Dave Fleischer | Betty Boop for President / 1932 [animated cartoon]

we want betty!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Seymour Kneitel, Roland Crandall, and Bernard Wolf (animators), Dave Fleischer (director) Betty Boop for President / 1932 [animated cartoon]

 

Betty Boop is running for President against Mr. Nobody, who argues:

       

         Who will make your taxes light?... Mr. Nobody!

         Who'll protect the voters' right?... Mr. Nobody!

         Should you come home some early dawn,

         See a new milkman is on:

         Who cares if your wife is gone?... Mr. Nobody

     In short, Nobody truly cares! In Nobody’s world even a pitcher of water has to pour out its own glass to quench its thirst.

     Betty, in contrast, believes that “this country is in need of a lot of heidi ho, boop-a-doop, and chocolate ice cream!” Moreover, she speaks a rather socialist line (“some of you have money and some you have no / If you send me to Washington, I’ll split up the dough!”); although briefly channeling Al Smith and Herbert Hoover in her speech, she argues also for several visionary causes, namely limousines for street cleaners, trolley service in which the cars themselves scale the giant skyscrapers to permit easy entrance, a giant umbrella that lifts up to protect the entire isle of Manhattan every time it rains, private booths for dogs at fire hydrants, and perhaps, most revolutionary of all, punishing all men on death row by transforming them in the electric chair into effeminate queers who go mincing away into a life ever after, a fate surely worse than death.

     At least the former thug is slimmed down, his face and teeth shined up, and his shoes polished all with the switch of the current—a sort of early version of the transformations promised on the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy series.

     Although, like many others before and since her presidency she cannot ever get the elephants and asses to agree on anything, she is still hailed by the common man as she marches through the streets with numerous sleepy animal friends on inauguration day. Betty is a hit, the crowds repeating their cry, “We want Betty!” The President Elect offers up every single citizen a large mug a beer at film’s end, 13 months before the actual end of Prohibition.

      Four days after the release of this short, animated film, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected the President of the United States.

 

Los Angeles, April 8, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2022).

 

Rudolph Ising | Freddy the Freshman / 1932 [animated cartoon]

cheering on beauty

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isadore “Friz” Freleng and Paul Smith (animation), Rudolph Ising (director) Freddy the Freshman / 1932 [animated cartoon]

 

Employing the Cliff Friend and Dave Oppenheim song “Freddy the Freshman, the Freshest Kid in Town,” Ising’s animated work revolves around the raccoon coat-clad Freddy and a canine meanie, evidently the “big man on campus.” Freddy crashes a college pep rally, where he’s greeted by some and jeered by others such as a canine meanie, evidently the “big man on campus.”  The very next day Freddie goes on to become the star of the school football game.

     Various contingents of the student body cheer on their team during that game, including a Jewish group yelling “oy, oy, oy oy oy,” interrupted by a lone sissy, clearly an odd duck, who insists, “No, bah, bah, beauty, beauty, beauty,” while the more conventional fans in the stadium shout “Hold that line, hold that line.”

 

Los Angeles, April 21, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2022).

Hugh Harman | Ride Him, Bosko! / 1932 [animated cartoon]

no time for heroes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isadore “Friz” Freleng (animator), Hugh Harman (director) Ride Him, Bosko! / 1932 [animated cartoon]

 

It’s utterly fascinating that the very first Warner’s animated short and its first “Looney Tune” creation was devoted to monkey-mouse-like creature named Bosko whose great love was a kind of Minnie Mouse look-alike named Honey.

     In this very first eight minute work from 1932, however, Bosko rides into the Wild West, having at moments to carry his exhausted horse, successfully making it to Red Gulch, a tough western town where, we’re told through a title-card, “men are men nine times out ten,” precisely the statistical percentage of homosexuals out of the total population.*

      Bosko is greeted with a shoot-out so intense that it cuts one tall lanky hound dog down to the size of a puppy. Bosko, himself puppy sized, finds bullet holes have turned his hat to a something that looks like Swiss Cheese. But once inside the bar, he’s greeted with a friendly-like hoot of “Howdy!”

      Inside he finds a piano player accompanied by a banjo player and a fiddler performing a rendition of “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” that is so very appealing the new man in town cannot resist a tap dance.

       The piano player gives the end of the song such an emphatic flourish that a foamy mug of beer sitting on the edge the keyboard flies into the air, pouring its entire contents into his mouth. Clearly this hooch is hot lightning, setting his stomach on fire and burning away his pants to leave behind a tattered garment looking a bit like a pair of female bloomers. He, suddenly revealed to have mascaraed eyes with long batting eyebrows and lipstick-covered lips, acquires limp wrists and goes strutting off like a suddenly just “gone queer” queen. Evidently, he was a sissy who couldn’t hold his liquor.

     Bosko ratchets up the piano stool and takes over the keyboard, shouting out “Hi boys,” before tickling the ivories so effectively that even two Kings, a Queen, and Joker in a poker deck jive in a chorus as the free-wheeling Deadwood barroom is filled with ambiguously gendered dancing couples.

     Meanwhile, the stagecoach is also coming round the bend holding the soon-to-be new girl in town, Honey. Around the corner, however, are the villains waiting to rob the coach, which roars so quickly past their gun-slinging leader that he and is horse are twisted into a coiled lasso.

     But a moment later they’re on the chase, eventually gaining ground, the stagecoach in its desperate rush throwing its driver into a prickly cactus and leaving his lead horse a skeleton. Poor Honey, precious cargo, is dizzily rocked back and forth in the rocky flight.

     The driver, once the thorns are our pulled of his ass, seats himself on the skeletal remains of his steed and heaves himself into town to breathlessly report: “The stage is robbed!”

      After a few futile attempts to leap upon the saddle, Bosko’s horse noses his way under his rider’s rump and they off to save the day, jumping huge boulders like caveletti. Honey screams out the window of the coach, and Bosko moves a few more frames forward as we suddenly perceive the camera panning away to reveal a small screen set upon a table, around which three men are grouped—director Hugh Harman, animator Friz Freleng, and producer Rudy Isling—watching their animated creation while adding sound effects.

      How are we going to get Bosko to save Honey, asks Isling? a question for which the other two apparently don’t have an answer. Well, we have to do something, Isling insists. But Harman declares it’s late, time to go home, and three exit, leaving their very first creation without a chance of becoming the hero who might save the day. No he-men around, apparently, in this “looney” world to come to the rescue. “That’s All, Folks!”

 

*The Gallup Poll recently announced that for the younger US generation, the percentage of those identifying as LGBTQ is now 1 out of every 6, although gays and lesbians are still very much in the minority, bisexuals making up most of the increase. More recently to this information, journalists have reported that there has been a much steeper rise, particularly in those identifying as transsexual individuals.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2021).

 

 

Wilfred Jackson | Barnyard Olympics / 1932 [animated cartoon]

getting nowhere fast

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wilfred Jackson (director) Barnyard Olympics / 1932 [animated cartoon]

 

This Mickey Mouse cartoon gathers most of the barnyard animals for a true series of Olympic-like events, featuring a mad quadrathlon which includes running with hurdles, pole vaulting, rowing, and cycling.

     It begins with some boxing and wrestling bouts, and a parade of three animal athletes in race walking which with its requirements of looking straight forward without any visible contact, one foot always flat on the ground, and no bent knee or legs gives the walkers a characteristic swivel hip rhythm which encourages one pansy fan, who interpreting it as a queer trot, rises up, hanky in hand, to call out a “you-hoo” from the grandstands.

 

     Most of the rest of this short involves how the smallest and seemingly weakest of the barnyard creatures, Mickey, competes against the large, muscular Tomcat Pete in the main event. Despite Pete’s constant attempts to cheat, spinning Mickey backwards from the start, tying his boat to a stump, changing the arrow on a mountain pass that sends most of the cyclists over the cliff, destroying his tires, and finally, tossing a large wad of gum to the truck forces Mickey, now near the finish line, to remain pasted in place. 

    In each case, however, the backward movement somehow propels him back into the competition, and finally even send his over the line before Pete as the winner, delighting Minnie and her friends.

    But frankly this race gets rather boring quite quickly. Even diehard sports fans might want to sit this short 7-minute film out.

 

Los Angeles, November 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

 

 

 

 

Wilfred Jackson | Egyptian Melodies / 1931 [animated cartoon]

walk like an egyptian

by Douglas Messerli

 

Albert Hurter, Harry Reeves, Ben Sharpsteen, Cecil Surry, Rudy Zamora, and David Hand (animators), Wilfred Jackson (director) Egyptian Melodies / 1931 [animated cartoon]

 

In this enjoyable-to-watch picture a spider, after a moment or two of debate, decides to enter an Egyptian tomb, and we follow along as he moves down several flights of stairs where he discovers mummies who quickly exit their cases and do a line dance. Even the hieroglyphics come to life.

    Who knew that the oddly positioned half limp hand children have for centuries witnessed in the pictures of their schoolbooks (if you recall, Jem attempts to teach Scout to “walk like an Egyptian” in To Kill a Mockingbird) was really an early version of Bobby Watson and his chorus boys doing a line dance? Walt Disney shows you how to be a proper sissy without even having to say the word “gay.”

     Soon everything is set into the motion which becomes very scary for our incy spider, he speeding out of that sphinx as fast as its eight little feet can carry him.

 

Los Angeles, April 20, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2022).

Dave Fleischer | Dizzy Red Riding Hood / 1931 [animated cartoon]

the metaphorical and the real

by Douglas Messerli

 

Grim Natwick (director of animation), Dave Fleischer (director) Dizzy Red Riding Hood / 1931 [animated cartoon]

 

In this, the real story of Red Riding Hood, so we’re told, Betty Boop as “Red” attempts to prepare for a trip to her grandmother’s house with food from the refrigerator, including a whole fish and several sausage links which her pet Bimbo (half dog, half giant mouse) consumes before she can even place them in the basket.

     Bimbo asks, “May I go along with you?” to which Betty replies, somewhat gleefully, “My mother wouldn’t want you to.” Like Mary’s little lamb, he follows her nonetheless, watching over her as she enters the dark forest the trees have joined together to create, overhearing their warning to her about the “wolf.” Caught in a stump, he too attempts to warn her, but without success, and she moves forward, displaying her shapely legs and thighs around which she even wears a garter.

     Before she can consider the warnings about the wolf, he begins to follow close behind.

     Observing several beautiful flowers, she begins picking them, Bimbo closely tracking the wolf’s advance. The wolf finally catches up and attempts to introduce himself, without success. Instead, he offers her some flower seeds, which she gladly accepts, planting flowers as the wolf, now with knife and fork, prepares to actually rather than metaphorically “eat her up.”

     Just as the wolf is about to pounce, Bimbo conks him over the head with the water sprinkler and drags him off to a tree hollow where he beats the living daylights out of him—literally rather than metaphorically speaking.

      Since, as Bimbo seems to realize, Red loves wolves, he dresses up in the wolf skin and follows Betty once again. By this time her plants have grown up to become violets, which she picks along with a rose and tulips, and finally, sings out, “I think she’d like a pansy, a pansy. I think she’d like a pansy,” with an unidentifiable animal joining in “The fairies like them too.” I suppose he must be a kind of goblin or fairy, but evidently the animators didn’t even feel the need to call up a full image of a sissy, presuming even children

could well imagine what one might look like. We note that the unidentified animal has a long hand with limp and flailing fingers at its end.

      Bimbo runs ahead to get into bed since, we’re told, “Grandma’s gone to the fireman’s ball.” Bimbo, dressed as the wolf and Betty, cast as Red Riding Hood, play the usual games, as she sings “Where’d get those great big teeth, where’d you get those eyes?” followed up by “nose,” “ears” etc.  Eventually Bimbo, pulls her into bed as he sings out “Far better to eat you dear,” this time metaphorically speaking.

      I can only wonder: where did all the flowers go?

 

Los Angeles, April 20, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2022).

 

Rudolf Ising | Smile, Darn Ya, Smile! / 1931[animated cartoon]

the annoying trolley song

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isadore Freleng, Max Maxwell, Bob Clampett, and Larry Martin (animation based on a story by Bob Clampett), Rudolf Ising (director) Smile, Darn Ya, Smile! / 1931[animated cartoon]

 

This rather irritating Merrie Melodies’ remake of Trolley Troubles, a Disney short staring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, is one of only three cartoons featuring Foxy. Foxy is the driver of a trolley that has several problems, including the predilection of the wheels to outrace the detachable car, forcing Foxy, at times, to have to race after them.

      Foxy also faces a dilemma with a fat female hippo who attempts to fit into the trolley car. Pushing and pulling don’t work, and the only solution seems to be to deflate her with a pin, which brings her down to size, but so angers her that she races off, her dress in hand.

      Finally, Roxy, also a fox, joins him, and both are overjoyed. But the trolley is soon stopped again. This time by a cow who refuses to move, blocking the track.

      All along chorus after chorus of the title song, composed by Max Rich with lyrics by Charles O'flynn and Jack Meskill, has frustratingly demanded that people keep smiling despite the troubles they encounter. At the cow stop, a chorus of hobos take over the song, the biggest of them suddenly belting out a chorus, “You should get behind and try to shove her,” in an annoyingly high, female voice while he gestures and preens himself like a “pansy.” 

      The commentator for the Instagram QueerAnimation site comments: “While the character is not visually depicted in the way other Pansy characters were during this period, the hand gestures, swishing movements, high voice, and (I'd argue) double entendre lyric, point to how the character at minimum was to be read as effeminate by the audience.”

      Finally, Foxy runs the car underneath the cow, but as it begins a descent it runs out of control, momentarily throwing Foxy out of his driver’s seat. Even when he races to catch up with and save his female friend, however, the brakes no longer function and it runs madly out of control, stopping only when Foxy is thrown out of bed, forcing him to realize it has all been a bad dream. When his bedside radio begins the same song, “Smile, Darn Ya, Smile!” the annoyed fox throws a piece of furniture at it, finally halting its endlessly positive admonition.

 

Los Angeles, November 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

 

 

 

 

Douglas Messerli | Sad and Silly Sissies [Introduction]

sad and silly animated sissies

by Douglas Messerli

 

While I have argued elsewhere in these pages that the “Pansy” or “Panze Craze” of the early 1930s at least provided us, through the brief appearances of the sissies, with evidence that LGBTQ figures

still existed and, on occasion, provided a brief glimpse into gay or lesbian life, I want to make it absolutely clear that in turning most of the LGBTQ figures into pansies or sissies movie writers, directors, and producers were in no way attempting anything close to a beneficial representation of homosexuality. If crossdressing was mostly a comic bow to those who preferred to be of a sex different from the one by which “they” had been born or used gender confusion as a way to satirize and mock male and female heteronormative attitudes, the representation of gays as pansies and lesbians besuited and monocled as male imitations was an even more demeaning expression of the still undefined LGBTQ community.

      Despite my argument for the importance of the sissy in film—the last expression of homosexuality permitted by the Hays Code before even that small token gesture was cut off—it was never truly a kindly or even slightly sincere attempt to represent gay sexuality. What Vito Russo wrote in his very first chapter of The Celluloid Closet is basically correct, even if today I think we might more fully question what he means when we say “real men” or in categorizing effeminate men as not being completely worthy of our attention:

 

“Nobody likes a sissy. That includes dykes, faggots, and feminists of both sexes. Even in a time of sexual revolution, when traditional roles are being examined and challenged every day, there is something about a man who acts like a woman that people find fundamentally distasteful. A 1979 The New York Times feature on how some noted feminists were raising their male children revealed that most wanted their sons to grow up to be feminists—but real men, not sissies.

     ...Homosexuality in the movies, whether overtly sexual or not, has always been seen in terms of what is or is not masculine. The defensive phrase, “Who’s a sissy?” has been as much a part of the American lexicon as “So’s your old lady.” After all, it is supposed to be an insult to call a man effeminate, for it means he is like a woman and therefore not as valuable as a “real” man. The popular definition of gayness is rooted in sexism. Weakness in men rather than strength in women has consistently been seen as the connection between sex role behavior and deviant sexuality.”

 

     In the hundreds of “coming out films” since the Stonewall revolution, being seen as a sissy is what gets high school boys beaten up.

     And what little credence we might desire to give those rather wonderful actors who performed the numerous manservants, interior decorators, clothes designers, chorus boys, lady wrestlers, and all those other persnickety sissies and female toughs, they were never intended to represent anything other than comic stereotypes. No one who could count to ten might imagine that any of these figures were meant to be seen as real gay men and lesbians. Even Samuel Goldwyn, who has not exactly known for his intellectual or linguistic prowess could recognize, as he did in 1938, that “Most of our pictures have little, if any, real substance. Our fear of what the censors will do keeps us from portraying life the way it really is. We wind up with a lot of empty fairy tales that do not have relation to anyone.”

      As if we needed to prove that the so-called “pansy craze” was not really about homosexual representation, we only need look at the numerous animated cartoons produced during this same period which demonstrated that even animals and unidentifiable cartoon squiggles could demonstrate the essence of a sissy. In short, effeminate males were not truly differentiated by cartoon representations of their bizarre traits.

      Below I discuss several cartoon versions sissies during the same period, 1930-1934, who didn’t even make it into human form. These images of queer behavior reveal, indeed, an even darker look at the homosexual male than the films that contained exaggerated human beings. And even if once in a while we might crack a smile at this satirizing of gay sexual behavior, far more often they make one angry and even sick at the thought that homosexuals could be portrayed in this manner, just like the racist and sexist attitudes often expressed in these very same cartoons.

 

Los Angeles, April 10, 2022

Reprinted in My Queer Cinema blog (April 2022).

George Rufle and Frank Sherman | Doughnuts / 1933 [animated cartoon]

liquor’s quicker

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Rufle and Frank Sherman (directors) Doughnuts / 1933 [animated cartoon]

 

In this last Tom and Jerry short animation, the duo have gone into doughnut-making and are attending the Baker’s convention. Once again, as in many of this series we encounter a full parade with bands and floats representing each baker, the Cupid Wedding Baker, the Orthodox Jewish matzos maker (a fairly antisemitic representation), the Pretzel Champion, and the Pansy Brand Cream Puffs, headed by two sissy boys and led by high-trotting horses (another early 1930s bow to the “panze craze”).

 

     With the parade over, the bakers man their various booths as the crowds rush into the convention grounds. The masses, however, skip right by Tom and Jerry’s doughnut concession, storming past the pansy puffs, and utterly ignoring the matzos booth, the Jewish men manning the stand quickly posting signs declaring “clearance,” “fire,” and “bankruptcy” sales. They head straight for the pretzel maker only because with those champion crunchies his stand offers up beer!

 

   Tom and Jerry and all the other except for the champion seem doomed, even though the doughnut makers have the most modern of methods for stamping out their product. But is still the Judges’ Prize to be awarded.

    The Jewish matzos duo offer up a rounded version of their product on a phonograph, producing a Yiddish song.

   They stroll past “Ye Pie Shoppe,” where a baker shoots raisins into the gingerbread men with a machine gun, and finally reach Tom and Jerry’s doughnut stand. Jerry offers up a demonstration of how they flatten out their dough for the doughnuts by running a miniature steam roller over the rounds of dough sent off on a conveyer belt. Soon after he jumps upon a large metal pogo stick to create the holes, as the conveyor belts drops them into the hot oil where they cook.

     The judges stand watching, but you can guess that they are not impressed.

   The employee in charge of watching the dough drop upon the belt, however, is a heavy tippler, drinking directly from the jug, and as he gets drunk and stumbles around the vast mixer, he accidently spills the jug’s contents into the dough, he and the jug joining it soon after. Finally, extricating himself, covered with the dough he dances down the conveyor belt.

    Almost immediately the judges taste a sample, absolutely delighted with the results. The female judge gathers up a whole pile of doughnuts and drops them into her mouth, and leaps into the air in drunken delight, displaying her under garments.

 

      The crowds gathered round the pretzel maker suddenly come pouring over to the doughnut stand, while the judges, now thoroughly soused, begin to dance a kind of ring-around-the-rosy until the two prissy males split off a in proper fox-trot, leaving the female judge to settle for the inebriated doughboy.

      Soon everyone is dancing in celebration of Tom and Jerry’s winning the gold cup. In the foreground Tom and Jerry do a gig, while nearby one of the Jewish men and the pansy cream puff boy together perform a swivel of their hips.   

 

Los Angeles, November 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).