Whoa Nelly, what the heck were they thinking? It’s not uncommon to find cartoons from the past to be racially insensitive, but to be overtly sexual and sexually violent is another thing all together. That brings us to Betty Boop, a cartoon which first appeared in August 1930, and was at one point the most popular cartoon in the world. During the latter part of the 1930’s , and up until today, she appears as a demure character, but it wasn’t always that way. The early cartoons in the Betty Boop franchise were adult oriented, and in some Betty Boop went topless, had full frontal nudity, was sexually assaulted and nearly raped!
The first few years of the Betty Boop cartoons can be described as her wild years. She was single, flirtatious and sexy. She would be regularly groped by hands, and could even be seen topless in several different scenes and cartoons. In fact Betty Boop can be seen dancing topless in the very first Popeye cartoon. But if being topless is pushing the envelope a bit too far, think again because it gets a lot worse. In one cartoon she can be seen completely nude while taking a bath in what can be described as full frontal nudity. In another cartoon Betty Boop is sexually assaulted on screen and nearly raped. At the end she says that her attacker couldn’t take her “boop boop away.”
Why were the Betty Boop cartoons so sexually suggestive? Aren’t cartoons for children? In this case, no. Just as Family Guy, South Park and Robot Chicken today are made for an adult audience, Betty Boop was made for adults too, not children. And to be honest, sex sells and the people with the money for movie tickets were adults, not children.
Between 1930 and 1934 there was no censorship in Hollywood, so the production companies pretty much had free range to do what they wanted. But that came to an abrupt end on July 1, 1934 with the introduction of the Production Code of 1934. The creators of Betty Boop were forced to completely change her character from an outlandish one to a demure one we are now familiar with.
