Betty Boop, Triangle Films

[Osi Osgood]

Just needing some advice on the Triangle Films Betty Boop cartoons. Are they from original black and whites prints or those terrible colorized Betty Boops? Some companies released both the colorized and black and white versions. The problem comes with the fact that when rereleased these colorized versions, they left out a lot of animation frames in the colorizing process, leaving a fairly bad representation of the original Boop cartoons and even worse, the super 8 companies that released the color versions on super, simply released the color versions on black n white film stock, but you still ended up with a pale imitation of the original, 1930's black and white cartoons. The same thing was also done with the black and white Looney tunes in the 1970's.

[Joseph Banfield]

Osi, I read that too online a while back about the horrific treatment those films received during the colorization process.

I have three of the Betty Boop cartoons in their original black and white versions but I could find no indication of who released them. When I bought them they were already in generic white boxes with no information other than titles written on any of the leaders. To date, I have no idea of the film company who released these.

The three titles I located were "Betty Boop's museum" (1932), "Betty Boop M.D. (1932) and "Betty Boop in Blunderland" (1934). All three have excellent picture quality but the sound on all three was rather muddy so I rerecorded all three with excellent soundtracks from restored versions from the net and now they sound great.

[Maurice Leakey]

If you really want early black and white Betty Boop titles then 9.5mm sound are the ones to collect. I have a lot of these.
9.5mm sound film - T.9479 "I HEARD" Betty Boop cartoon - YouTube

My favourite 9.5mm sound is Betty Boop and Grampy.
9.5mm Pathescope sound film T.9519 "BETTY BOOP & GRANPY" US 1935 - YouTube

[Joe Caruso]

My favorites in 16, yes I said 16...BETTY & THE LITTLE KING, THE OLD MAN ON THE MOUNTAIN and NO! NO! A THOUSAND TIMES NO!...Cheers, no jeers, Shorty

[Brian Fretwell]

Osi, I read that too online a while back about the horrific treatment those films received during the colorization process.

I'm sure I read somewhere that they weren't colorised in the current fashion, but projected frame by frame on to cells badly traced pained and re filmed - losing much of the original in the process.

[Osi Osgood]

Exactly, let's say that there was a cycle of 24 frames per second of a walk cycle, when they did this 70's colorization, they would only re-animate and paint 12 frames instead of 24, thereby giving these cartoons a made for TV feel and look, a travesty compared to their original brilliance.