Who Knew?Betty Boop
The roaring ’20s were
epitomized by jazz,
hedonism, and flap-
pers. And among the
most popular flappers
was baby-voiced
helen kane, she of the dark ringlet curls.
The popular singer was performing at
New York’s Paramount Theater when
she ad-libbed “boop-boop-a-doop” into
a song as a bawdy eyewink. Soon the
entire country was boop-boop-a-dooping,
and animator Max Fleischer took notice.
In 1932, his company created Betty
Boop, a baby-voiced flapper with dark
ringlet curls. Kane sued Fleischer for
$250,000, claiming he’d appropriated
her likeness and her signature phrase.
The judge, however, threw out the case
after Fleischer pointed to Baby Esther,
an African American flapper who had
performed the same routine well before
Kane. In fact, insisted Fleischer, Kane
had stolen the act from her!Popeye
In 1929, when Elzie
Segar was hunting for
characters to populate
his new comic strip,
he didn’t need to
look any farther than
his hometown of Chester, Illinois, for
inspiration. There was the tall, reed-thin
woman who wore her hair in a bun at
the nape of her neck. The local theater
owner, a man who so loved hamburgers
that he had his employees run out
between performances to buy him
some, was also perfect. Finally, there
was the one-eyed pipe smoker with a
penchant for fistfights. There’s no record
that frank fiegel was obsessed with
spinach, but he certainly looked a lot like
Popeye, just as the other two evoked
Olive Oyl and Wimpy. “Mr. Fiegel was
a little guy like Popeye,” one Chester
resident told the New York Times. “He
often got into fights at Wiebusch’s
tavern, and he did not lose many.”rd.com 119gl
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(fiegel).^moviestorecollection/shutterstock(boop,popeye)Who Knew?