Boop concludes the film by leading a victory parade of the now battered toys, many carrying crutches, bandages, and makeshift substitute parts. In an elaborate and destructive battle, the villain of course takes it on the chin, and the air forces have the last say, by launching two planes carrying between them a set of weighted ropes, much like the Argentine bolas (See the kind of knowledge you can pick up from watching “El Gaucho Goofy”?), which spiral around the gorilla in opposite directions, tying him up in a confining coil of rope. (What exactly is a buzzsaw doing in this toy shop?) The toy soldier army springs into action, launching a squadron of toy planes in the process of their rescue attempts. Climbing to the top shelf of the shop, the gorilla uses a toy crane to snag Betty from her throne below, and carries her to a buzzsaw device to behead her. But he seeks a more perfect head, and, spying Betty, imagines her cranium as ideal. Spotting some stereotypic ethnic negro and Chinese dolls, the ape creates a pastime by pulling off their heads and replacing them with the heads of other dolls (such as that of an elephant). (After all, this was the year of King Kong.) The beast begins destructively lumbering around the shop, stomping on any toy in its path, and pointlessly knocking others from their shelves. Of course, a Betty epic isn’t complete without a villain, which is provided when the toy soldiers begin launching skyrockets in celebration of Betty’s coronation, awakening a large rag-doll gorilla. In another complex and incredibly smooth shot, a toy autogyro, with attachment of a clamshell construction bucket of the type found on toy cranes, picks up a hefty load of lettered blocks, rises to the ceiling of the shop, and releases the blocks, which fall with precision to form a massive queen’s throne for Betty, complete with her name spelled in blocks around the perimeter.
Unusual and interesting camera angles abound, including 3D tracking shots, hand-drawn full frame camera pullbacks, a toy railroad tunnel ornately detailed for a frame-by-frame pan attempting to change its details dimensionally from the viewpoint of the passing camera, and a wonderfully smooth rag doll dance using a combination of hand-drawn and rotoscoped effects. The Fleischers pull out all the stops on this production, with marvelous animation coming as close to matching the spectacle of Disney’s Santa’s Workshop toy parade as the New York artists could manage. (With all this pomp and ceremony, you’d have thought this film could have been the greatest commercial of all time for the sale of real Betty Boop dolls, if Paramount’s marketing department had thought to fully exploit its possibilities.) It looks like Betty is still in hot water, as there is a roaring fire blazing in the hearth below – but the flames leap out of the hearth, parting into two columns to leave an entry path for the descending package, and take graceful low bows as the package tumbles into the store, to welcome their distinguished guest. Even the shipping process gives Betty the red-carpet treatment, transitioning from delivery truck to locomotive to aerial delivery from a six-engine China Clipper! The box she is packaged in is dropped from the plane by parachute, and the tall chimney of the toy store below has to compensate for inaccurate marksmanship by disconnecting from the building and hopping about ten feet to catch the falling chute, then re-attach itself to the building. – featuring Rubinoff and his Orchestra, of fame from his association with Eddie Cantor on radio’s Chase and Sanborn Show), casts Betty as the masterpiece of all toy creation – a mechanical doll, which took five toy factories’ combined labor to produce (deflating each production plant like an exhausted balloon when the work was through). Max Fleischer’s Parade of the Wooden Soldiers (Paramount, Betty Boop, 12/1/33 – Dave Fleischer, dir., Seymour Kneitel/William Henning, anim. Just barely out of the holiday season, we begin with honorable mentions for two Christmas cartoon classics. Yet amidst them, animal aviators continue to occasionally strive for distance and endurance records to exotic lands, providing an overall varied bag of offerings to raise the eyes ever skyward, and the eyebrows in surprise.
Today’s batch of titles from the mid 1930‘s take up the subject of flying on a sometimes smaller scale – several literally scaling down the action to the world of toys, while others present full size aircraft in roles more incidental to their story plotlines.