It's a quality that is, in its own bizarre way, bizarre. In searching for a suitably bizarre film, I briefly entertained the notion of writing about the 2008 Katherine Heigl romantic comedy 27 Dresses. Not because it’s actually bizarre, but because it is so relentlessly, aggressively average that it achieves hitherto unreached levels of mediocrity. Many films lapsed into public-domain status, which accounts for that preponderance of poor-quality DVDs of Betty Boop films. Poor business decisions in the 1930s and ’40s rippled through the decades, bringing about a situation in which, as I understand it, the copyright statuses of many Fleischer films remained in limbo for a long while. But they achieved these advances at the expense of focusing on, you know, running their studio. It’s too much history to delve into here, but suffice it to say that the Fleischers’ strength was technically proficient, sometimes trendsetting animation. To take it back even further: The reason that the Betty Boop films were available only on crummy, public-domain releases has to do with the now-defunct Fleischer Studios’ legacy of irresponsible business practices. This is a major film, largely because it is so majorly weird.
Even the Olive Films Boop discs that have been released, though, don’t include Snow White, which to me is an oversight. Before these discs, the historically important and pretty terrific Boop films were available only in lousy, cut-rate DVD editions that used old kinescopes for source material. The first two volumes of a planned four-volume DVD / Blu-Ray Betty Boop collection were released in 2013 by Olive Films, a good, small-label video company. (I'm also happy to note that this is the first "What I'm Watching" film that is available on YouTube, so you can watch it below.)Īs an aside, the reason for the film’s relative obscurity - and for the fairly low level of cultural currency that Betty Boop seems to have these days - may have something to do with the fact that there had never been an official, high-quality DVD release of any of the Betty Boop films. But it seems to me that this 80-year-old film has slipped through the cracks even many lovers of animation don’t know about it, so it seemed ripe for revisiting. In animation circles, Fleischers’ Snow White is well-known as an oddity, so I’m not breaking new ground here. Rather, I wanted to write about a “normal” film that has a current of strangeness coursing through it. I didn’t want to write about these or other films that seemed to cultivate strangeness, even as, generally speaking, I welcome that artistic gesture. Informed that I could write about any bizarre film I wished, I thought for weeks about which to choose, rejecting such obvious options as Otto Preminger’s Skidoo, almost anything by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal’s rather remarkable 1971 film Viva la Muerte (a showing of the last was the occasion of one of my first dates with my now-wife make of that what you will). The occasion for my return to this film is that this particular journal will soon publish a special issue on “Bizarre Films,” and the 1933 Snow White is a gold-medal winner in bizarreness. In preparation for an essay that I’ve been asked to write for a film journal, I’ve recently returned to a film that I’ve seen many times before, and it’s one that never fails to instill in me a mighty sense of “HUH?” It’s an animated version of Snow White, but not the famous Disney version from 1937 this one predates Disney’s epochal film by four years, and features Fleischer Studios’ sauciest leading lady, Betty Boop, in one of her weirdest star turns. In this feature, published occasionally here on Live Culture, I'll write about the films I'm currently watching, and connect them to film history and art. I gave that up to move to Vermont and write for Seven Days, but movies will always been my first love. One career ago, I was a professor of film studies.
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