Bimbo's Express (1931)

Bimbo's Express was released August 22nd, 1931. The incidental plot involves Betty's moving day, although she seems oblivious to it when the movers, among them Bimbo the dog and an anthropomorphic cat who resembles Felix the Cat, arrive to move her and her stuff out of her old, cracked home. When they arrive Betty is relaxing and cutting her toe nails with a pair of scissors, which I thought was a pretty amusing non-glamorous instance.

These were the days when Betty was still a dog and the cartoons were still attempting to establish a love connection between Betty and Bimbo through non-serialized encounters, in that with a lot of these cartoon shorts from this period, Bimbo seems to always be laying eyes on Betty for the first time and is almost always titillated (or at least experiencing a more comical version of love at first sight). Bimbo has the confidence to shout "hello beautiful," with all of the charm of a cat-caller. He eventually starts singing "Hello Beautiful" to her, to which Betty responds in song, "♫I'm not so beautiful; you only think I'm beautiful; you'll only think so for awhile♫," indicating that she doesn't buy in to his advances right away. Although while she's singing, in one of the more memorable moments (next to when she was clipping her toe nails), Betty strikes a brief but naughty pose, an early instance of a running gag with her famous leg garter (here on the right leg instead of the usual left) accidentally falling down her leg before having to be slid back up to its original position. Bimbo is pretty much here to stay with Betty now, as they depart with all of her stuff loaded into the horse-drawn carriage to eventually reveal that she is apparently only moving around the corner. They sing their way into a happy "HEY!" ending that might make viewers wonder what they just watched. There's at least some continuity in the next film, Minding the Baby (1931), where Betty and Bimbo already seem to know each other.

My thoughts at the end were that this was kind of pointless but so fun and charming. There's not a whole lot to note about this animated short though other than that it might be the first time Betty's leg garter falls down as well as a passive risque joke when Bimbo knocks at the door and Betty says she's in her nightie, and Bimbo responds with, "alright, I'll wait until you take it off"... Cute, but not as cute as when Betty's big toe comes to life as a smiley face satisfied with its new haircut after the toenail is trimmed thoroughly.