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You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I’m Eric Molinsky.

I mentioned in my last episode that Camelot was my escape from reality last year. Reality is still pretty scary, and my other happy place that I go for comfort, are old cartoons, especially the ones from Fleischer Studios, like Superman, Popeye and especially Betty Boop.

CLIP: THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN

How many of you are tapping your feet right now?

One of the things I like about Betty Boop is that she wasn’t for kids. The cartoons were made with the understanding that they would be played before adult feature films.

MARK: That was absolutely true. They were not intended for children, uh, as, as cartoons came to be.

That is Mark Fleischer – the grandson of Max Fleischer, who created Betty Boop.

The other thing I love about the Fleischer cartoons is that they feel so contemporary compared to Disney. Betty Boop incorporated real jazz musicians like Cab Calloway into the animation.

MARK: You can look at Betty Boop is probably the first music video, the way Max brought in the cultural musical icons of his day.

But as I started looking into the history of Betty Boop, and the context in which she was created – and censored -- I was surprised to learn that even though she is a character from a certain time in history, what happened to her in those cartoons, and the reaction to her in the real world, speaks to a lot of issues today.

In 1930, Betty Boop made her debut as the girlfriend of a dog character called Bimbo. But audiences responded to her so positively, Fleischer decided to humanize her – which was not difficult. She just had a button nose and droopy dog ears, which they turned into earrings. And quickly made her the star of her own cartoons.

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MARK: In those days, movies were usually proceeded by a cartoon in the theaters that obviously the main attraction would be the movie that was playing a Betty Boop to hit became so popular that some of the theaters started giving her top billing on the marquee.

But the character ran into controversy early on. In 1932, a performer named Helen Kane sued Fleischer Studios because she said Betty Boop was based on her. And she did have a point. This is what Helen Kane sounded like:

CLIP: HELEN KANE SINGING

But Mark’s grandfather, Max, won the lawsuit.

MARK: Max Fleischer showed that Betty Boop was not based on a human being and certainly not one human being.

In fact, they were able to prove that Helen Kane had stolen her act from a Black performer named Baby Esther. This is the only recording I could find of Baby Esther.

CLIP: BABY ESTHER

Whatever kind of appropriation was going on, clearing both human performers, and the cartoon character, were all doing what we would call today the sexy baby voice. But the judge found there were other aspects of Betty Boop that defined her as an original character. And those qualities are really interesting.

Tom Doherty is a professor at Brandeis who focuses on early 20th century film. He says a lot of what makes Betty Boop stand out are the situations they put her in. She is often misremembered as a carefree flapper from the ‘20s, but she’s from the ‘30s, and he says her cartoons epitomize the fears of The Great Depression.

TOM: You know, you look at the Fleischer cartoons and they're so surrealistic, they're kind of expressionistic nightmarish at times. And that's might be where you really see some of the Great Depression coming into the Fleischer studio work, you know, and when they go into these catacombs and subterranean worlds that are sort of dark and spooky and scary and skeletal

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When I talked with Mark Fleischer, his wife Susan Wilking Horan, joined us on the call because she’s an advocate for Betty Boop as a character. In fact, she wrote a book called “Betty Boop’s Guide to a Bold and Balanced Life.”

SUSAN: In 1932, there's an old cartoon called SOS. And this cartoon is interesting because it's the first time we see Betty really afraid. And the cartoon goes on to instruct everyone watching the cartoon, how to face that fear and overcome it.

BETTY BOOP: I’m so scared, I can’t stand it, there must be something we can do it!

SUSAN: Uh, in 1934, she was in a cartoon called She Wronged Him Right where she is facing real life issues like eviction and the loss of her home.

BETTY BOOP: No more money in my purse! Things have gone from bad to worse!

In watching these old cartoons, I can’t help but notice another real life parallel. The classic Betty Boop scenario is a male character lusting after her until she escapes. Like in the cartoon where she’s facing eviction, the landlord makes sinister advances towards her.

LANDLORD: I love you more and more, dear, you’re looking younger every day! You never were so sweet before, dear!

Or take the 1932 cartoon Boop Boop a Doop, where Betty is working at a circus. The Ringmaster sneaks into her tent, stands over her menacingly, caressing her legs while she covers up her chest.

RINGMASTER: You like your job? BETTY BOOP: Uh huh

Then he whispers in her ear:

RINGMASTER: I think if you were you (whispering) BETTY BOOP: Oh, you mean?! (Slap!)

She slaps him.

RINGMASTER: Oh no! There will be more boop boop a doop out of you!

And then he chokes her until she can get away. 4

Tom Doherty says around this time, women were entering the workforce in record numbers. And sexual harassment became a plot point in a lot of film in the 1920s and ‘30s.

TOM: And girls in the early ‘30s are often balancing their virtue is if it, if you will, uh, with their need for employment, or sometimes just a meal where, you know, they'll meet a guy on the street, and if it's the 1920s, you're not going to get picked up on the street. But if it's the 1930s and a guy comes by and offers you a meal, you're probably going to go along with them because you're literally hungry and you don't see that much. See it that much in the ‘20s girls have more freedom. Uh, and they're not under the kind of economic distress they're going to be after the stock market crash.

When I mentioned this to Mark Fleischer, he quickly went to grab an issue of The New Yorker from the second month of the MeToo movement.

MARK: The November 2017 issue of, uh, the new Yorker, the cover had a man standing before a big window, exposing himself and going in front of the window was like the, uh, Thanksgiving Day Macy's parade with Betty Boop as a balloon, looking in with a look of surprise and horror on her face. And the interesting thing about that is we did not know this cover was coming out until it hit the stands, which showed that the editorial staff of the New Yorker felt that Betty Boop was the right character, the right personality to carry one of the most important conversations that was going on in this nation and internationally at the time.

But the biggest concern about Betty Boop in the 1930s was not her safety onscreen – but her sexuality. A coalition of Roman Catholics were worried this cartoon character was a terrible influence on girls – even though her cartoons were supposed to be for adults. They were actually worried a lot of things in movies. And in 1934, they became part a censorship board called the Hays Code, which created strict guidelines for what you could show on film.

Marya Gates is a film critic who used to work at Turner Classic Movies. And she says the issue the censors had with Betty Boop was an issue they had with a lot of real-life actresses at the time.

MARYA: She really represented that flapper aesthetic, which was, you know, personified by people like Joan Crawford and Clara Bow, who they were, these women who drank a lot and they danced all night and they slept around, and they were unapologetic about the fact that they controlled their own destiny and marriage wasn't 5 necessarily the next step for them unless they chose it. When the code came in, it was like, oh no, you can't, women cannot be dancing all night and without being punished. And I think you saw that in, in the evolution of Betty, Boop where she went from being this very girl about town, to being basically a housewife.

Again, Mark Fleischer and Susan Wilking Horan.

SUSAN: I think overall she was the only Fleischer character that was really affected, uh, by the Hays Code. MARK: They kind of started looking at Betty Boop is a live human being. They lost their perspective. You know, Betty, Boop, uh, is sexy, although I've never thought that she's sexual, but there is a sex, a sexiness to her. And so, the bodice went up and the skirt went down, the garter got lost. SUSAN: The bodice went up not just to her neck, but she had a collar. But also, the storylines changed. I mean, she was suddenly, she was a housewife with a baby. MARK: Well, it, it it's such a mystery to me because she suddenly shows up with the baby. And how did she have a baby? And that was one of the points of the code, which, which was never to show the, um, the results of having sex. Did this new revamped Betty Boop did, did it make her less popular? I mean so much of her appeal was the boop boop a doop kind of sexy, not sexual but sexy character. MARK: I think it killed the character as a, as a popular icon of its day.

Although Susan says, the studio never lost its subversive sense of humor, like in the cartoon A Language All My Own, which came out after the Hays Code was installed.

SUSAN: In this Betty Boop cartoon, Betty flies around the world and goes to Japan. And there are sections of the cartoon. Some are in English and some are in Japanese. Now the parts that are in English are squeaky clean and Hays Code approved.

CLIP: BETTY BOOP SINGS IN JAPANESE

But in Japanese, Betty sings, “Come to bed with me, and we’ll Boop-oop-a-doop.”

SUSAN: And the Hays Code and the people who were enforcing it had no idea.

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But in the end, Fleischer just couldn’t compete with studios like Disney – which were very Hays Code friendly. In 1942, Fleischer Studios shut down, and sold their inventory to Paramount.

In the early ‘70s, the Fleischer family got the rights back to Betty Boop -- not to the original cartoons, they’re still owned by Paramount – but they got the rights to make new cartoons and license the character. But instead of trying to restart their studio and make new cartoons, they focused on making Betty Boop merchandise. She became a worldwide brand – especially with women’s clothes, and accessories.

MARK: Without any media tie-in. I don’t know of any cartoon character who’s been able to do that. Betty is really like a blank screen people project, what they want to see in themselves onto Betty Boop. How so though, I feel like she is still a very distinctive character. MARK: Yes, she is. But as a character, she represents qualities that people want to see in themselves. So, they're identifying with her. And that's why if you do, if you try to do a Betty Boop movie, or you try to do a Betty Boop television series, and you have to say who she is, you're also saying who she isn’t. And that's a very tricky thing.

Marya Gates agrees. It would be difficult to bring Betty Boop up to date.

MARYA: Because she's almost like a, uh, a baby doll, but also an adult today's standards that would not pass literally at all. There would be too many questions, too many think pieces

The sexy baby voice is something that gets made fun of now, in movies like “In a World”

LAKE BELL: I said I don’t know where you’d get a smoothie around here, I’m sorry. SEXY BABY: Okay, thanks so much! LAKE BELL: Yeah, no worries!

Or the show, 30 Rock.

LIZ LEMON: I want you to talk in your real voice. ABBY: This is my real voice. And the whole sexy baby thing isn’t an act. I’m a very sexy baby, I can’t help it if men are attracted to me.

But Marya sees Betty Boop as an empowering character. 7

MARYA: She's almost feigning being a baby, you know, because she, she handles herself pretty well and gets out of a lot of these situations, um, and never puts herself in the situation. She just gets in like, it's like the men around her are causing all this trouble and she's half the time. She's just like trying to water her plants or like walk to the store. She encapsulates just how hard it is to be a woman like walking down the street practically.

Again, Susan Wilking Horan.

SUSAN: What has survived through all the years is still her basic personality, that fierce independence and confidence and courage. And even though people tried to repress her originally, she survived, and she is still with us today and, uh, more popular than ever.

Now around the same time the Fleischer family got the rights to merchandise Betty Boop, about a half century ago, the Hays Code was lifted, and it was replaced with the modern ratings system we have today.

But the Hays Code is not ancient history. In fact, we are still feeling the effects of the Code in subtle ways, especially with fantasy entertainment. We will find out why after the break.

BREAK

Let’s rewind to the beginning and look at why the Hays Code came about because Tom Doherty says, the censorship of Betty Boop was part of a much bigger story that began with the invention of the talkies in 1927.

TOM: After sound comes into cinema, all the kind of ellipses and allegorical insinuations of the silent era suddenly are verbalized. And so, in the late ‘20s, you start getting language and scenes that you might've been able to get away with in the silent era. But if now, because sound makes everything more explicit and more realistic, uh, become all that more explicit.

The Hays Code went into effect in 1934 but it was actually written four years earlier in 1930, by a man named Will Hays. And in 1930, the studios said they would abide by the code but there was nothing in place to make them do it.

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TOM: March of 1930, when they say they will agree to the code is also the onset. The, you know, the first month of the great depression. And for the first time in the history of the motion picture industry, the box office starts declining and the Hollywood studios start throwing anything on the screen that they think might attract an audience.

We usually think of the 1930s as quaint old black and white films. But the movies from the early ‘30s are surprisingly racy. There were violent gangster films like Scarface – the original film, not the Al Pacino remake -- where the main character is lusting after his sister. In Red Headed Woman, Jean Harlow sleeps her way to the top and gets away with it. And in the movie, Morocco, Marlene Dietrich kisses a woman on the mouth while wearing men’s clothes.

The Roman Catholic group that had been pushing for the production code – which the studios were ignoring -- felt betrayed. So, they formed a group called The National Legion of Decency, which organized boycotts. And when Roosevelt came to power in 1933, Catholic voters were a big part of his coalition. FDR was coming up with all these new government agencies, and the studios were worried that a government censorship board was just around the corner. Before that could happen, they decided to set up an agency in-house that would force them to abide by the morality code, which they had been ignoring.

Of course, the code banned a lot of the sex and violence that was on screen. And there were positive aspects to the code, like you’re not supposed to disparage anyone’s religion or nationality. But Tom says, it went much deeper than that.

TOM: And this is in some ways you might call the genius of the production code and the way the Roman Catholics wanted to do censorship that Roman Catholic censorship, as annunciated in the production code, isn't a matter of just clipping things out of films. What the Catholics wanted to do is they wanted to get into the process in preproduction. They wanted to promulgate values. They wanted to put things into movies, not just take things out. So, uh, what you find is this moral universe that's promulgated. I always say that, uh, contrary to popular belief, not every Hollywood film ends happily, but every classical Hollywood film ends morally after the production code comes in the moral universe at the end of the film is reasserted.

But morality is subjective. In fact, let’s go back to the issue of sexual harassment, which was satirized in Betty Boop cartoons.

First of all, these stories didn’t come up as much after 1934, because it states in the Hays Code that authority figures should be seen in a positive light. And Marya 9 says when the movies did depict abusive bosses, like in two different films starring Ginger Rogers.

MARYA: Where her backstory is basically, she was attacked by a boss and she pushes him, and he falls out a window and dies. And she goes to prison. You look at those plots now and she would be covered under self-defense on both of those.

But overall, in this era, sexuality was swept under the rug.

MARYA: If you look at the pre-code era in particular, most films that had to do with sex had to do with unmarried people. And when you hit 1934 and in July, when it flipped over, you saw things like, um, the Thin Man were the first Thin Man, they are a married couple, but there's supporting characters that are unmarried, that are floating around and dealing with their sexuality. And then as that series progressed, it was more and more about this nuclear family. And they didn't just have this, you know, cute, married couple and a dog. They started to have a baby, the plot lines were less and less about sex and more and more about business and other things.

The code ended in 1968, partly because the old studio system was falling apart, and being replaced with more of a free market. But Marya says once sex and nudity were allowed on screen, the roles for women, in some cases, got worse.

MARYA: Like the studio system, the one thing the student system did well, was it stood by creating the star image and star power and making sure you had a new Betty Davis movie, you had a new Joan Crawford movie, you had a new Roslyn Russell movie. And when that fell apart, I think you lost something in terms of having strong women fight for stronger representation of women in cinema

And Tom says the values of the Hays Code didn’t end in 1968 because those classic films are the movies that today’s filmmakers grew up on.

TOM: All of those movies still live in our imagination. So, there are some directors that even today you might think of a very production code friendly. This actually used to be one of the assignments I'd give to my, uh, my students at Brandeis. I'd send them to a movie over the weekend and say, analyze this film via the production code guidelines. Tell me if the film passes the production code or defies the production code, or can you make the film production code friendly and a surprising number of mainstream Hollywood. Movies wouldn't pass the production code in terms of maybe language or violence. But if you just take out some of the words, you can kind of redesign the film to make it production code friendly. Virtually every Steven Spielberg movie, I think could 10 pass the production code with just a little fiddling around the edges in terms of the dialogue, right? Or a George Lucas film, much of what comes out of Walt Disney have some of the most successful franchise movies on the planet, are production code movies, which have a kind of moral universe. So, think of Spider-Man, your superpowers are this responsibility. You have this duty, they're not there for your own pleasure, but you have to repress your pleasure in order to fulfill your duty as a superhero. And that's kind of like Casablanca, right?

Or It’s a Wonderful Life.

But when female superheroes have similar storylines, like Rey in the new Star Wars trilogy or Black Widow or Wonder Woman – the same moral conundrums can be a problem. A lot of critics have said these movies imply that women have to sacrifice having loving partners or families if they want to do their best work.

And the depiction of sexuality in these movies is also influenced by the Hays Code. Although there are moments when it slips, like in the first Wonder Woman film, when Diana says to Steve Trevor:

DIANA: I’ve read all 12 volumes of Cleo’s treatise on bodily pleasure. They came to the conclusion that men are essential for procreation, but for pleasure, unnecessary.

Again, Marya Gates

MARYA: That was one of the one, one of the moments where you thought maybe it was going to lean into the fact that Wonder Woman canonically is a Sapphic character. And the fact that it didn't even lean that way, I think speaks to some of this code stuff of, of not really being able to show, not just sexuality, but specifically same-sex relationships. Cause that was, that was another big part of the code. And with Wonder Woman, what's fascinating is it's the one film that kind of got to be a little sexy, but only heterosexually.

Or look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Before Marvel was bought by Disney, movies like Iron Man had a layer of political commentary. And it was also kind of sexy, even sleazy.

MARYA: The very first one, 2008, Tony Stark is definitely a bed hopper. But by the end of his character arc, he's a married man, right?

And these aren’t bad values. Tony Stark’s character arc is quite noble. But as the franchises become bigger and costlier, they have to appeal to the widest 11 audience around the world, and the values of the production code can be blueprint for how to make that work.

Now it might seem like a stretch to trace these modern special effects extravaganzas back to old black and white movies, but Marya says, it’s not as far back as we think.

MARYA: Cinema being such a young art, something that happened 70 years ago is way more seen in, what's still being made than say painting where painting is thousands and thousands and thousands of years old, you know, it's evolved a lot more from the nascent stage whereas cinema is a blip in terms of how old it is. And I think you see that in Marvel cinema, especially now that Marvel cinema is 13 years old, this May, right? So, you have like a whole generation of kids who are now adults, who that is the cinema. They know, and it being informed by a whole century before it, they don't, if they don't have that context, they don't understand how it became what it became. And then it's harder to think of cinema as being anything else.

Which brings me back to Betty Boop.

I keep thinking about what Mark Fleischer and Mariah said, that it would be too problematic to bring Betty Boop into the modern world. And I have no doubt that if they did modernize her, they’d do it with the best intensions, but it wouldn’t feel like her anymore because it’s impossible to imagine new stories without building upon the last 87 years filmmaking.

We tend to think that entertainment properties need to live forever, creating endless content for the fans and generating money for whoever owns the IP. But sometimes the most respectful way to handle a beloved character is to leave them in their time and place.

Betty Boop is a time capsule but she’s also timeless because, unfortunately, the problems that she faced are timeless. Censoring them, can’t make them go away.

That’s it for this week, special thanks to Tom Doherty, Marya Gates, Susan Wilking Horan, and Mark Fleischer, who says his grandfather Max made a big change to the character of Popeye, who had only appeared in comic strips before Fleischer got the rights to make Popeye cartoons.

MARK: In the cartoon strip, the hook that Popeye had is that he would stroke the head of a mythical hen, which would give him luck. Max looked at that and said, boy, that's 12 kind of weird. And so, he moved away from stroking the head of a hen to giving him spinach, which didn't bring him luck. It brought him strength.

I’m also not sure if stroking his magical hen would’ve passed the production code, but it would’ve led to a lot of great jokes and Internet memes.

By the way, my NYU class on creating your own podcast starts earlier this year, on Thursday February 4th. You can sign up at the NYU website, and the class is virtual. I also have an advanced podcasting class that begins in March.

My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinsky and imagine worlds pod. If you like the show, please leave a review wherever you get podcasts or do a shout out on social media. That always helps people discover Imaginary Worlds.

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