Miss Helen Kane

The Original Betty Boop

A tribute to a great inventrix: Miss Helen Kane

The 1920s were a time of great invention. Penicillin. The first affordable and reliable family motor cars. Sliced bread. But perhaps most significant of all for the development of human civilisation, the fundamental phrase that shaped the ideology of the 20th century:

Boop-boop-a-doop!

The bulldozer, the stop-light, the lie detector and a hundred other inventions of that noble decade pale in comparison to the invention of this one phrase, pregnant not only with meaning, but with the spirit of an age.

It happened in 1928, when she was appearing at the Paramount Theater in Times Square.

Miss Kane was singing the popular song “That’s My Weakness Now,” when she interpolated the scat Lyrics “Boop-Boop-a-Doop.” “I just put it in at one of the rehearsals,” she later mused. “A sort of interlude. It’s hard to explain—I haven’t explained it to myself yet."

Naturally the effect of such a fundamental discovery upon the audience was phenomenal.

The audience went crazy, and four days later, Helen Kane’s name went up in lights. Seemingly overnight, the world changed for Helen. “One day I had fifty cents,” she laughed, “and the next day I had $50,000.”

Well not quite the next day. But she was signed by Oscar Hammerstein for $5,500 a week. In 1928 that was a reasonable amount of money.

“Money was falling off trees,” said Miss Kane. “I got $5,000 at one of those big society parties just to sing four or five choruses of “‘Button Up Your Overcoat.’”

Well yes - but not forgetting the magic ingredient Boop-boop-a-doop. This was what truly revolutionised 1920s music.

Soon she was running courses teaching a new generation to boop, as shown in this movie:

However, as with many great inventions, the genius who created it forgot to patent it. Boop-boop-a-doop was blatantly pirated, bottled and sold for fortunes by the Max Fleischer Studio in the thinly disguised form of Betty Boop.

Miss Kane filed a quarter of a million dollar lawsuit against the studio in 1932, and the trial dragged on for two years. Eventually, Judge McGoldrick ruled that no theft was involved.

Miss Helen Kane commented “I consider it very unfair, as all of my friends believe the cartoons a caricature of me.” Looking at the cartoon and the singer side by side it is very hard to believe they are not.

Miss Kane felt obliged to take the law into her own hands, and under the guise of Dangerous Nan McGrew she approached Fleischer Studios for a six-figure settlement in the Betty Boop Case. In the cinema below we see her getting tanked up ready for this all-important mission.

Fleischer Studios agreed to the Betty Boop Settlement (as it became known), though they later claimed that they had done so under duress. They spent many years unsuccessfully attempting to prove that Dangerous Nan McGrew was in fact none other than Miss Helen Kane.

Justice was thus served and Miss Helen Kane's many recordings are the legacy of the discovery that changed the course of the 20th century.