Betty Boop for President

"Betty Boop for President" (1980) (not to be confused with Betty Boop for President, 1932- which was a real theatrical release, Betty Boop short) is a collection of the old, black and white Betty Boop shorts, VERY lazily editted together into a kinda-sorta, if you squint """story""" (using that word, very loosely), and then shipped off to a Korean sweat-shop, to be redrawn and coloured. Then dubbed by people who apparently have no clue what the characters are meant to sound like, who I'm pretty sure were ad-libbing 90% of the dialogue. They also included new songs, at least SOME of which were especially recorded for this VHS tape (because the lyrics reference the hobbled-together "story").

What I find confusing, is WHY would anyone go to the trouble of making this? Obviously, it was exploiting the of Betty Boop shorts being out of copywrite, and wanting to produce a cheap cartoon "movie", for the VHS market of 1980. But the copywrite was elapsed (and just as violated, either way) so why not just dump the original (far better) shorts onto VHS casettes, as is, and call it done? Why go to the trouble of editting and dubbing, to make a pretty undeniably FAR WORSE product? Colourization, I can kinda understand, that it was probably hard to sell black and white cartoons to kids, in that era... But all the other changes are kinda baffling, to me.

The only explanation I can think of was that someone saw this as a genuine "passion project"?!? That it was MORE than just a cash-grab... Which casts the bizarre "moral of the story" in an even stranger light...

It has a certain "so bad it's good" appeal, just because of the quality of the dubbing... and some of the esoteric music choices are interesting... but overall, it's as bad as you expect it be. Probably worse... 1/10...

Hurray for Betty Boop premiered on November 21, 1980.