![]() In the Fleischer landscape, anything was possible, and seemingly nothing was off limits. In New York, meanwhile, Fleischer created a grungy, often dangerous urban world for its characters to navigate. From its home in California, Disney was laying the groundwork for the idyllic, fantastical fairy tales that would soon dominate its oeuvre. The dueling studios’ styles were diametrically opposed. After a makeover, Betty became the first fully human, fully female animated character.Īt its height in the 1930s, Fleischer Studios was a giant in animation, rivaled only by Disney. She appeared in the Fleischers’ “ Talkartoons” series as the girlfriend of main character Bimbo and was such a success that the studio promoted her to its star. Initially, Betty was depicted as a dog with a button nose and floppy ears. ![]() Her constantly shifting design offers an intriguing case study of how representations of women-including fictional ones-are shaped by censorship, the public’s response and changing conceptions of morality. Betty’s appearance continues to evolve today, with the character donning ripped jeans, joggers and sneakers, and overalls in merchandise and on social media. Beneath that iconic look, however, is a more complex story of aesthetic transformation, from what Heather Hendershot, a media historian at MIT, describes as a “flapper-secretary-adventurer” in the early 1930s to a “middle-class homemaker” by the end of the decade. ![]() The enduring image of Betty is a flapper in a strapless minidress, with a garter peeking out above her knee and large hoop earrings in her ears. … They would come for the Betty Boop cartoon.” “She’s a big hit,” says Katia Perea, a cartoon scholar at City University New York, “and she’s a big hit in the same way that Felix the Cat is a big hit, where she was drawing audiences to the movie. It's true, it will remind us that we are, after all, not God.At a time when cartoons were largely opening acts before a featured movie, Betty’s stardom was an outlier. And your father's name will shine again like a beacon in the galaxy. ![]() Then, having reached the heights, this all-but-divine race perished in a single night, and nothing was preserved above ground.Īlta, about a million years from now the human race will have crawled up to where the Krell stood in their great moment of triumph and tragedy. Ethically and technologically they were a million years ahead of humankind, for in unlocking the mysteries of nature they had conquered even their baser selves, and when in the course of eons they had abolished sickness and insanity, crime and all injustice, they turned, still in high benevolence, upwards towards space. In times long past, this planet was the home of a mighty, noble race of beings who called themselves the Krell. United Planets Cruiser C57D, now more than a year out from Earth Base on a special mission to the planetary system of the great main-sequence star Altair. And so, at last, mankind began the conquest and colonization of deep space. Almost at once there followed the discovery of hyperdrive through which the speed of light was first obtained and later greatly surpassed. By 2200 A.D., they had reached the other planets of our solar system. In the final decade of the 21st Century, men and women in rocket ships landed on the moon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |