Wonderful character development!

Purely Joyful Movie!

One of my all time favorites.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Minnie the Moocher (1932) *** (out of 4)Betty Boop gets yelled at by her parents so her and Bimbo decide to run away. They don't get too far when they run into a group of ghosts. The big highlight of this short is that Cab Calloway and His Cotton Club Orchestra play a big part in it. The film opens up to a Calloway song and showing him do a dance and then once we get to the ghosts they are basically dancing to his music. We also see the main ghost dancing like Calloway was at the start of the picture. If you're a fan of the Betty Boop shorts then you'll certainly enjoy this one as there are some funny jokes throughout and the animation is extremely good. Another highlight are the actual ghosts that look quite good and there's no question that the music is excellent.

Betty Boop is possibly the most durable of all Hollywood female icons, since she can still be seen adorning stationery items and girlie accessories almost 85 years after her creation! Even so, her real stock-in-trade – the Max and Dave Fleischer series of black-and-white cartoon shorts throughout the Thirties – are among the least-seen items of classic animation. She was a staple of Italian TV during my childhood, to be sure, but it has been ages since I have seen her image displayed on any channel! Although I have collected many of the comprehensive classic animation box sets issued on DVD in the past decade (be it Walt Disney Treasures, Looney Tunes Golden Collections, Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker or, best of all, Tex Avery), tellingly, I have not sprung for any of the 3(!) collections recently released on BluRay (no less!) dedicated to Betty Boop and what entries I will be reviewing from her filmography presently have been watched via "You Tube" and are simply more grit from the "Wonders In The Dark" mill.This particular "Talkartoon" short – which was obviously intended to highlight then-popular entertainer Cab Calloway's current song hit, who also appears with his jazz band in the brief, live-action intro – features Betty angering her parents by declining to eat her dinner (a helpful flower tastes it and promptly wilts away!) and fleeing the house with her dog Bimbo into the woods where they meet a bunch of ghosts, whose walrus leader scares them back home with a rendition of the titular tune. Again, for a film of its age, the animation is pleasing enough (if not particularly inventive) and the song itself is now a standard.

The title is a song made famous by Cab Calloway, and we immediately see him making like Michael Jackson smoothly dancing as she leads his orchestra in the song. Calloway was definitely a very cool cat, and ahead of his time.After that short performance comes the cartoon story, in which we see Betty being blasted by her father at the dinner table. She's in tears, can't eat and walks away singing the blues, ready to leave home. She writes a note: "Dear Ma and Pa, I'm leaving home because you're not so sweet to me. I won't ever be home again. Betty."She calls Bimbo and the two leave together. They get scared when it gets dark and hide in a cave, where a giant walrus (Calloway) materializes and sings them the "Minnie The Moocher" song. Bizarre?? Yeah! During the song we see skeletons, jailbirds singing on electric chairs, spooks, ghosts, all kinds of very strange sights. After witnessing these strange sights, Betty changes her mind about never going back home. Home, all of a sudden, looks pretty good.Not hilarious, but a very entertaining cartoon. I love it when Betty and Cab get together.

The Betty Boop cartoon 'Minnie the Moocher' has an advantage: at least the second half is entertaining whether you like the cartoon itself or not since Cab Calloway's famous song with the same name plays there. Before the cartoon starts we see the real Calloway doing one of his dance moves, another little thing to make sure you probably will enjoy this. The story deals with Betty's parents being mad at her causing her to run away with Bimbo. After they have left they enter a forest where ghosts and other scary creatures all dance on "Minnie the Moocher".This cartoon is very nice. The Calloway part is terrific with some inventive animation that fits the music perfectly. I also liked the last moments when Betty and Bimbo have escaped the scary forest where the happy ending is found in quite a funny way. If you like Betty Boop cartoons this one is not to be missed. If you normally don't, this could be a nice surprise.