Betty Boop Colorization: Snow White (1933)

Short clip of the famous "Saint James Infirmary Blues" segment from the 1933 cartoon "Betty Boop in Snow White". Featuring jazz singer and bandleader Cab Calloway providing both the voice and rotoscoped movements of Koko the clown as he is transformed into a ghostly figure by a witch. The seven minute cartoon was entirely animated by a single person, Roland Crandall, over the course of six months. Crandall was granted the opportunity to create his own personal project after working at Fleischer studios for over a decade. The resulting cartoon has become regarded as a milestone in the Golden age of Animation and is widely cited as one of the most surreal and bizarre cartoons from the period.
Original video can be found here: • Video
Unlike the backlog of a certain animated mouse, the classic Betty Boop cartoons have never been fully restored or shown much appreciation. Many are only available in low quality and some have been lost or fallen into the public domain. The only official colorization of Betty Boop cartoons was done in the early 70's and was a notoriously rushed process that was outsourced to a small Korean company. The result was a collection of sloppily traced cartoons with missing frames of animations and subpar coloring. This channel was created to catalogue the attempts of an amateur to try and show these classics the love they deserve.

[@TheTinman1996]

Love the color shifts when he morphs into the $20 gold piece and the bottle of booze

[@Shawno625]

Yeah I wonder how can calloway pulled that off

[@fluffymacaw933]

The gold chain part was traumatizing to me for some reason

[@Teilz.]

It's wonderful how you managed to colorize the start despite the "snow effect" that the cartoon has. And also, great choices of the character's colors!

[@DrTeeth-ss1ek]

ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!!! Betty Boop certainly does not get enough love, this is a totally amazing project and the best colorization for these cartoons I’ve seen

[@pixiethecanary7666]

Sadly it was banned in 1934 because of drug use

[@gothgirlgraveyard3539]

This song needs to be my ringtone🖤💃🏻

[@rabsmiff]

really good, far superior to the old hack-house Korean 'color' versions of the 70s on these works.

[@ashbash6111]

Koko/clown/ghost it’s basically Michael Jackson👁👄👁💅🏾✨✨👌🤌🏻

[@JonDan]

@@ashbash6111 .-. he is Cab Calloway

[@shalainejones3926]

This one always scared me as a kid I would always get nightmares but now it seems normal to me and the voice acter for him is really good at singing :)

[@retrolopez8321]

That was pretty cool in full color. I wish I can watch the whole thing.

[@pablonunez548]

Even the colorization is so smooth. 👏

[@otsu3011]

Love how coco still black and white

[@-deleted-4325]

This cartoon brings back what koko originally was. Hes animated realistically

[@dr.pepper7606]

Ever heard of a "rotoscope"?

[@tylers55509]

We never see cartoons like this anymore so it's nice to see it

[@ziraspride1564]

This is absolutely amazing!

[@bobsbrain397]

Thanks so much for doing this, gives so much more life into an already brilliant animation!

[@wafflekd-f5o]

That is very impressive for the amount of effort given to this. Some colors in my humble opinion feel a little too saturated like with the green tone of the witch’s skin, but it would be amazing if it were the whole cartoon.

[@bonniethenostalgia5237]

Cool

[@Muñecota-y5q]

Las mejores caricaturas en mi infancia como estas ningunas

[@delta1970]

0:31 i remember this from ghostemane

[@Ambipie]

They should've done the color like those paints they did on every slide by hand.

[@acinnamonrollthatcouldkill4635]

The clown did not turn into a ghost cuz he's not dead

[@tigercoke]

his eyes become ++ when they close-

[@youretheproblem5321]

Exactly I wonder why.

[@scyhh4233]

i like how the character's skin is kept pale to represent the horribly cold climate

[@dedsi8848]

try using an fps booster and upscaling to 4k

[@angelfabianmesina6099]

Own by betty boop

[@th3_r0ckst4r]

BETTY BOOP!! Omg money :0 1:00

[@girlgirl768]

1933........it reminds me of so many bad things

[@seanorielly3599]

Do minnie the moocher song betty boop colorized

[@jamesscott6979]

While I do think these are very good, what weakens them quite a bit imo are the occasional strange color choices. For example, the witch's skin should probably have been a lighter shade of green, and Bimbo's shirt should have been a more saturated red/yellow. Betty's skin color in all of these is way too subtle as well, almost unnoticeable at times; it can look almost completely paper-white depending on how the rest of the scene is colored in. It should be a little more saturated. The backgrounds being monochrome blue doesn't help either, though I do get why, it can take hours, sometimes even days to get a colorized background to look right.

[@bettyboopincolor6151]

Choosing the colors for a black and white image is always the most difficult part of colorization, particularly because it can be very subjective. I think when people try to imagine a b&w scene in color everyone will see a different result. I actually agree with you with the background, for these cave scenes I've always interpreted the background images as being sort of carved into the walls, but for the amount of detain in this cartoon especially I realize that sounds like a cop-out. I'm definitely an amateur and I don't even really consider myself to be an artist, I just love old cartoons and started doing this for fun in my free time.

[@tylers55509]

I have to say he sings better than Louis Armstrong

[@warriors6411]

Do you have Instagram? I’d love to repost this

[@bettyboopincolor6151]

I'm not crazy about social media myself, so I'd have no problem with anyone sharing my colorations as long as they give credit and/or link back to the originals.

[@raheemabbas5450]

@@bettyboopincolor6151 can you upload the full cartoon of betty boop snow white please an request

[@bettyboopincolor6151]

@@raheemabbas5450 If you mean upload the original cartoon, you can find it by searching on youtube. As for a full color version, as much as I'd like to it's way too much work for a single person to colorize an entire cartoon. This clip alone took well over a month to do. Maybe eventually I'll attempt an entire cartoon but I'm currently just doing this in my spare time.

[@raheemabbas5450]

@@bettyboopincolor6151 no problem if you have time to colourize the whole cartoon that will be brilliant

[@prohacker9243]

0:30

[@captn_kush4207]

i love color but idk why i prefert black and white

[@bettyboopincolor6151]

These cartoons were created to be shown in black and white and I would never try to claim that these colorations were in any way a replacement or upgrade from the originals. They're just something I do in my spare time fro fun

[@DigitalEelRich]

Um....no.