A Language All My Own

A Language All My Own
Name	A Language All My Own

Name	A Language All My Own (1935)

Betty Boop flies to Japan and takes her stage act on the road, and plays to great acclaim, and sings the title number "A Language All My Own" in both English and Japanese. After singing to a cheering New York audience, Betty sets off in her plane for the Land of the Rising Sun, depicted literally as such with an emblematic sunrise over Mt. Fuji. When Betty arrives in Japan she sings for her cheering Japanese fans.

Quotes

• Betty Boop: "Oh, dear oh dear what a busy day this has been."
• Betty Boop: "Which way to Japan?"
• Betty Boop: "How do you do?"
• Betty Boop: "Arigatou, Arigatou, Arigatou!"
• Betty Boop: "Got a language all my own known in every foreign home! You surely know it is Boop-Doopy-Doopy-Doo-Boop-Oopy-Doop-Bop!"

Characters

• Betty Boop
• Statue of Liberty
• Japanese Audience

Cast & Crew>

• Mae Questel as Betty Boop
• Max Fleischer (Producer)
• Dave Fleischer (Director)
• Adolph Zukor (Executive Producer)
• Myron Waldman (Animator)
• Hicks Lokey (Animator)
• Sammy Timberg (Music)

Music

• "A Language All My Own" performed by Mae Questel

Gallery

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Trivia

• Was released on the 19th of July in 1935.
• The Fleischers became aware that Betty Boop was popular in Japan, and decided to create a short film "designed to appeal to the Japanese market".
• The Studio's produced this short after discovering that Betty was very popular in Japan. Animator Myron Waldman, worried that Betty's gestures might offend the conservative Japanese audience, asked a group of Japanese college students to review his work.
• Having Betty sing in Japanese allowed her to slip a racy comment past the Hays Office, one of the lyrics in the Japanese song translates to "come to bed with me and we'll Boop-Oop-a-Doop!"
• "A Language All My Own" was written by Sammy Timberg.
• Shannon Cullem granddaughter of Sammy Timberg re-recorded "A Language All My Own" for the 2004 CD Boop-Oop-a-Doin as Betty Boop in English among many other classics.
• The cartoon release was dubbed in Japanese by Mariko Mukai.
• Japanese fans, the audience members are not depicted as the usual cymbal-hatted pan-Asian grotesques, but as more proportionate adult figures with detailed kimono and hairstyles.
• When Betty sings the line "If you’re near or far doesn’t matter where you are" her melody takes up a few bars of the song "The Streets of Cairo".
• The huge crowd that welcomes Betty upon her arrival in Japan is also reminiscent of a real event: the crowd of over 500,000 baseball fans who showed up to welcome Babe Ruth and nineteen other Major League players to Japan in November of 1934. The players were in Japan as part of a goodwill tour during which they played Japanese baseball teams.
• Betty’s influence on modern day manga and animae from Japan can be seen to this day, as acknowledged in this article about Osamu Tezuka, the artist credited with inventing anime, Dr. Tezuka is known in Japan as manganokamisama which literally translates as “god of comics.” His work continues to influence and inspire every artist in Japan, as every anime or manga that ever uses "large eyes" to make the characters more appealing pays homage to Tezuka, as he was the one who started that trend (alternately, he was influenced by the works of Max and Dave Fleischer, who created Betty Boop).

Links

• A Language All My Own at The Fleischer Studios