sighinastorm:lveshae:rikareena:beebeedibapbeediboop:boop-boop-a-doopESPECIALLY SINCE HER CHARACTER A
sighinastorm:lveshae:rikareena:beebeedibapbeediboop:boop-boop-a-doopESPECIALLY SINCE HER CHARACTER ACTUALLY IS BASED ON AN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMAN: ESTHER JONES.THANK YOU FOR THIS!!happy black history month Except that Esther Jones (“Baby Esther”, then) would have still been a child when the first Betty Boop cartoons came out, whereas Betty Boop was an older teen or adult flapper—for the time, a sex symbol. She was a red-hot hoochie-coocher, and an obvious New York City native. Also one of Betty Boop’s big hits was as Snow White. In her first color appearance, in 1934, she had red hair!I think it’s more probable (as was unsuccessfully litigated at the time) that Betty Boop was inspired by (New Yorker) Helen Kane. Baby Esther among others was brought up in example at that trial, not as a direct source of inspiration but as evidence that Kane’s performance stylings were not unique to her. It was claimed by testimony of Jones’s manager that Kane had seen Baby Esther perform at the Everglades in Manhattan in 1927 or 1928, the implication being that perhaps if Max Fleischer had been inspired by Kane’s singing style, then Kane had been inspired by others. Jones would have been at most eleven years old, and possibly as young as five. At another point in the trial, Jones’s manager Lou Bolton also testified that he thought Kane was probably in Paris at that time. Bolton also claimed that Jones launched The Charleston into popularity, despite that happening in the early 1920s.Among the physical evidence for the singing style being an established idiom were films of Baby Esther singing three songs in that style—but these were three songs which had been previously popularized by Helen Kane! The defense pulled this same stunt with material covered by other singers too.The plaintiff Kane failed to prove her case, but the Fleischers did not exactly excuse themselves from suspicion. Fleischer Studios did later admit Helen Kane was their model, something that was obvious when one of Betty Boop’s one-off character names was the same as one of Kane’s: “Nan McGrew”. If Fleischer and Paramount had chosen a random smalltime performer and said “here, imitate Betty Boop so we can win our court case”, the evidence as we have it today would look no different. I think there is reason enough to suspect that is exactly what happened.Finally, the minidress photographs above are not of Esther Jones. They are of a Russian model photographed in 2008. Her name is Olya something. They keep getting passed around misattributed. The seated woman is not Esther Jones either (although it is frequently republished as such). It is Esther Bigeou, who had her photograph taken by James Van Der Zee in Harlem around 1923. Van Der Zee was a major African American cultural photographer. Someone should do a post on him. There are other photos also being misidentified as Jones, which are of Esther Phillips, the problem there stemming from the fact that, like Jones, she also performed as “Little Esther”, a confusion compounded by the fact that Esther Phillips’s birth name was Esther Mae Jones. Still more misidentified photos proliferate due to, somewhere along the line, the false factoid emerging and becoming popularized that Esther Jones and Gertrude Saunders were the same person. I have no explanation for this whatsoever.Below: Esther Jones 1930 (2), Clara Bow 1927, Helen Kane 1930 (3).BowKaneUnintentional pedo implications! Isn’t it wonderful? -- source link
#tw pedophilia