Betty Boop and Little Jimmy: A Bizarre Trip to the Gym

Is it worth the watch?

If you have a thing for vintage Fleischer cartoons, you'll probably dig this. If you get creeped out by rubbery limbs and surreal transformations, maybe skip it. It’s definitely not for everyone, especially if you’re looking for a coherent story.

Betty starts this one feeling like she needs to shed a few pounds. She launches into the song "Keep Your Girlish Figure" and, honestly, it’s a total earworm. You’ll be humming it for hours, even if the lyrics are a bit dated.

Then things get… weird. The exercise machines in this cartoon are the stuff of nightmares. They aren't just weights; they’re these bizarre, clanking contraptions that seem designed to stretch Betty into oblivion. Watching her get thinner and thinner until she’s basically just a pair of eyes and a dress is actually kinda stressful.

The pacing is frantic. It’s like the animators were on a sugar rush. One minute she’s doing jumping jacks, the next she’s practically a line drawing.

Then Little Jimmy shows up. He’s supposed to be this big debut from the newspaper comics, but honestly? He feels like a total afterthought. He’s just kind of hanging around while Betty is busy fighting for her life against an exercise bike.

It reminds me a bit of the frantic energy in The Frogs Who Wanted a King, where the chaos just piles up until you stop trying to keep track of the plot. You just watch the ink move.

There's this one moment where her reflection in the mirror stops moving at the same time as her. It’s probably just an animation quirk, but it feels like a horror movie trope by accident. Spooky stuff for something made in the 30s. 💀

It’s not as polished as some of the later stuff, but that’s the charm. It’s raw, it’s messy, and it’s completely unconcerned with being polite. The background details are sparse, which makes the foreground action pop in a way that feels aggressive.

If you want a palette cleanser after something like The Merry Widow, this is about as far in the other direction as you can get. It’s short, it’s jarring, and it makes me never want to go to a gym ever again. Good times.