Barbara Hamby on Betty Boop—National Poetry Month 2022

Poet Barbara Hamby.

Born in New Orleans and raised in Hawaii, Barbara Hamby earned an MA at Florida State University. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Delirium which won the Vassar Miller Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award in 1995; Babel which won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Donald Hall Prize in 2004; and All-Night Lingo Tango in 2009. Her short story collection, Lester Higata’s 20th Century in 2010 won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize/John Simmons Award. With her husband, poet and musician David Kirby, she coedited the anthology Seriously Funny in 2010. Hamby’s poetry has been featured in numerous anthologies, including The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry in 2011); three editions of Best American Poetry 2010, 2009, and 2000; and Good Poems for Hard Times in 2006.

Hamby and Kirby have been called “the cultural power couple” of Tallahassee, Florida where they reside.

                            Betty Boop's Be Bop was included in Hamby's 2009 collection All-Night Lingo Tango.

Hamby has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts as well as several grants from the Florida Arts Council. In 2010, she was named a Distinguished University Scholar at Florida State University.

According to the Poetry Foundation:

Hamby weaves together a mix of high and pop cultural references into formally strict, lyrically extravagant poems. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly described Hamby’s fourth collection, All-Night Lingo Tango, as “[c]hatty and whimsical, literary and (at its best) laugh-out-loud funny,” and observed, “Long-lined Odes, most in monorhyme or in loose couplets, give her extroverted, digressive imagination free play.” In an interview with BOMBLOG, Hamby spoke to her interest in formal constraints: “When I was writing my first book, I found myself being pleased when I was working under certain formal constraints. Whether it was an anaphora that I had to repeat, the abecedarian corset, or a sound I was repeating—I found that the constraint forced me to dig deep into language and, more interestingly, into myself.”

A title card from a Fleischer Betty Boop cartoon.

Last month I considered making a Women’s History Month blog post about Betty Boop who first appeared in Max Fleischer cartoons released by Paramount in March of 1930.  The black and white cutie pie made her bow in Dizzy Dishes in his Talkartoons series and was soon starring in her own shorts.

With her over-size head, pouty bee stung lips, big round eyes, spit curl bobbed hair, overtly sexual small body in a skimp dress threatening to slip off her breasts and ending mid-thigh to expose glam dancer legs, Betty Boop was an instant star.  

Prototype Betty as the anthropomorphic poodle love interest of Bimbo the dog.  As a human here long dog ears were replaced with hoop earrings.

Fleischer’s often surrealistic cartoons were in stark contrast to their main competition—Walt Disney’s early sound Silly Symphonies.  The music was loud, modern, and brassy.   Fleischer originally conceived her as an anthropomorphic French Poodle and was early studio star Bimbo’s—a dog—girlfriend.  They co-starred together in Minnie the Moocher with music by Cab Calloway.  It was not the last time she was associated with Black musicians which shocked Southern audiences.  After the first handful of films, she was fully human—supposedly a wild but innocent 16 year-old and was paired with Koko the Clown from the Out of the Inkwell series.

Betty’s appearance, little girl voice, and signature Boop Oop a Doop line were all inspired by popular stage, recording, and early sound musical star Helen Kane.  In fact, the connection was so obvious that Kane sued Fleischer.  But Kane herself ripped off the look and signature sound from Black Harlem jazz singer Esther Jones who often performed as Baby Esther.  Kane lost her suit against Fleischer when that came to light.  Jones is sometimes credited as being the real and original Betty Boop.

Betty Boop with Boop Oop a Doop inspirations Esther Jones, left, and Helen Kane, right.

When Betty first appeared in the early ‘30’s her persona as a Jazz Age flapper was already outdated.  Although she cheered Depression Era audiences, fashions were quickly changing to longer mid-calf skirts and music was moving into the Big Band Swing era.  Betty also drew the ire of Will Hayes, enforcer of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1934.  He found everything about Betty “suggestive of immorality.”  To comply with the demands her skirts were lowered to knee and she was often shown with short sleeves and a shop-girl peter pan collar.  She was also changed to an adult woman, sometimes given a human boyfriend/husband, and even portrayed as the mother of a brood of children in at least one film.

Fleischer studio's specifications for a late post-code version of Betty. Gone were her earrings and bangle bracelets as well as her flapper dress.  He thigh garter remained but would be obscured in most shots.

By 1939 her films were discontinued, although a daily newspaper comic strip continued for a few years.  During World War II her image was painted on bombers.  Various attempts to revive her came and went over the years.  Her original cartoons were eventually released for television but there was not much market for black and whites shorts.

There was a revival of interest in her as a result of the underground comix and hippie counterculture of the late 1960s and ‘70s.  Soon her image was adorning posters, T-shirts, coffee mugs, figurines, and an astonishing variety of merchandise.  She remains a popular collectable to this day.  In fact, my oldest daughter Carolynne had a large collection which decorated her apartment.

T-shirts were among the first merchandise offered during the '60s and '70s rediscovery.

Here is Barbara Hamby’s take on Betty from her collection All-Night Lingo Tango

Betty Boop’s Bebop

Because I’m a cartoon airhead, people think it’s a picnic

down on these mean streets. Sure, my skirt’s short, but it’s a crime,

fellows, how you give a frail the slip, leave her simmering,

hot and bothered. I have feelings, cardboard, but bordering on ennui,

just this side of tristesse. I may not be human, but I can kick

like one and bite and pinch, too. Don’t forget, mister, I’m

not just a bimbo with a helium voice. I’m no rococo

parvenu pillhead. I’ve read your Rilke, your Montesquieu.

Really, I’m not as dumb as I look. Or maybe I am. Less

tries to be more, but ends up being nothing. My last beau

vetoed the philosophy of religion class in favor of pre-law,

exactly why I don’t know, but I’m getting a glimmer. Stay

zany, the cartoonists tell me, and next year you’ll play Cinderella.

 

—Barbara Hamby

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer sung by Gene Autry —The Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival

                                            Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer sung by Gene Autry. 

The Rankin/Bass stop action animation TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer which first aired on CBS Television in 55 years ago in 1964 was just the latest iteration of what then seemed almost like a timeless holiday folk tale.  And it would not be the last.  Rudolph has had more lives than any cat.

Versions of the show have been aired annually ever since making it the longest running Christmas TV special in history.

Rudolph first saw light as commercial come-on.  One that proved so wildly popular that he took on a life of his own.

                    Original author Robert L. May reading Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to his daughter after the death of his wife.

Robert L. May was the son of wealthy secular Jewish family from New Rochelle, New York.  He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1926.  But his family’s wealth was wiped out in the Depression.  In 1939 he was toiling as a low-paid in-house advertising copywriter at Montgomery Ward headquarters in Chicago. 

The stores had been buying and giving away cheap coloring books as promotions every year at Christmas.  But that year someone figured the company could save money if they produced their own in-house.  May was handed the assignment. When May decided to do a narrative poem about an outcast reindeer based on his own childhood as an awkward misfit the project took on a special significance for him. 

His wife was dying of cancer.  He read his early drafts to her and his four year old daughter Barbara. Evelyn May died in July as he was still at work on the project.  He was so grief stricken that his bosses offered to let him give up the project.  May refused, determined to complete it.  In August he read the final version to Barbara and his wife’s parents.

Store officials were at first taken aback by the product.  They had expected a simple, cheery book featuring some sort of cute animal.  What they got was a little morality tale in verse, in in anapestic tetrameter in case you are interested.  But it was too late to get anything else, so they sent it to the art department for illustration and ordered copies of a thin magazine-like booklet in a bright red cover.

                                The first edition of the Montgomery Ward give-away books.

It turned out they didn’t order enough.  From the moment the book hit he stores it was a huge success.  Printing presses had to run day and night to keep up with demand.  In that first year 2.4 million copies were distributed.  Shoppers who had never set foot in a Wards store were attracted by word of mouth.  They stayed.  They bought.  The chain had its best holiday sales in years.  The booklet was re-issued for the next two years and the appeal hardly diminished.

War time paper rationing suspended distribution for the duration.  But in 1946 pent-up demand was so great that 3.6 million copies were distributed.  Children all over the country were interrupting readings by their parents of The Night Before Christmas to demand to know where Rudolph was.

Such success was bound to draw other commercial offers.  But May was unable to do anything because Montgomery Ward owned the copyright.  In 1947 Ward’s boss—the notoriously flinty Sewell Avery most famous for being physically carried out of his office by National Guard troops during World War II for defying the National War Labor Board’s order to recognize a union for his employees—uncharacteristically gave May ownership of the copyright to the poem and character free and clear.

A spoken word recording of the poem was made in 1947 and became a hit.  Several big name commercial publishing houses had passed on a hardcover edition of the book believing that all of the free copies had saturated the market.  Maxton Publishers, a small New York publishing company, took a chance and put out an updated print edition in time for Christmas that year.  It became the bestselling children’s book of the year and would remain in print for decades.

Rudolph in his 1948 Max Fleischer cartoon redefined the story for post-war children.

In 1948 animation pioneer Max Fleischer made a theatrical cartoon short of the poem, one of his last original productions.  Despite being made by a minor studio without a good distribution deal, exhibitor demand brought it to screens across the country.  It would subsequently be shown on television.

May was always convinced his hero needed a theme song.  He turned to his brother-in-law, pop composer Johnny Marks then best known for the song Happy New Year Darling co-written with Guy Lombardo’s brother Carmine and a handful of novelty numbers.   Marks did not just set the original poem to music—it was too long and complicated.  Instead, he pared down and re-told the story in the 3 minute format of the popular song and set it to a bouncy, catchy tune easy for a child to remember and sing along with. Despite the commercial success of the other Rudolph ventures May and Marks had a hard time peddling the tune.  They first took it to Bing Crosby, the reigning king of holiday music but Der Bingle was not interested in a kiddy ditty.  A disappointing parade of other big names also rejected it.  Finally, Gene Autry agreed to do it.

May's brother in law Johnny Marks launched a career as a holiday and children's music composer with the song made a hit by Gene Autry in 1949.

Autry was then at a low point in his career.  After the death of his idol Jimmy Rodgers, he had become the biggest hillbilly/country singer in the U.S. during the early 30’s and then established himself as the greatest of the movie singing cowboys.  His records sold millions and he had success on radio.  But after he returned from World War II service as a pilot in the Army Air Force flying cargo Over the Hump in the China/Burma Theater, he found himself eclipsed at Republic Pictures by the younger and handsomer Roy Rogers, the new King of the Cowboys.  His record sales were also off although his radio show Melody Ranch was still popular.

The song was successful beyond anyone’s imagination on its release just before Christmas, 1949.  It soared to # 1 on the Billboard pop singles chart the week of Christmas and sold 2.5 million copies the first year, eventually selling a total of 25 million copies.  It was the second best-selling record of all time until the 1980s and still just trails Crosby’s White Christmas in all-time sales of holiday records.  Crosby himself saw the light and recorded it in 1950 and scored a hit with it.  Many artists have followed.  But the version you are likely to hear on your car radio or piped into shopping malls is likely to feature Autry’s familiar twang.

The song did boost Autry’s career.  He followed up with a string of Christmas, holiday, and children’s records that were snapped up by a new young audience including Frosty the Snowman, his own composition Here Comes Santa Claus, Teddy Bears’ Picnic, and Here Comes Peter Cotton Tail. 

It was a life changer for Marks as well who founded St. Nicholas Music, a publisher, in 1949 and dedicated the rest of his career to composing Christmas music.  His contributions include haltingly beautiful, heartbreaking setting for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, and rock and roll seasonal standards Run Run Rudolph for Chuck Berry and Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.  He was commissioned by Rankin/Bass to compose and arrange the songs for the 1964 TV special.  That one show produced three more modern Christmas classics—A Holly Jolly Christmas and Silver and Gold, both popularized by Burl Ives who played the snowman/narrator of the show, and The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, a huge hit for Andy Williams.  May also composed music for other holiday specials.  He joins the likes of Irving Berlin, Mel Torme, and Sammy Cahn as a Jewish writers of classic Christmas popular songs.

It seemed like almost every American child of the late '50's had a copy of the Little Golden Book illustrated by Richard Scarry.  It was not a reprint of May's original poem, but based loosely on the Max Fleischer cartoon.

Rudolph has had many incarnations.  Many baby boomers will fondly recall the 1956 Little Golden Book.  A lot of folks think it was May’s original book, but it was a re-telling by Barbara Shook Hazen and illustrated by Richard Scarry which closely followed the version in Max Fleischer’s cartoon.  DC Comics also issued Rudolph comic books every December from 1952 to 1962 with new stories every year.

There was a sequel to the ’56 animated special, Rudolph’s Shiny New Year, and other spin-offs.

 In 1998 Good Times Entertainment released an entirely new treatment of the story in the animated film Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Movie with an all-star vocal cast.  But the film veered to far from either the original or the Rankin/Bass version that generations had grown up to believe was canonical that it failed miserably in theatrical release.  It recouped in home video sales however and was followed up by a GSI computer animated film that licensed the Rankin/Bass characters.

Cultural references in other books, movies, and songs are too numerous to mention.

One of many Gene Autry Christmas compilation albums featuring Rudolph.

After all these years, everybody still loves the little reindeer with the glowing proboscis. 

 

Rudolph the Alienated Adolescent Saves Christmas, Thank You

In the Rankin/Bass stop action animation version of Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer, there was double the adolescent angst and rejection as the little reindeer aquired a young elf pal.

The Rankin/Bass stop action animation TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer which first aired on CBS Television in 1964 was just the latest iteration of what then seemed almost like a timeless holiday folk tale.  And it would not be the last.  Rudolph has had more lives than any cat.

Versions of the show have been aired annually ever since making it the longest  running Christmas TV special in history.

Rudolph first saw light as commercial come-on.  One that proved so wildly popular that he took on a life of his own.

Robert L. May was the son of wealthy secular Jewish family from New Rochelle, New York.  He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1926.  But his family’s wealth were wiped out in the Depression.  In 1939 he was toiling as a low-paid in-house advertising copywriter at Montgomery Ward headquarters in Chicago.  

Robert L. May reads his story to his daughter Barabra.  Both were mourning the death of his wife by cancer while he was working on the project.

The stores had been buying and giving away cheap coloring books as give away promotions every year at Christmas.  But that year someone figured the company could save money if they produced their own in house.  May was handed the assignment. When May decided to do a narrative poem about an outcast reindeer based on his own childhood as an awkward misfit the project took on a special significance for him. 

His wife was dying of cancer.  He read his early drafts to her and his four year old daughter Barbara. Evelyn May died in July as he was still at work on the project.  He was so grief stricken that his bosses offered to let him give up the project.  May refused, determined to complete it.  In August he read the final version to Barbara and his wife’s parents.

Store officials were at first taken aback by the product.  They had expected a simple, cheery book featuring some sort of cute animal.  What they got was a little morality tale in verse, in in anapestic tetrameter in case you are interested.  But it was too late to get anything else so they sent it to the art department for illustration and ordered copies of a thin magazine-like booklet in a bright red cover.

The first edition of the Montgomery Ward give-away books.

It turned out they didn’t order enough.  From the moment the book hit he stores it was a huge success.  Printing presses had to run day and night to keep up with demand.  In that first year 2.4 million copies were distributed.  Shoppers who had never set foot in a Wards store were attracted by word of mouth.  They stayed.  They bought.  The chain had its best holiday sales in years.  The booklet was re-issued for the next two years and the appeal hardly diminished.

War time paper rationing suspended distribution for the duration.  But in 1946 pent-up demand was so great that 3.6 million copies were distributed.  Children all over the country were interrupting readings by their parents of The Night Before Christmas to demand to know where Rudolph was.

Such success was bound to draw other commercial offers.  But May was unable to do anything because Montgomery Ward owned the copyright.  In 1947 Ward’s boss—the notoriously flinty Sewell Avery most famous for being physically carried out of his office by National Guard troops during World War II for defying the National War Labor Board’s order to recognize a union for his employees—uncharacteristically gave May ownership of the copyright to the poem and character free and clear.

A spoken word recording of the poem was made in 1947 and became a hit.  Several big name commercial publishing houses had passed on a hardcover edition of the book believing that all of the free copies had saturated the market.  Maxton Publishers, a small New York publishing company, took a chance and put out an updated print edition in time for Christmas that year.  It became the bestselling children’s book of the year and would remain in print for decades.

Rudolph in his 1948 Max Fleischer cartoon redefined the story for post-war children.

In 1948 animation pioneer Max Fleischer made a theatrical cartoon short of the poem, one of his last original productions.  Despite being made by a minor studio without a good distribution deal, exhibitor demand brought it to screens across the country.  It would subsequently be shown on television.

May was always convinced his hero needed a theme song.  He turned to his brother-in-law, pop composer Johnny Marks then best known for the song Happy New Year Darling co-written with Guy Lombardo’s brother Carmine and a handful of novelty numbers.   Marks did not just set the original poem to music—it was too long and complicated.  Instead he pared down and re-told the story in the 3 minute format of the popular song and set it to a bouncy, catchy tune easy for a child to remember and sing along with. Despite the commercial success of the other Rudolph ventures May and Marks had a hard time peddling the tune.  They first took it to Bing Crosby, the reigning king of holiday music but Der Bingle was not interested in a kiddy ditty.  A disappointing parade of other big names also rejected it.  Finally, Gene Autry agreed to do it.

May's brother in law Johnny Marks launched a career as a holiday and children's music composer with the song made a hit by Gene Autry in 1949.

Autry was then at a low point in his career.  After the death of his idol Jimmy Rodgers he had become the biggest hillbilly/country singer in the U.S. during the early 30’s and then established himself as the greatest of the movie singing cowboys.  His records sold millions and he had success on radio.  But after he returned from World War II service as a pilot in the Army Air Force flying cargo Over the Hump in the China/Burma Theater, he found himself eclipsed at Republic Pictures by the younger and handsomer Roy Rogers, the new King of the Cowboys.  His record sales were also off although his radio show Melody Ranch was still popular.

The song was successful beyond anyone’s imagination on its release just before Christmas, 1949.  It soared to No. 1 on the Billboard pop singles chart the week of Christmas and sold 2.5 million copies the first year, eventually selling a total of 25 million copies.  It was the second best-selling record of all time until the 1980s and still just trails Crosby’s White Christmas in all time sales of holiday records.  Crosby himself saw the light and recorded it in 1950 and scored a hit with it.  Many artists have followed.  But the version you are likely to hear on your car radio or piped into crowded shopping malls is likely to feature Autry’s familiar twang.

The song did boost Autry’s career.  He followed up with a string of Christmas, holiday, and children’s records that were snapped up by a new young audience including Frosty the Snowman, his own composition Here Comes Santa Claus,Teddy Bears’ Picnic, and Here Comes Peter Cotton Tail. 

It was a life changer for Marks as well who founded St. Nicholas Music, a publisher, in 1949 and dedicated the rest of his career to composing Christmas music.  His contributions include haltingly beautiful, heartbreaking setting for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, and rock and roll seasonal standards Run Run Rudolph for Chuck Berry and Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.  He was commissioned by Rankin/Bass to compose and arrange the songs for the 1964 TV special.  That one show produced three more modern Christmas classics—A Holly Jolly Christmas and Silver and Gold, both popularized by Burl Ives who played the snowman/narrator of the show, and The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, a huge hit for Andy Williams.  May also composed music for other holiday specials.  He joins the likes of Irving Berlin, Mel Torme, and Sammy Cahn as a Jewish writers of classic Christmas popular songs.

It seemed like almost every American child of the late '50's had a copy of the Little Golden Book illustrated by Richard Scarry.  It was not a reprint of May's original poem, but based loosely on the Max Fleischer cartoon.

Rudolph has had many incarnations.  Many baby boomers will fondly recall the 1956 Little Golden Book.  A lot of folks think it was May’s original book, but it was a re-telling by Barbara Shook Hazen and illustrated by Richard Scarry which closely followed the version in Max Fleischer’s cartoon.  DC Comics also issued Rudolph comic books every December from 1952 to 1962 with new stories every year.

There was a sequel to the ’64 animated special, Rudolph’s Shiny New Year, and other spin-offs.

 In 1998 Good Times Entertainment released an entirely new treatment of the story in the animated film Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Movie with an all star vocal cast.  But the film veered to far from either the original or the Rankin/Bass version that generations had grown up to believe was canonical that it failed miserably in theatrical release.  It recouped in home video sales however, and was followed up by a GSI computer animated film that licensed the Rankin/Bass characters.

Cultural references in other books, movies, and songs are too numerous to mention.

After all these years, everybody still loves the little reindeer with the glowing proboscis.