“Minnie the Moocher” starring Betty Boop and Cab Calloway, bounces along just like the hot jazz number on the soundtrack. Still popular today on social media, with colorized and high-definition restorations, the 8 minutes of film is a funny musical dream sequence with various animated creatures singing along to the title tune, supplying plenty of hi-de-ho’s in response to Cab’s singing.
Let's start with the movie released on February 6, 1932:
Paramount Studios, which distributed the Fleischer cartoons, already had relationships with Louis Armstrong, Don Redman, the Mills Brothers, etc., so Fleischer got them cheap. The Fleischer Studios were located in New York and Lou Fleischer, brother of Max and Dave, and the studio’s resident composer, visited the Cotton Club to choose the songs to be used for the cartoons.
And we see the hand of Irving Mills making his deals, leveraging his client, doing what he did best for his artists. The Calloway band was booked into Paramount-owned theaters as a stage attraction along with the feature movie that was showing, so the theaters screened the cartoon the week before to entice audiences to come back to see Cab live. Clever marketing at work!
Betty Boop’s 1932 campaign book set by Paramount Pictures. Cab Calloway’s characters appear on the cover.
The film opens with a live action scene of the orchestra playing the famous title song. This one minute of film is the earliest existing footage of Cab Calloway. The band is cramped and pushed together so that they all fit in the shot leaving enough room for Cab to dominate the front of the stage. The clip was filmed at Paramount’s studios in Astoria, Queens, New York sometime in October or early November 1931.
Behind the maestro (who gives a quick glance towards the camera) are
Lammar Wright (tp), Jimmy Smith* (t), RQ Dickerson* (tp), Reuben Reeves (hidden, tp), Leroy Maxey (hidden, dm),
Morris White (g), Arvelle Harris (as), EB DePriest Wheeler (tb), Andrew J. Brown (as),
Earres Prince* (p), and Walter Foots Thomas (ts).
They all appear on screen for the first time. And some* for the last time too.
For the initial credits, the band plays the opening horn riff from “St. James Infirmary”, which was Cab’s theme song prior to using “Minnie the Moocher”. The orchestra is active and excited for their film debut, with Leroy Maxey, the drummer, playfully throwing his sticks in the air, and banjoist Morris White smiling joyfully throughout.
Leading the band, Cab performs his signature moves, gliding slowly across the stage bending, sliding and mugging for the camera. More than fifty years later, well into his last concert years, Cab continued to use these same moves, and the foundation for the moonwalk is clearly evident. For a moment, Cab looks directly into the camera (partially obscured by the credits).
Martina Kessel, in The Politics of Humor, posits that Cab and Fleischer are “visibly co-inventing modern recorded jazz.”
The live sequence presents the sole appearances of several members of Cab’s band, the Missourians, as he inherited it. Earres Prince (piano), Reuben Reeves and RQ Dickerson (trumpets), and Jimmy Smith (tuba) would soon leave or be ejected from the band.
The cartoon action can serve as an introduction to early 1930s social issues and mores — race, sex, immigration, jazz, and drugs all play a part. The story includes the drug-related lyrics of “Minnie” and some raunchy visuals, like a nude statue coming to life and a suspicious- looking tail on the ghostly walrus modeled on Cab. A typical American audience of the time might have missed the drug references (cokey, kick the gong around, etc.)
The main story starts with the pre-code sexy Betty Boop, with her short hair, long eyelashes, adorable cleavage, and a garter high up on one leg. She’s unhappy at home with her immigrant parents and decides to run away with her friend Bimbo.
It’s almost four minutes into the film when the real fun begins. Betty and Bimbo have a terrifying but musical adventure, hiding from the dark in a cave, they are either accosted or entertained by a series of singing ghosts and spirits.
Cab Calloway was rotoscoped to appear as a walrus, among other creatures.
A huge ghostly walrus appears in a puff of smoke — this is the rotoscoped Cab Calloway. The rotoscoping — tracing filmed movements to make illustrations lifelike — was unusually smooth and realistic for animation of the time. The fat walrus dances and sings the title tune using Cab’s wild and smooth movements. The rotoscoped walrus so accurately reflects Cab’s dancing and gestures, exactly like the live sequence clip at the beginning of the cartoon, that it must have blown the audiences’ mind. As it did for Cab Calloway who, according to the legend, fell down laughing when Max Fleischer screened the sequence for him!
Kessel points out the “interesting racial ambiguity”, the ghosts and the walrus are white (members of the Ku Klux Klan dressed in white sheets to look like ghosts to terrify African Americans) but the singing musicians on the soundtrack are Black. The walrus, however, is entirely benign and when Betty asks “Whatcha gonna do, man?”, Cab’s voice just says “I’m gonna do the best I can!” This mix of Black and white performers, although primarily only on the soundtrack, prevented the cartoon from being shown in the south.
Daniel Goldmark, in his book Tunes for ‘Toons, points out that the cave can be seen as a substitute for a Harlem nightclub where the white clientele could safely be entertained by the Black performers.
The adventure ends happily of course, with the ghosts benignly chasing Betty and Bimbo back to the safety of home. The band plays a few bars of “Tiger Rag” at the end.
“Minnie the Moocher” is still imitated today. The animated character King Dice from the video game Cuphead was inspired by Cab. And in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), “Oogie Boogie’s Song” is an obvious reference to “Minnie”. Nightmare’s composer Danny Elfman also included a version of “Minnie” in his film “Forbidden Zone” (1980).
A typical local press ad including the featured attractions (Feb 10, 1932, Fort Worth Daily, Fort Worth, TX)
Review from The Film Daily, dated January 10, 1932:
“Swell”
“This Max Fleischer musical cartoon is one of the best turned out so far with the cute pen-and-ink star, Betty Boop, who seems to be getting more sexy and alluring each time, and her boyfriend, Bimbo. The musical portion is supplied by Cab Calloway and his orchestra, and what these boys can’t do to the "Minnie the Moocher" number isn’t worth mentioning. Cab and his boys are shown only for a brief moment the opening. Then a cartoon character, a big walrus with serpentine hips, performs the gyrations to the tune of the "Minnie" song. The effect is little short of a knockout, especially to those who are familiar with Cab’s stuff on the radio or stage or night club. Betty Boop’s part in the action concerns her running away from home because of her bad parents. With Bombo she goes into a cave, where spooky figures and eerie noises give them such a scare that they beat it back home.”
Sources:
- Leslie Cabarga, The Fleischer Story; New York, Da Capo Press, 1988.
- Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for ‘Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon; Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005.
- Daniel Goldmark and Taylor Yuval, eds., The Cartoon Music Book; Chicago, A Cappella Books, 2002.
- Martina Kessel and Patrick Merziger, eds., The Politics of Humor, University of Toronto Press, 2012.
- Christopher P.Lehman, The Colored Cartoon; Boston, University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.
- Alyn Shipton, Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway; New York, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Article excerpted from "1932's Cab Calloway Day-by-Day" magazine,
available free on simple request to this website's address.
