping up kitchen stuff to create a mini train, gets on it, and rides it through the wall leading outside. The end. Writing all this makes me realize how strange it all sounds. At one point the roast duck hatches a roast duck that also dances, and at another point the dancing is the roast duck smacking Bimbo on the behind as he gets on the floor to let it do so. Not the strangest Fleischer cartoon, but not the least strange either. 

Everything is one big song. It is all sung dialogue about what everyone wants to eat, Betty singing what I can't entirely make out as words except for "needing her boop boop de doop", and then cartoon action antics (that mimic the silent films to a cartoon extreme).  It is dancing and singing with background music and added antics. That's this cartoon in a nutshell. And Bimbo is our focus even when Betty is singing. She's never in a frame by herself. This is early Betty Boop. I think nearly everyone in this generation wouldn't know Bimbo the dog existed, but would know Betty Boop. It's strange to think that Bimbo was the intended main character. This was Betty Boop's debut.

What I liked and disliked

This was a tamer Fleischer cartoon. I've seen stranger than this one. Other than the dance move of having a roast duck smacking Bimbo's bottom and a table leg with bones in it, it's a standard cartoon for the time. I had fun watching it. It didn't make me uncomfortable and it had a good rhythm and dancing tune. I'd say it mimicked the silent films and was generally just silly. I disliked nothing in it. I'd give it a 9 out of 10 stars.

If the time had allowed better sound quality, which it wouldn't, I would have been able to hear what Betty was singing and what some of the crowd was singing in the beginning, but that comes with the 1930s sound quality. Nothing they could do about it. I still can't understand the majority of her featured song. Let me know if you can. 

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