Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

ThiefHott Too much of everything

GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Jenna Walter The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Michael Cho Since I am limited to 1,000 words, I cannot do this picture justice from the start. Therefore, I will simply say: who's to say what it means? Should we each individually subscribe to any one interpretation and thereby join a group? (Wanna be a member?) I think that is the most important point if anything. At least Bimbo seems to think he has the right to walk, happy-go-lucky, through a neutral society (going in and out the window without actually ever going in or out as he whistles along) without falling into a trap set for him by Mickey Mouse or other corporate traps, lol. When he does fall into one, he has the right to say no, but when all groups are reduced to their least common denominator, male and female, he also has the right to say "YES!". It is unfortunate as it seems that Betty did not remain faithful and later turned into a real "Bimbo" in her other pictures, lol.I believe the least common denominator is arrived at by phi over pi (0.5150362148) indicating that Bimbo is only a little over half a person without his female companion. Together they would add up to a little over one 1 with the overage leading back through time to their origin. The leader of the secret society has a prop that seems to suggest their belief in the opposite, pi over phi which is 1.94161103873 and is nonsensical unless you say that a group is more than the sum of its parts and this perhaps somehow gives them more import or rights than an individual or married couple or any person who does not desire to be incorporated. I assume that Fleischer was a Jew and so had been instructed in the importance of male and female union and so this makes sense from that perspective.

Michael_Elliott Bimbo's Initiation (1931) ** 1/2 (out of 4)Marginally entertaining short has Bimbo falling down a manhole where he ends up in a strange playhouse where some masked people keep asking him if he wants to be a member of their group. Each time he says no they put him through some form of abuse but soon Betty Boop shows up and asks him the same question. In terms of imagination this short has quite a bit of that but in terms of laughs there are very few. I think the film works best as some eye candy because the house is a pretty interesting one and at least keeps the movie going at a good speed. I thought all the tricks were rather clever and this includes the rolling floor and the sequence where Bimbo has to open one door after another. I think the highlight is without question the cameo by Boop and there's no doubt that this short was made before the Hayes Code. The level of pre-code sexuality is quite high as it's obvious Boop is having quite the effect on poor Bimbo who can't control himself. The scenes with Boop shaking her butt and slapping it are hard to forget and easy to see what's going on.

theowinthrop Because of the way the Betty Boop cartoons were shown on television in the early 1960s, certain cartoons were not pushed too much. Those that showed her as she was originally drawn, with "dog" ears", and which hinted at more raw sex than the occasional lapses of later "domesticated" Betty Boop cartoons with her inventor "Gramps" and with her cute dog "Pudgy" were never shown. This, unfortunately, reduced the chances of seeing some of the early Boop supporting cast - Koko the Clown ("Out of the Inkwell") and the male dog Bimbo. Bimbo was Betty's boyfriend in some of the early cartoons - like this one.Here we see Bimbo strolling along, minding his own business, when he falls down a manhole - and immediately the manhole is shut with a heavy lock applied to it. Bimbo finds himself in an underground structure surrounded by about ten masked men who are the members of a society and offer him a chance to join. But he sees they have paddles, and he refuses. And then the surreal world of the Fleischer studio takes over: Bimbo is pushed from one room of the underground structure to another - and in each he is confronted by torture devices that are aiming to kill him. He is also confronted by corn ball jokes (he opens a door and sees a skeleton on a pay phone, telling his girlfriend, "I have a bone to pick with you!"). Every now and then he meets with the spokesman of the society, repeating the offer ("Do you want to be a member? Want to be a member?" And each time Bimbo refuses, and the process of torture begins again.Then Betty pops up to briefly rescue him. At the tail end of the cartoon Betty is there and goes into a dance, and she makes the offer - and now Bimbo accepts it. Then all the members remove their clothes, and they are revealed to be Betty Boop clones.As I said earlier there was more raw sex in these cartoons than in the later ones. Betty, to keep Bimbo's total fascination with her from flagging, whacks herself on the behind while dancing. At the tail end of the cartoon (no pun intended) as she and new member Bimbo are jointly dancing they both "playfully" whack each other's behind a bit. Done tastefully...of course! It was a more open era before the Hays Office Code and the Breen Office really got underway in Hollywood three years after this cartoon was made.

Eusephus Bimbo's Initiation (1931): An early Max Fleischer cartoon starring the studio's pre-Betty Boop star, Bimbo. A strange, cocky, decidedly urban character, Bimbo went through many character designs and voices during his early films. By this film the little dog had settled into the design he would keep until he was eclipsed by Betty Boop's popularity in the mid-thirties . Like many of the Fleischer's Depression era cartoons, "Bimbo's Initiation" is filled with desperate characters dealing with an unstable, even hostile universe. After being swallowed by a manhole and locked in by a demonic Mickey Mouse (evil Mickey Mouses were rampant in the early Fleischer cartoons) Bimbo finds himself in a dungeon inhabited by a psuedo-Masonic group with chamberpots on their heads who chant,"Wanna be a member, Wanna be a member?" When Bimbo refuses, he is thrown into a labyrinth filled with surrealistic tortures while the Lodge brothers continue to chant, "Wanna be a member...?" Does Bimbo relent? Watch the cartoon and find out! No spoilers here!