Click To Play

Cartoons are meant for kids, supposedly. But this, while entertaining and really interesting, is downright frightening at times. There are multiple gruesomely cute deaths.

I excerpted these clips from a full version of the cartoon available at archive.org, leaving in only the stuff with Cab Calloway. Wikipedia says that after garnering a good deal of Harlem attention playing with Duke Ellington (at the Cotton Club by the 125th St. A train!), this cartoon made him nationally famous for the first time.

Info on the cartoon from the Wikipedia post:

In 1932, Calloway recorded the song for a Fleischer Studios Talkartoon short cartoon, also called Minnie the Moocher, starring Betty Boop and Bimbo. Calloway and his band provides most of the short’s score, and appear in the short themselves in a live-action introduction. The thirty-second live-action segment is the earliest-known film footage of Calloway. In the animated section of the film, Calloway appears as an animated character, a ghost walrus (whose dance movements were rotoscoped from footage of Calloway dancing).

“Rotoscoped” means they copied his movements exactly by tracing the film of him dancing (this is actually the first known instance of rotoscopy).

The act of literally “cartooning” his movements presents an interesting twist on that fuzzy line between hommage and mockery. Did the creators respect him, and put him in the cartoon because they wanted to showcase his talent? Or was this all just for a laugh at the dancing black man? It was 1932. I’m assuming that people saw it both ways, and that’s the way Paramount liked it: whatever makes a buck.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.