Snow-White

This is another of those Betty Boop cartoons that feature two things: music and an insane storyline with wild visuals where crazy things happen one after the other. Back in the late '60s, we would have thought the cartoonists who made this had to be stoned. I say that because this is not any Snow White story you've ever seen. It's so strange, and it's almost hard to describe.

In one fairly long scene, we hear the voice of the great Cab Calloway while some ghostly spirit-like figure dances through some Dante's Infero/hello underground. It's really bizarre!

Earlier, we get the ugly queen talking several times to her "looking glass" (mirror) with dialog such as, "Am I the fairest in the place?"

The mirror answers, " If I was you, I'd hide my face!"

I'm telling you; these guys MUST have been on acid who wrote and drew some of these early Betty Boop cartoons! They are so wild, it's unbelievable.

Imaginative, provocative, seductive. And fair mix of jazz, fairy tales and crumbs of ghost story. The ice coffin is the beautiful detail and the bad queen , from the narcissism to prehistory is just great.

A nice short animation, admirable for the nostalgia proposed to viewer first, surprising modern and courageous and funny at whole.

You can't do much better in terms of pure, clever cinematic fun, than revisit these Betty Boops, the ones that mix Cab Calloway, ghouls and sexy Betty cavorting with demons. Hallucinogens, jazz, sex.

This isn't my favorite. I count that as "Old Man of the Mountain" of this same year. That one has more spooks, more sex (an attempted rape) and more jazz. This is much more complex, mixing in Alice in Wonderland, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, all of which would be mined by Disney later.

What brought me back to this was seeing "Corpse Bride." It was brilliant, I thought, and drew heavily from the two "Skeleton Dance" cartoons and this little window into the underworld given to us by the Fleischers.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Everything about this short is fantastic! The music is perfect, the animation is superb and quite darkly creepy in spots, the story is excellent and everything fits together like a seamless jigsaw puzzle. When Koko (voiced by Cab Calloway) sings "St. James Infirmary Blues", watch his movements. The animators captured Cab Calloway's movements perfectly here. Cab Calloway is caricatured in cartoons frequently in cartoons from others studios and is quite easily recognizable as Cab Calloway in them, but this is something completely different. The character is Koko, but the walk is Calloway and it works completely. Anyone who is a fan of both Koko and Cab Calloway (I may be the only one, although I hope not) will see both characters in one place at one time, a perfect blend without either dominating. That's hard to do under any circumstance. I bow humbly to genius. You have got to see this if you love cartoons! In print and available. The tape is worth it for this one short alone (although it's excellent and there are other great shorts here as well) and is most highly recommended!!!!!! A shot from the other end of the court at the buzzer and nothing but net!!

Most of this cartoon is top-notch Fleischer fare and definitely worth watching, but there's one part that makes it absolutely stand out: the darkly hypnotic scene where Koko the Clown sings an elegy in Cab Calloway's voice in the underworld while Betty Boop is marched down in her glass coffin by pallbearers. The first time I saw it, it was literally breathtaking; all conversation in the room stopped as soon as Calloway started singing, and we watched, hypnotized, as Koko turns into a skeleton and dances with Calloway's moves in Hell while skeleton fish fly through the air and skeleton humans play poker deep in the background. As good as cartoons get.