Cartoon Reviews

Sunday, January 20, 2019

Crazy-Town (1932)

"Foolish facts, foolish facts, foolish things, and silly acts. But we have nothing else to do, so let's go crazy." -Betty Boop
In this Talkartoon, Crazy-Town, Betty and Bimbo take an incidental trip to the bizarro world, where everything is pretty much backwards, giving the animators ample opportunity to explore a large number of gags where things occur opposite of how you'd expect. Even Betty and Bimbo's presence here seems a bit incidental.

I got to admit to being pretty ho-hum about this one, that is until the quick but morbid scene in the beauty parlor, where instead of having their hair styled by a qualified cosmetologist, women can just come into the parlor and decapitate themselves of their old heads (and toss it in the trash!?) and put on a completely new, beautifully made-over head, just like Princess Mombi from Return to Oz (1985), or rather Princess Langwidere from the book Ozma of Oz (1907) by L. Frank Baum, of which the film Return to Oz was partially based on. Like Dorothy, Betty even refuses to give up her head when a customer takes a fancy to her, resulting in Betty making a brief run for her life. At the end of the adventure, Bimbo gets a couple nice wet kisses from Betty.

Betty's chipper singing (by Mae Questel) heard over the credits at the beginning is just too cute, particularly when she screams "crazy town!". As is usual, there are a few high quality song and dance numbers, with Betty performing a lovely rotoscoped dance (while singing Foolish Facts) with Bimbo on Piano in front of several enthusiastic Crazy Town denizens, towards the end.

The meowing rhino-hippo thing was kind of funny, but aside from the morbid beauty parlor, the bizarro (opposite world) gags just kind of passed by without much response from me. Crazy-Town is still a pretty weird episode that I just recently saw for the first time. It's got its moments that make it worth the near seven minutes of your time to watch it.   



I was playing around with the Betty Boop Snap and Share app on my phone, and I decided to edit a picture I took that commemorated my finally finishing the original Metroid on the NES Classic. Hooray! Unfinished childhood business complete!..
A meeting between Samus and Betty Boop? Now that's a universe crossover worthy of Crazy Town.

No comments:

Post a Comment