this was long before cartoons were ever thought of as ‘for kids’, the target audience of this one was roughly 20-40
betty boop cartoons featuring cab calloway singing, yes, but slang has changed so much you dont realize he was singing about opium, sugar daddies, death, weed, sex, booze, and gambling back when gambling was nearly as tabboo as sex and drugs. ‘minnie the moocher’ where cab calloway is a dancing walrus is specifically about someone who does literally everything on that list but die
most of the animation studios had their ‘thing’ to make their animation stand out, disney had fluid motion linked with quality music, warner brothers had top notch dialogue with carefully crafted facial expressions, MGM had comedic timing down to the individual frame that no live action comedian could dream of achieving, terrytoons had the budget of a ham sandwitch and a fistfull of nickels
fleischer studios however had authentic jazz and heavy toned subject matter, often crossing the line of what we think of as ‘cartoon violence’ into realistic
idk why this is making me so emotional???
I love this. I’ve always had a love for cartoons
Cab Calloway, he was a legend performer and entertainer, although he’s listed as a jazz singer he did much more with his voice, his singing style and delivery was very unique. Cab (with his band) was the first black artist to sell over a million copies of a single record and he paved the way for many artists to come. Happy Black History Month.
sorry to make this long post longer, but I feel like it needed some actual photos of Cab Calloway, who is, in fact, the greatest
G.O.A.T.
To clarify, the first video (the rotoscoped Cab Calloway) is “St. James Infirmary Blues” from the Betty Boop film Snow-White (1933). Vices mentioned: gambling with dice (“give me six crap-shootin’ pall-bearers”), alcohol (“hand me over another shot of that booze” – this was shortly before the repeal of Prohibition, btw), jazz (yes, that was a vice, at least in some circles; incidentally, the fastest way to hate and completely swear off critical theory is to read what Adorno has to say about jazz; I strongly recommend you never ever do that to yourself).
While the gifs are from Minnie the Moocher (1932). Vices mentioned: sexiness / sex work (“she was a red hot hoochie-coocher”, generally meaning dancer, um, with benefits), cocaine (“she loved him though he was cokey”), opium (“He took her down to Chinatown and showed her how to kick the gong around”), and, in the last two verses, a string of classics like greed (“a home built of gold”, “a diamond car”, “a million dollars”), gluttony (“each meal was a dozen courses”) and more gambling (“racing horses”), all assumed to be the result of hooking up with a sugar daddy (“he gave her things that she was needin’”).
HOWEVER, these two verses don’t tell us what Minnie has, they tell us what she dreams. In the film, Betty Boop forays into the exciting perils of the underworld and then flees back to her repressive but safe home. In the song, Min is ofthe underworld, dreaming luxuries she can’t have. Not unlike the Little Match Girl lighting a match, or Pirate Jenny, who’s not reallya pirate, looking out a shitty brothel’s window and waiting for a ship that’s not there. That’s why the song is so funny and at the same time so dark, not because it lists “vices”.
See, Minnie the Moocher was a real person. Her name was Minnie Gayton, and she was a homeless beggar in Indianapolis, around 60 years old at the time: “she acquired the quaint nickname of ‘The Moocher’ by regularly begging food from grocers and carting it off in a baby buggy. She slept on doorways, on porches and in garages.” And she died about 20 years later, during a terrible blizzard, from exposure. They did get her to a hospital, but by then it was too late.
Do you think she ever lit a match, and imagined in its light extravagant meals and sacks of money and cars and booze and coke, and some sweet love to fight off the cold? Do you think she liked the song? Do you think it cheered her up? God I hope so.
Hi de hi de hi de ho Poor Min, poor Min, poor Min
Ahh, but Minnie the Moocher is also somewhat based on an older folk song called Willie the Weeper aka Willie the Chimney Sweeper. Which follows much the same plot, a fantastic dream that eventually must end. Bit more explicit about it though, and Cab Calloway certainly added the flair and swing. AFAIK the origin is lost, thought to be 1880s, but here’s a 1927 recording by Ernest Rogers
