Cinema: Censors & Swing

To any dictator trying to run things on a strictly authoritarian basis, the devastating technique of Popeye the Sailor-man in dealing with bulldozers is bound to be disturbing. Last week in Berlin Nazi censors decided Popeye’s spinachy vigor was getting a mite too rich for Aryan blood, banned one of his latest cinema cartoons, Popeye’s Parrot.

Of more concern last week to Popeye’s cinema sponsor, Cartoonist Max Fleischer, was the necessity of making hippy, squeaky, short-skirted Betty Boop play second fiddle to a new jitter bug creature named Sally Swing. Eight-year-old relic of the plastic, or boop-boop-a-doop, age of jazz music, Betty had successfully weathered the Afro-manic, or hi-de-ho, period without once being referred to as corny. But to the orgiastic, or zazz-u-zazz, generation Betty’s presence “has been like having grandma occupying one end of the sofa all evening. A wide-eyed, sportily clad lass with a dink perched on loosely brushed locks, Sally steps around in gillies and low socks, will jitter like any Benny Goodman votary in the twelve cartoons planned for her this season.