Directed by Dave Fleischer

Produced by Max Fleischer

Animated by Grim Natwick and Ted Sears

Featuring the voices of Margie Hines and Billy Murray

STORY

Before Betty Boop became BETTY BOOP, before the famous curls, earrings and instantly recognizable silhouette were firmly established, she wandered into a Fleischer Studios cartoon called DIZZY DISHES — and animation history changed.

The setting is a wonderfully chaotic restaurant and nightclub populated almost entirely by anthropomorphized animals. Flapper cats sing and dance, animal customers fill the tables, an impatient gorilla demands his dinner and Bimbo — Fleischer Studios’ canine star of the moment — is trying to keep the whole operation moving.

Bimbo is charged with serving a hungry gorilla who wants roast duck. Unfortunately for both customer and dinner, something much more interesting suddenly appears on the nightclub stage.

Her name is not yet announced as Betty Boop.

But there she is.

Betty enters as an anthropomorphic female dog — generally identified as a French poodle — complete with long canine ears and a tiny black nose. She sings, dances, flirts with the audience and delivers those irresistible little vocal flourishes that would soon become inseparable from her identity:

BOOP! BOOP! BE-DOOP!

Bimbo is instantly smitten.

The roast duck is forgotten.

The customer is forgotten.

Practically everything is forgotten.

Bimbo joins Betty’s performance while an increasingly furious gorilla waits for dinner, setting off exactly the kind of surreal, musical, anything-can-happen chaos that made early Fleischer animation so wonderfully unpredictable.

Betty may technically be the supporting character.

For about five seconds.

Because the moment she takes the stage, she steals the cartoon.

And there is no looking back.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS

THIS IS WHERE BETTY BOOP BEGINS.

Dizzy Dishes, released in 1930 as part of Fleischer Studios’ Talkartoon series, marks the very first screen appearance of the character who would become one of the most recognizable animated stars in history.

Betty was not yet the fully human-looking character audiences would soon recognize. In her earliest incarnation she was designed as an anthropomorphic female dog, generally described as a French poodle.

Her long floppy ears would eventually disappear as the character evolved, visually transforming into the hoop earrings associated with the classic Betty Boop design.

Even more fascinating: Betty was not originally intended to be the star.

Bimbo was.

Bimbo had already been established as one of Fleischer Studios’ principal animated characters, and Dizzy Dishes is fundamentally built around his comic misadventures.

Then Betty walks onto the stage.

That supporting character would soon eclipse Bimbo in popularity and become a star in her own right.

Talk about stealing the spotlight.

The entire nightclub world surrounding her is also wonderfully Fleischer. Human behavior is assigned freely to animals: flapper cats perform as chorus girls, Bimbo works as a waiter and chef, a gorilla sits at a table ordering dinner, and the boundaries between people, animals and objects seem almost nonexistent.

That uninhibited visual imagination became one of the signatures of early Fleischer animation.

Betty’s musical performance is “I Have to Have You,” sung by Margie Hines.

And already we hear the playful vocalizations that audiences would forever associate with Betty Boop.

Boop! Boop! Be-doop!

The character was partly modeled on the popular “baby voiced” singing style associated with entertainer Helen Kane, whose performances helped popularize the famous “boop-oop-a-doop” style.

Animator Grim Natwick played a major role in developing Betty’s earliest appearance. The character would evolve dramatically over the cartoons that followed, becoming less canine and increasingly human until the familiar Betty Boop emerged.

And what makes Dizzy Dishes especially wonderful to watch today is that we are witnessing that evolution at its very beginning.

Betty has not quite become Betty yet.

But the charisma is already there.

The attitude is there.

The musical playfulness is there.

And most importantly…

THE BOOP IS THERE.

THE AIN REASON

Some films are classics because they perfectly represent an era.

Others are classics because they introduce something the world never forgets.

DIZZY DISHES does both.

It captures the wonderfully strange, musically driven freedom of early sound animation while introducing a character who would become an enduring symbol of American popular culture.

There is also something irresistibly entertaining about watching Betty arrive before anyone — including the filmmakers — could possibly have known exactly what they had created.

Bimbo is supposed to be the star.

Betty has other plans.

For AIN, that makes Dizzy Dishes much more than another vintage cartoon.

It is an origin story.

A six-minute piece of animation history in which an unnamed canine nightclub performer walks onto a stage, sings a few bars, tosses out a few boops…

…and steals the spotlight for nearly a century.

Welcome to the beginning of Betty Boop.