Notorious Pre-Code silliness but rarely appreciated firsthand, the early-'30s Betty Boop cartoons by Dave and Max Fleischer, released in twin DVD packages from Olive Films, have not been ubiquitous in the American mainstream in the era of TV and video. Betty herself has always been instantly recognizable and iconic, for purely campy reasons, but the shorts were hardly ever syndicated or reshown or serialized, whereas the Fleischers' own Popeye 'toons, as well as Warner's Looney Tunes, Krazy Kat, Ub Iwerks' warped one-offs from the '30s, and Paul Terry's Terrytoons all did their duty in constant syndicated-TV rotation from the '60s to the '80s. Looking at them now, the shorts' non-ubiquity isn't very surprising - the Boop shorts are hugely, monstrously inappropriate for the narrow purpose of entertaining gradeschoolers over their Cheerios before they dash to the bus stop. They are in fact inappropriate for nearly any purpose that comes to mind. They may be the strangest films ever made in America.

The notorious distillation of Pre-Code naughtiness in eye-popping cartoon form, Betty Boop wasn't a full-on character (she never wants or struggles or even says very much) but a totem-sign of cost-free sexuality and the much-missed hedonist groove of the Roaring '20s. With her often barely covered breasts, tiny black teddy, ever-present left-thigh garter, and non-stop hootchie-koo sass, Boop is an unmistakable libido object refined down to a few spare lines and shapes, and remains a campy byword for retro-sexual culture. She also represented a freer, happier, more carefree bygone day and age; however outrageous she might seem today for the early '30s, it's stunning to consider her as essentially an object of bitter nostalgia and eternal youth - the last flapper, the crystallized persona of a belle epoque that vanished with a hair-whitening pop just a handful of months earlier.

But Betty herself, even at her animated dirtiest, is not what makes the Betty Boop oeuvre remarkable. Indeed, her taboo-busting is perfectly sensible - you see what she's doing, and you know why, especially once she's chased and manhandled by a rape-minded character (it happens in at least four separate films). We all know what sexual desire is, fettered or not. It's the rest of the shorts' business, happening around Betty like a catastrophically bad dream, that's inexplicable and dismaying. Whether Boop is a snake-oil saleswoman or a Presidential campaigner or just a party girl on parade, the action around her is ceaseless lysergic madness, creepy transformations, miniature people, non sequitur anthropomorphisms, ad infinitum. When a man pours Betty's cure-all elixir on his pegleg, it turns instantly into a small third hand holding a small cane, upon which he strolls away, because why not? When flowers get scared and flee, of course they leave tiny skeletons behind. A Bunsen burner flame lights a cigar with a match and then naturally burns itself.

Any object can and does spontaneously grow body parts for no particular purpose - including hands and feet, as if possessed by appendage homunculi - and orifices (sometimes mouths, sometimes not) can appear anywhere, to swallow someone or to spit something up or to provide a tongue for some inappropriate licking. Miniature versions of characters can and do emerge from their ears or noses or pants, table legs have femurs, the moon eats pancakes and gets food poisoning. When a man pours snake-oil elixir on his pegleg, it turns instantly into a small third hand holding a small cane, upon which he strolls away. When the planets gather to an auction of Earth, Saturn turns out to be a Jew, and buys it. When Bimbo's ass gets slapped (don't ask), it fumes black smoke then emits tiny winged bugs. Then there are manifestations that even defy description - as in Bimbo's Initiation (1931), which the doglike Bimbo falls through a manhole and into an underground torture chamber populated by black-fur-faced creatures in onesies, each with a large candle burning on top of their head. ("Wanna join?" is all they say.) Who or what these things are meant to reference is a known unknown that went with the Fleischers to their graves. The juxtapositions aren't ironic or satiric or metaphoric; they just are, like the delusions of a schizophrenic. The Surrealists never went so far.

The Fleischers had been mining their collective unconsciousness for years already, starting with the Out of the Inkwell shorts in 1919, but the Boop shorts are the acme achievement of this unleashed sensibility, and are so much odder, with their ubiquitous rhythmic boogie beat and misfiring sight gags that are closer to nightmares, than Disney's competing cartoons that it's a wonder that they were shown to the same audiences. The most disarming realization is that none of the Fleischer's frantic, mad inventions are even remotely funny. Surreal juxtapositions and free-associative mash-ups and bizarre anthropomorphisms are all fine if they're amusing, or at least have some satiric or comedic point. The Fleischers, at least here, seemed to be virtually humor-free creatives, going wild inventing nonsense but ending up only with a torrent of nasty, deranged subconscious imagery that is basically too weird to be comedy. They're so ferociously odd, in fact, that the sunny, goofy, child-like vibe that traditionally flows out of old-school cartoons like heat waves is completely absent. Instead, the films have the rather terrifying chill of cognitive impairment, of helplessness, of maniacal impulses unchecked and roaming free. Watching the shorts, you're always on edge, wondering - because there is absolutely no way for you to guess - what collision or senseless manifestation will occur next. The experience is joyless, uneasy, almost sickening, a feeling probably accentuated by the filmmakers' primitive animation capacity and crude black-&-white drawings; there's no polish or gloss, just the torrent of nightmarish ideas and confounding explosions.

Watching the Betty Boop films under some substance's influence might seem a reflexive mode, and may be a good idea - that way, you're gigglingly safe from the irrationality and grim weirdness. You can't help what the Fleischers meant - were they trying to be funny? Perhaps they gave unique voice and image to the disorder and uncertainty of the first years of the Great Depression. Perhaps that's how they were intended, as a vision of an American landscape twisted beyond rationality and logic. It's doubtful, under the circumstances; auteurist intention seems inapplicable here, whereas how these films might've subconsciously embodied a culture-wide nausea, somewhat as German Expressionism was imbued with its nation's post-WWI anxiety and shame, may be the only explanation we have.

Several of Boop's most famous films, including Minnie the Moocher (1932) and Poor Cinderella (1934), are missing, but corkers like Betty Boop, M.D. (1932), Betty Boop for President (1932) and Betty Boop's Rise to Fame (1934) are, along with a few post-pre-Code sanitizations, like 1937's The Foxy Hunter, produced after the Code put a sleeved dress on Betty and made her an uncontroversial figure of maternal warmth. In the DVD sets, all of the shorts are cleanly transferred from fine 1950s TV-syndication prints, sans Paramount logo. Together, they should be handled with care, like disturbing messages from a psychotic past.

by Michael Atkinson