PubDHub, on Roku, has a metric ass-ton of Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, and other early cartoons going back to the silent era. PubDHub Gold, which costs like $2 a year, has even more. The guy who curates that channel has excellent taste and writes good descriptions of his offerings.
The Cab Calloway ones were truly awesome. If you want old and surreal check out Windsor McCay
Video Links
Full Gertie the Dinosaur
Winsor McCay - How a Mosquito Operates [1912]
His masterpiece: Winsor McCay’s Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend: THE PET (1921)
Maybe, but I suppose it depends who you ask. Based on photographs of her taken through the years, it’s Betty Boop, no contest. In at least 8 out of 10, she’s striking that familiar pose.
It’s a great video.
The character of Betty Boop was probably based on the singer Helen Kane. Here she is singing I Wanna Be Loved by You. Betty’s voice was very similar to Kane’s, and Betty was also made to look like Kane (with the big eyes and pincurls). Kane often worked the phrase “Boop-oop-a-doop” into her songs. She billed herself as the “Boop-oop-a-doop-girl.”
Helen Kane didn’t get anything professionally out of Betty Boop: not credit, work (because Mae Questel did the voice) nor money. Kane sued and lost. The Fleischers claimed that Kane had cribbed her act from a singer called “Baby Esther” who performed at the Cotton Club (and it’s possible that she did). They also pointed out that Kane’s appearance wasn’t unique - for example, pincurls were a common style in the thirties. Still, it seems likely that the Fleischers were thinking of Kane when they designed Betty Boop.
None of this detracts from the quality of the Betty Boop cartoons. They are still very entertaining today, many decades after they were created. The Fleischers and their crew were brilliant.
I’ve mentioned it above, but it ought to be re-stated – Mae Questel didn’t always voice Betty Boop. The Cabarga book lists others, as does the Wikipedia entry:
Bonnie Poe, besides voicing Betty in the cartoons, also portrayed Betty in live-action. She’s the Betty in the Hollywood on Parade episode that features Betty Boop meeting Dracula (played by Bela Lugosi!) A lot of websites, commenting on this short, say it’s Mae Questel, because they apparently think she’s the only Betty. Ain’t so.
But Mae was the most common of the Bettys. She also had a long film career afterwards. I recall seeing her in flicks in the 1970s and 1980s (And she was in commercials, too. She was “Aunt Bluebell” in ads for Scott Paper Towels.)
I admit I can’t tell the different Betty voices apart. It’s different with the Popeye voices – there were at least three of them during Fleischer’s heyday, and they all sound different.
Poor Bimbo. :eek:
You really, really would not want to be trapped in a Fleischer cartoon world! 
Fleischer didn’t have a monopoly on surreal. Some of Bob Clampett’s cartoons for Warner, and Tex Avery’s for Warner and later MGM were extremely weird.
Check out Porky in Wackyland or The Big Snooze
Or Bad Luck Blacie, or any of the zillion variations on “Little Red Riding Hood” Avery did. Or his Symphony in Slang
https://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AwrBT7QFdFtUVYgAtiFXNyoA;_ylc=X1MDMjc2NjY3OQRfcgMyBGZyA3lmcC10LTkwMQRncHJpZANfelp4eGlpRlM5R3Q4X3lDRmFMcWFBBG5fcnNsdAMwBG5fc3VnZwMxMARvcmlnaW4Dc2VhcmNoLnlhaG9vLmNvbQRwb3MDMARwcXN0cgMEcHFzdHJsAwRxc3RybAMxNwRxdWVyeQNTeW1waG9ueSBpbiBTbGFuZwR0X3N0bXADMTQxNTI4NTY4OQ--?p=Symphony+in+Slang&fr2=sb-top-search&fr=yfp-t-901&fp=1
And, of course, there’s Chuck Jones’ classic Duck Amuck
My fave Betty Boop clips here, in this “banned for sexual content” clip: BETTY BOOP BANNED CARTOON - Sexy - Nude - Behind the Scenes
Koko’s Earth Control. Music by Paul Whiteman. Just like Stimpy can’t resist pushing the big candylike button, Koko’s dog can’t resist pulling the lever that ends the world 
I suspect the reason the animation in the Fleischer cartoons was so good is the same as the one for Disney’s: the animators had yet to form (or join) a union and were thus (a) cheap to employ—you could hire lots of them—and (b) required to put in many hours of overtime with minimal (if any) compensation.
I love all the Fleischer cartoons. I have a bunch of Popeyes and (I think) all of the adventures of Superman on DVD. Hoppity Goes to Town is another underappreciated classic.
I saw Gulliver’s Travels on TV at Christmastime when I was three or four. Due to the rotoscoped scenes, I remembered it as a live-action flick until I saw it again when I was about 30. Imagine the shock I had when I saw it was all animation!
One of the things that struck me when I read Cabarga’s book about the Fleischer studio was his description of how, when people from Disney visited, the animators would gather around and press sketches into his hand, evidently signaling their availability. People wanted to work for Disney. I’m not sure why. This persisted even after Fleischer studios moved from New York City to Florida. And Fleischer had union problems and strikes, but so did Disney.
I love Gulliver’s TRavels by the way (not Hoppity, though), and think it still doesn’t get enough respect from the critics.
Well, Disney always was more of a “prestige” outfit, I think: First cartoon with sound, first character mass-marketed (Mickey Mouse single-handedly saved the Lionel Train Co. during the Depression), first full-length animated feature film, first (I think) Oscar for an animated film. Then there were films like Victory through Air Power that were produced during the war, the armed forces adopting Disney characters as mascots, and so on.
On the other hand, Fleischer’s works were always much more biting and adult-oriented. I could understand them occupying more of a niche market than Disney’s.
Plus, California had long before replaced New York (and anywhere else on the East Coast) as the center of the film industry, both financially and—dare I say it?—creatively.
With respect to Hoppity, there was a Sunday afternoon Kindercinema at the University of Wisconsin that I used to take my elder daughter to when I lived in Milwaukee. I saw once that they were showing something by that name, and I was expecting a marathon of Jay Ward’s old Hoppity Hooper cartoons. What a surprise the Fleischer film turned out to be! And they had at least a half-dozen episodes of Superman on the bill too! We were in cartoon heaven that day!
I agree that Disney was a prestige outfit, but you could argue those points. As Cabarga points out, Disney, despite their claims didn’t make the first sound cartoon. Mickey wasn’t the first mass-marketed character. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit certainly preceded him (in facvt, Mickey was invented when his distributor effectively took Oswald away from Disney). There’s even an argument that Disney’s wasn’t the first feature cartoon film – have a look here:
But this is quibbling – Disney was the company that did this successfully first in the US and mostly in Europe, so they get the laurels.
Fleischer was done in by Paramount, who had persuaded them to accept a loan and subordinate position to Paramount as a condition for backing the studio and the move to Florida – then called the loans in early, bankrupted the Fleischer Studio, and used the talent to create Famous Studios (which finished making the Superman series, and kept making Popeye cartoons into the 1950s). In a better world, Fleischer would have survived in Florida with more shorts and features, and been a competitor with Disney for much longer, if not up until the present day.
I’ve heard of this, but I don’t know any of the details. I’ll have to find a copy of Cabarga’s book when I get back to Canada in December. It’ll make a nice Christmas present to myself.
I must admit, this thread’s an education. Keep it up! 
When I have the chance, I’m looking over those links everyone has been kind enough to post. So much great animation I had no idea existed.
Actually, although Cabarga talks about the demise of the studio, I got the details of Paramount’s role from Richard Fleischer’s autobiography. Richard was Max’s son, who went on to become a noted director. (Among other things, he directed 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, for Disney, ironically.)