Betty Boop # 84 My Friend the Monkey 1939 Cartoon with Organ Grinder скачать в хорошем качестве

Betty Boop # 84 My Friend the Monkey 1939 Cartoon with Organ Grinder

In the 1939 Fleischer Studios cartoon My Friend the Monkey, Betty invites a mischievous monkey (belonging to a very Italian-accented organ grinder) into her apartment to play with her dog, Pudgy. As you can imagine—chaos follows. What’s interesting to me is the setting. Though not stated, It looks like New York City, yet by 1935, organ grinders had already been banned from NYC streets by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. That makes the cartoon feel like a nostalgic throwback to a vanishing era. This is also post–Hays Code Betty—no more short skirts or flapper behavior. By 1939, the Motion Picture Production Code (enforced since 1934) had reshaped the once-risqué jazz-age icon into a modest homemaker. And what a home! Her kitchen boasts a refrigerator, washing machine, and a bounty of cakes—a surprisingly luxurious life for a single woman in the tail end of the Great Depression. In the cartoon, Betty tips the monkey ten cents (roughly $2.25 today), then offers to buy the monkey for $2—a steal, considering trained monkeys in the 1930s could cost close to $100. Maybe she got a discount because the monkey was such a handful... Lastly, it’s notable that 1939—the year this cartoon was released—was also the year of Betty Boop’s final theatrical short. The enforcement of the Hays Code had gradually eroded much of what made Betty unique