Betty Boop and Grampy (1935)
On her way to a party, Betty Boop's singing pulls a fireman, a traffic cop, and a moving crew off the job to follow along, and once she arrives, her eccentric host Grampy turns his house into a Rube Goldberg machine of gadgets for the guests.
Betty Boop and Grampy introduces Grampy, the tinkering inventor voiced by Everett Clark, who would recur through the rest of the Betty Boop series turning household junk into elaborate contraptions.
Background
Released on August 16, 1935, Betty Boop and Grampy marks the first appearance of Grampy, an eccentric inventor voiced by Everett Clark who would recur through much of the remaining Betty Boop series. Directed by Dave Fleischer and produced by Max Fleischer, with Mae Questel voicing Betty, the short establishes the character’s defining trait immediately: a house full of Rube Goldberg-style gadgets built from ordinary household junk, including a mechanism that wheels his entire house to the front door whenever the bell rings. It arrived as Fleischer Studios, facing tightening Hays Code restrictions on Betty’s earlier risqué humor, was leaning more heavily on supporting characters and mechanical sight gags.
What to watch for
As Betty strolls toward the party singing “I’m On My Way to Grampy’s,” a fireman, a traffic cop, and a pair of moving men abandon their jobs mid-task, dropping a burning house, a traffic jam, and a piano respectively, to fall in behind her. Once everyone arrives, the film turns over most of its runtime to Grampy’s inventions: a ceiling light whose glass shade doubles as a punch bowl, an old umbrella rigged to slice a cake into wedges, and other contraptions built from scrap. The jokes are mechanical rather than verbal, relying on the sheer accumulation of gadgets rather than story to carry the short’s seven minutes.
