Betty Boop For President

Customer Reviews:

Not What You'd Expect.......2006-05-13

CAUTION!!! If you're looking for the original Betty Boop for President from 1932, this is not it. Instead, it's a compilation of video clips from a number of BB cartoons that have been spliced together with new audio to create a loose and awkward story of Betty's running for President in 1980! To make it worse, the producer made it a musical, using 1980-period music of various quality. There are a couple of clips of original sound, but not many, and not for long.

Betty's voice is not the original Mae Questel, whose light, perky and happy voice indeared Betty to the world. By comparison, the voice used in this production more often sounds as if it's whining, and the dialog does not help, either.

The creativity and daring of the Max Fleischer studios is completely lost with the half-hearted and uneven attempt of the writers and editors of this movie to join together disparate cartoon clips to create a cohesive movie. They failed miserably.

The best thing I can say about this movie is that at its cost, I didn't mind losing what I paid for it.

I LOVE BETTY!.......2006-02-10

This is a cute and clever Betty Boop movie. The highlights are the scenes with Cab Calloway playing as a ghost (kind of looks like a walrus?), and as always, Betty Boop's cabaret/broadway style performances! Not only that, this movie for its time focused upon subjects and people that still exist today (the double standard, bosses lusting after women before they're hired, showbusiness men trying to seduce young women in the business to promise success, sexist male biggots, etc). It does it in a way where it's not preachy or uncomfortable to watch. And poor Betty, she's always clueless to the men's "come-ons." The only negative aspect of this movie is that at times it seems to digress into strange and sometimes bizarre scenes that make you lose track. At first you think that the whole movie is about Betty Boop trying to run for president, but at times it feels as if some parts of the movie were taken off from past Betty Boop episodes, which makes the plot nonconsistent. And for some reason, Pudgy is talking in this movie, but Betty can't hear him. When did Pudgy suddenly start to talk? Why did he need to talk? The voice of Pudgy somehow stripped off his youth and cuteness and made him seem older than he looks.

Still, this is a nice treat. I wouldn't buy it though. I rented my copy; I'd recommend you to rent it. As much as I love Betty Boop, I'm not sure if I'd be a Betty Boop DVD collector since some of these cartoons are a bit too outdated and sometimes odd for me. But as strange and loony Betty's world can be, it's still the kind that makes me love Betty.

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