Dave Fleischer | Dizzy Dishes / 1930 [animated cartoon]

bimbo’s nervous breakdown

by Douglas Messerli

 

Grim Natwick and Ted Sears (animators), Dave Fleischer (director) Dizzy Dishes / 1930 [animated cartoon]

 

In this, the very first of the Betty Boop cartoon appearances, the singing sensation was represented with dog’s ears since she was intended to be the “love interest” to the Fleischer Studio’s character Bimbo, the dog. She sang and looked mostly like a human, but contained elements of a Cocker Spaniel, with a droopy face, oversized eyes, and a button nose. But when she sang and danced, with the voice of Margie Hines, she became a kind of sex sensation which would mean that within just a few films later, she would be transformed almost entirely into a human being, despite the fact that her films still often contained Bimbo and animal friends.

   This cartoon begins with four anthropomorphic dancing flappers, singing “Crazy Town.” The club’s chief chef, Bimbo waits on a hungry gorilla who orders up a roast duck. Bimbo returns to the kitchen to prepare the duck, but almost immediately besieged by other customers ordering up “one beef stew,” and adding, “make that two.” Yet a third queries, “Why don’t you wake up and chop that steak up.” A sissy, emphatically batting his eyes orders up “One cup of custard,” and is immediately pulled away by another customer demanding, “plenty of mustard,” while yet another insists the chef “Change those potatoes to French-friend tomatoes,” and so it goes.

    The frustrated chef finally just ignores the other’s orders, pulling the turkey out of the oven, setting it atop the counter beneath of which he drapes a white barber’s cape, and applies what looks to be shaving lather, all with the intention to cut away any bits of feathers still remaining on the cooked bird.

     The orders continue to come in, but he simply ignores them.

     Meanwhile, our gorilla customer is growing more and more impatient, growling in hunger.

    Finally finished with the turkey, Bimbo puts it upon a platter and proceeds to dance it across the room, but as Betty begins her performance, is so taken by her song that he stops before the stage and begins to join in, dancing along with the headless turkey, and adding to her song verses the now-common “Boop, boop-ye-doo,” which soon Betty will add to her repertoire.  

     Betty quickly enchants him, as he finds it difficult to even keep his heart from leaping out of his waiter’s suit.

     Still waiting for his dinner, the gorilla salts a plate, inverts another plate atop it, and consumes the dinnerware as if it were a sandwich. Bimbo has now begun to perform a new song, with the flappers in the background and the turkey joining once again in his syncopated taps.

     The gorilla begins now to eat “leg of table,” gnawing away at the furniture. But still hungry, when he spots Bimbo and his turkey on the stage, goes on the chase, Bimbo and the dinner bird.

     When the chef is finally cornered in the kitchen, he pulls down his pots and pans and taking up two cleavers goes mad as he chops up everything in sight, finally whittling it down to a child-size choo-choo train upon which he sits as it chugs off, breaking through the wall of the club and taking him away into an escape in the surrounding natural landscape.

 

Los Angeles, November 7, 2025 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).