Betty Boop has arrived on Broadway, nearly a century after she first boop-oop-a-dooped her way onto the big screen. “Boop! The Musical,” like the “Barbie” and “Elf” films that preceded it, imagines a transformational encounter between an anthropomorphic character and the real world (well, a fictional world full of people).
Betty’s journey to the stage has been an unusual one. The original character didn’t have much of a back story, which has made her an appealing blank slate for storytellers. But her image — and Betty, at her core, is a remarkably long-lived illustration — has managed to straddle media and merchandise, surviving court battles and changing mores.
“Her popularity goes on and on,” said Peter Benjaminson, author of “The Life and Times of Betty Boop.” “The musical is the latest in a series of incarnations.”
Film Debut
The animated cartoon character, who did not yet have a name, made her first appearance in 1930 in hybrid form — part poodle, part human — in “Dizzy Dishes,” which was one of a series of animated shorts, called Talkartoons, produced by Fleischer Studios. All of the characters in the film — a slapstick comedy set in an incompetent restaurant — were animals with human attributes. The secondary character that became Betty Boop was a jazz singer who already had many of the elements that came to define her — a curvaceous body and flirty looks, with big eyes and an oversized head, and a high-pitched, babyish voice.
Jasmine Amy Rogers, the actress starring as Betty Boop on Broadway, described her as “full of joy” and “unapologetically herself.” “She is sexy, but I don’t think it is merely sex that makes her sexy,” she continued. “I would say it’s the way she carries herself, and her confidence and her unabashed self.”
Jazz Age Inspirations
Betty, created at the height of the Jazz Age, is obviously modeled on flappers, and her relationship to music history has been a subject of debate and litigation.
In 1932, a white singer named Helen Kane sued, alleging that the “baby vamp” style of the Betty Boop character, including the “boop-oop-a-doop” phrase, was an unlawful imitation of Kane. At a widely publicized trial in 1934, Fleischer countered by pointing out that a Black singer, Esther Lee Jones, who performed as Baby Esther, had used similar scat phrases before Kane. Kane lost.
Fleischer Studios argues that Betty had many influences, but was not based on a particular woman. “She’s from the Jazz Age, and all the animators lived in Manhattan, so she was influenced by that culture,” said Mark Fleischer, the chief executive of Fleischer Studios, and the grandson of a company founder.
Rogers said she hopes that over time, women of different ethnicities will portray the character, but said she is proud to play her as a Black woman, with nods to Baby Esther and the scat technique of jazz singing. “Jazz lives so deep in the heart of Betty that I feel as if we can’t really have a full discussion about her without involving the African American race,” she said.
Pre-Code: Sexy, Sassy, Single
By the early 1930s, Betty had shed her canine features and become fully human, or as fully human as an animated character could be. Most notable — her floppy ears became hoop earrings.
Some aspects of her became formalized over time, according to Frank Caruso, the creative director of Fleischer Studios. She has 16 spit curls — eight on each side of her oversized head. Her eyes float low, leaving space on the forehead for expressive lashes and brows. “If you can recognize a character in silhouette, you’ve done your job,” Caruso said, “and Betty is immediately recognizable.”
She was decidedly sexy — and perpetually single. “She’s actually surprisingly virginal — she doesn’t have romantic relationships, she’s just pretty and confident and full of life, and not embarrassed about her own sexuality,” said Bob Martin, the musical’s book writer. “She’s continually being chased by men — she doesn’t have a conventional relationship, but she’s always chased and objectified.”
Post-Code: Buttoned-Up Betty
The arrival of the Hays Code — content guidelines for movies that started in the mid-1930s — had a big influence on Betty. Her dresses got longer, her blouses covered her cleavage, and she had more sedate jobs or was a homemaker. “Gone was the garter, the short skirt, the décolletage that made her so unique,” Heather Hendershot wrote in the Journal of Design History. “In its place was a more fully clothed Betty, a character stripped of her charm.”
The series of animated shorts ended in 1939.
Since the demise of the animated shorts, Betty has appeared in comic books, television shows, films and video games. But the platform that has sustained her for decades — and made her globally recognizable — is merchandise.
“The miracle of Betty Boop is that she achieved iconic status without any entertainment behind her — she developed a very robust life through licensing,” Fleischer said. It started with collectibles — dolls and magnets and so on — but before long there were housewares and games and toys and, most successfully, clothing. And it’s not just T-shirts — Betty has had couture collaborations with designers including Zac Posen and Marc Jacobs.
Paramount Pictures has owned the copyrights to the Betty Boop cartoons, and some are entering the public domain as those expire. But the character is still owned by Fleischer Studios, and is protected by copyright and trademark laws. Mark Fleischer said the company controls the rights to adapt the character for stage or screen, and also, he wrote in an email, “exclusive rights to allow others to display the Betty Boop name and/or image on their products (e.g., clothing, coffee cups, etc.) is not only protected by copyright, it is also protected by the enormous body of U.S. and international trademarks that Fleischer Studios has acquired in the Betty Boop name and image.”
Evolving With the Times
Betty, who arrived just a decade after American women won the right to vote, was always working, and she often had jobs that were adventurous.
“Betty Boop did things that until then were unimaginable,” Fleischer said, “like being a racecar driver, owning a diner; she was a pilot, she ran for president, and she was an early animal activist.”
In her merch era, her life has been audacious in different ways.
“We were always keeping her in step with what was going on,” said Caruso, who has been Fleischer’s creative director for 38 years. “In the ’90s she got a little grungy, or hip-hop. We started doing this Biker Betty, which is one of our most popular iterations. And people love Zombie Betty. We’ve done everything under the sun.”
Caruso said there are always people proposing new ways to use the Betty Boop image, including, he said, on tombstones. Grieving families, he said, periodically approach the company for permission to use the image on headstones; the company often says yes.
As society evolved, Betty became more socially conscious. In recent years, Betty Boop merchandise has come with an empowering message — some uplifting bit of text included in the package.
A ‘Boop!’ for Broadway
“Boop! The Musical” has been in development for more than two decades, and is a big-budget extravaganza, capitalized for up to $26 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It had a production in Chicago in 2023; the Broadway run, at the Broadhurst Theater, began previews March 11 and opens April 5.
The show, with music by David Foster and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead, depicts Betty as a busy actress working in the black-and-white world of short films. But when she develops an identity crisis — she can play any number of characters, but isn’t sure who she really is — she winds up traveling to the real world. In present-day New York, she embarks on a journey of self-discovery.
“I came up with this crazy idea that she exists in a black-and-white world where she has everything but love, and pitched a story that she comes to the real world, full of color, looking for something,” said the musical’s director, Jerry Mitchell. “Her world is never full of color until it’s full of love.”
Rogers, the actress playing Betty Boop, has two carefully positioned mic packs inside her wig to make her head look bigger and rounder than it is. Betty’s heels have become second nature to her, as has the slightly squeaky voice. The hardest thing to master, she said, is the phrase “Boop-oop-a-doop,” because it’s so closely identified with the character, and it’s built into both the start and the finish of the musical.
“I feel like saying that is the most nerve-racking,” Rogers said. “It’s funny — I talk in the voice the whole show, but just the way it sits in the voice, and with the notes it’s arranged on, sometimes I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, please let this come out the way it’s supposed to!’ But it has so far!”
Archival Images: Fleischer Studios Inc.
