re: Betty Boop has been cast in new film collab with creator’s family. Take one guess.

RIP Aunt Bethany.

Helen Kane saw Esther and adopted her look, baby talk, and scatting style

That's why Helen lost her case against fleishmann.

If that's true, I stand corrected.

Every picture I used was listed as Ms Jones.

And Kane got her act from watching Esther

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lol this is quite the rabbit hole

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Yeah This was not how I expected to spend my Friday.

Since this topic is still being hashed about, there are a few other things I could add to my previous post. When electric recordings overtook acoustic in 1925, that early technology sometimes rendered some female vocalists with a bit of an unnatural high-pitch, giving them a sort of 'little girl' sound. Recordings like Ruth Etting singing "Could I, I Certainly Could" or Jane Green doing "Honey Bunch," both in 1926, tend to have a bit of this, as do some things by the Ponce Sisters and such. At the same time, there was that aforementioned vo-do-do-de-o style, with lots of weird little 'ta-de-dah' and 'womp-a-domp-a-do' bits inflicting pop vocals, being thrown in everywhere. It was in the soup at that time, and by early 1928 Helen Kane came along took all this to its gimmicky limit.

It made her a huge household name. My grandparents often mentioned her. Kane rode that fame into movies, and had important supporting roles in major Paramount films, like "Sweetie" (1929), "Painted Heels" (1929), and the "Paramount on Parade" (1930) revue. I've seen all these, along with the rather awful comedy "Dangerous Nan McGrew" (1930) that actually gave Kane the spotlight. Kane was influencing a lot of girl singers/actresses in that early-talkie period, with her over-emotive, baby-girl style, like Marjorie White, Jeanie Lang, and even Dorothy Lee. You encounter it a lot in those first movie musicals. Not surprisingly, the novelty wore thin very quickly and disappeared.

Helen Kane was a hugely-known cultural commodity at that time, a thousandfold more well-known than any imitators or practitioners of that whole baby-girl singing schtick. She owned it. And, frankly, it had pretty much run its course by 1930, when the Fleischers introduced Betty Boop to cartoons. That Fleischer animator who designed Betty stated directly that he used a photo of Kane on a piece of sheet-music to guide him. When Kane's career had bottomed out, and she sued the studio, the big studio lawyers did their job, muddying the waters and denying Kane was an influence. But just the casual historical knowledge of those pop-culture trends back then informs the obviousness of Kane being the overwhelming influence on Betty Boop.