In the 1930s, Betty Boop was a major studio who showed minorities in America, though through stereotypes, are representing groups that were never represented before. The studio was created by a Jewish family, 4 of them, and Coco the clown was a caricature of one of the brothers. This is unlike Disney for this is much more urban and stayed in New York most of their carrier, but then went to Miami where they shortly went bankrupt. Bimbo the dog seems to be a very popular character of theres, along with Betty Boop and Coco the clown. I also know that Betty Boop was originally a dog and they were together. There is lots of energy and craziness in the cartoons, each moment is unpredictable. At the time, America is deep in the depression, and the plan at the time was not to do anything and the world was floundering. So what people did was go to the movies, which would be in a huge theatre that could hold 3,000 people and there would be an orchestra or organ that would play over the films. They would play the news, then a episode of a show that would play that would end of a cliff hanger, then they would play 2 films that would often have an animated short before hand. Sound is starting to become a thing and Steamboat Willie is one of the first to have sound that was shown in theaters. The only other forms of entertainment during the time was newspapers and the radio, thats why in the early cartoons they often play popular music of the time.
In the late 30s, comic studios start to pop up. Before this, comics were not widely spread for there was just not enough material. The killer appeal for comics at the time became superheroes. Superman was one of the prominent ones, but he was never meant to be in comic books, but in comic strips. They took the original comic strip, cut it up, and created the first comic book of him. The comic I was given to look at in class was Amethyst Princess of Gem world. It is a very disco title. In comparison to the strips we saw last class, this comic has much more sequential flow and color than the earlier comic strips. This also felt more like a full story from beginning to end, like a tv episode, instead of a bunch of skits and stories. In comics in the 30s and 40s, comics could be up to 60 pages so the reader could get a complete stories. The page size is very different to, it is a pamphlet, not in a huge newspaper. The second world war makes the comic books much more popular due to the portability of the product. In the 1950s, westerns become super popular mainly because they were being shown on tv. Crime Suspen Stories was another comic I looked at in class, and I didn't like it. Too many words and the end of each of the three stories I didn't feel like I discovered something new. But one can tell that this was not written for children, having murdered multiple people. Comics were seen as evil, that they were rotting the brains of the children, turning them gay, and stupid. Many comic book companies grouped together and formed the comic code, which made rules for what could be in a comic. EC stood for educational comics, but within 6 weeks they were taken out of the market by the two major companies, which would enforce government censorship. Yet as the original audience grew older, the content became more and more adult.
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