Some of the information is Boop-Oop-a-Dooping full of SPOILERS. Boop-Oop-a-Doop!
Leslie Cabarga
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Leslie Cabarga (October 9, 1954) is a cartoonist who was inspired by the black and white Betty Boop cartoons. New York was Cabarga's upbringing. Animated cartoons from the 1930s that were repurposed for television in the 1960s were something he enjoyed seeing.
Cabarga, as a young man, intended to become a commercial artist like his father. At the age of 15, he dropped out of school to pursue his passion of becoming a comic book artist. The primary stylistic inspiration continues to be the vintage Betty Boop cartoons.
Cabarga made an effort to look up vintage animation. Walt Disney, Max Fleischer's competitor, was well-known. Cabarga attempted to locate information about Max Fleischer by searching the local phone book, the New York collections, and the library in New York, but she was unsuccessful.
After showing his portfolio to Topps Chewing Gum, Inc, he showed his samples to an art seller by the name of Woody Gelman.
Gelman was once employed in the art department at Fleischer Studios. At the time, he had two former Fleischer animators working for him at Topps. At their house, they conducted an interview with Cabarga and gave him an item of bubblegum to illustrate. Gelman expressed his admiration for Cabarga and promised to produce a book provided Cabarga continued to expand his illustration.
Four years passed while Cabarga wrote and spoke with the former Fleischer Studios artists.
His search led him from New Jersey to New York, to Brooklyn, to San Francisco to Hollywood California, and also to Hollywood, Florida. The result of his four year search for answers was the publication of The Fleischer Story.
In 1974, Cabarga drew a comic book segment in Stan Lee's comic series on the Fleischers called "Fleischer Bros. Inc". The Fleischer Studios ups and downs are shown in the comic strip. The Fleischers' use of Kane's fame to promote Betty Boop is also described in depth in one sequence.
Cabarga depicts that the Fleischers did not tell the truth during the $250,000 Infringement Lawsuit. In actuality, the court case was quite complicated. Kane was suing for something she made famous, but did not originate. Peggy Bernier and Irene Franklin beat Kane to the punch, when it came to the baby-doll look and baby-talk.
Many Black female performers from the musical "Shuffle Along" came before Kane, and had used the scat-singing method years earlier. Gertrude Saunders paved the way for a majority of the Black women in the industry. Most notably a Florence Mills impersonator by the name of Baby Esther Jones, who the Fleischers used to defend their company.
Kane did not have enough evidence to prove that she was the inspiration behind Betty Boop. To this day, the Fleischers stick to that narrative, whether it be true or not. Paramount Pictures has acknowledged on multiple occasions in the Paramount annuals going all the way back to the 1930s that Clara Bow served as another source of inspiration for the promotion of Betty Boop, which explains why Betty Boop was originally a redhead.[1]
In the comic "Baby Esther" is depicted as a "fat" Black woman because researchers and historians had no idea who Jones was. Jones' real identity was uncovered by the "Betty Boop Wikia Fandom" during the late 2010s. She was a child star, not a woman, as people originally thought due to the misleading 1930s newspaper articles that said that Jones was a "Negro woman".
Ironically a majority of the Black women that pioneered the scat long before Helen Kane were slender and beautiful. A few examples being Esther Bigeou, Nina Mae McKinney, Baby Cox and Josephine Baker.
It goes more into detail about how Mr. Big Goes to Town was a flop in comparison to Gulliver's Travels. And how Max and Dave could not work together, in the end the Lou Fleischer, Dave Fleischer, Charles Fleischer and Max Fleischer went their separate ways and live unhappily ever after.
To promote the book, he held an exhibit with a "Betty Boop Impersonator" by the name of Sharon Greenberg.
In addition to simply writing and designing The Fleischer Story released in 1976, which resurrected the memory of Max Fleischer and his talented brothers, Leslie resurrected Betty herself. In 1990 he contributed art alongside Milton Knight to the Betty Boop comic Betty Boop's Big Break.
He became the go-to person for Betty Boop illustrations; he created designs for ceramic mugs and figurines, as well as more than fifty greeting cards and Betty's first LP album cover.
Cabarga acquired a new publisher after Gelman's death and continued to be published for twenty more years.
Quotes
- Leslie Cabarga: "Helen Kane sued Paramount and the Max Fleischer Studios for stealing her stuff. However, during the trial it was revealed that art had imitated life imitating life. Helen Kane herself had swiped the "Boop" schtick from a Black singer known as Baby Esther! Thus, the Fleischer Studios won the case and Betty was free forevermore to Boop anew." (1990)
- Leslie Cabarga: "In 1929, the teenage Mae Questel won a Helen Kane look-a-like contest and was signed up by Paramount to play in vaudeville. It was not long before Max Fleischer caught her act and asked her to supply the voice for Betty Boop." (1990)
- Leslie Cabarga: "According to Mae, Helen Kane had offered to drop the suit if Paramount would hire her, instead of Mae to play Betty's voice. Max Fleischer responded that he wouldn't use anybody but my Betty Boop!" (1990)
- Leslie Cabarga: "I started to research and met Grim Natwick who is credited having created Betty Boop. I called him in California and he told me his story, which was that he had been given a sheet music of Helen Kane and they told him, hey, do a take off of her." (2017)
- Leslie Cabarga: "Apparently, Helen Kane had gone directly to Max Fleischer and said if you use me in the cartoons, I'll drop suit, but Max said I won't use anyone but my Mae Questel." (2017)
- Leslie Cabarga: "In 1981, I got a call from Nintendo." (2022)
- Leslie Cabarga: "I based my drawing of Mario on Popeye the Sailor Man." (2022)
- Leslie Cabarga: "Donkey Kong, I likened to Popeye's nemesis, Bluto." (2022)
- Leslie Cabarga: "Pauline the damsel in distress, I based on the figure of Betty Boop, with a smaller head." (2022)
- Leslie Cabarga: "Shigeru Miyamoto the creator of Donkey Kong, had been greatly inspired by a Max Fleischer Popeye cartoon." (2022)
Trivia
- Before officially being hired to draw Betty, he renamed his character Betty Bupe.
- He was the first person to find out that KO-KO the Clown was in the public domain. At the time there was an ongoing battle of "who owned the rights"[2] to Betty Boop. Cabarga spoke to a King Features lawyer, and the lawyer told Cabarga that the Fleischers could go to hell.
- Cabarga brought some attention to Betty Boop, prior to his books and art, Betty was practically retired and dead.[3] However it wasn't just Cabarga. Ted Hannah's "Betty Boop Campaign" also revived Betty during the 1980s, after that the Betty Boop franchise was worth a billion dollars.
- During the 1970s he designed the first lines of Boop ceramics for Vandor Imports.
- Cabarga met with Mae Questel and Little Ann Little on separate occasions to obtain information on how they had been given the role of Betty Boop, both women shared "their stories" and signed an autograph for Cabarga. However Ann Little, lied in her statements claiming to be the "original" Betty Boop. The original Betty Boop was actually Margie Hines, a Brooklyn girl from Long Island.
- During the 1980s he did "Boop" stickers and products for Lisa Frank and began a series of Boop greeting cards for Paper Moon and Pop Shots.
- There were 44 Paper Moon cards and 4 for Pop Shots, which were the first Boop products to hit the modern market since the 1930s.
- According to Pauline Comanor's daughter, Gordon Michael Dobbs was upset that Cabarga beat him to the punch of writing a Fleischer Studios book. Dobbs scribbled out pages in anger in the book "The Fleischer Story" claiming that some of the stories were lies, challenging Cabarga. In 2022, Dobbs released his own book titled Made of Pen & Ink: Fleischer Studios, The New York Years.[4]