Sex Cels

Buried Treasure

If you're to trace back the roots of naughty cartoons, you have to start with Buried Treasure, an animated short film sometimes said to be from 1924 but that was more likely made in 1928 or 1929. The 7-minute film has a hero called Eveready Harton (sometimes spelled "Hardon"), a fellow with a very large penis who, throughout the course of the film, lets his manhood lead him into contact (mostly sexual) with a naked woman, an unfortunate man, a farmer, a donkey, a cactus and ultimately a cow. It is a revelation just how bawdy and obscene the film is, however Eveready's libido-led antics are told with a cheeky charm and playful humor that is quickly recognizable as the trademark style of classic slapstick children's cartoons of the 30s and 40s. The reason for this is that Buried Treasure was created (apparently for a stag party in honor of Windsor McCay) by a team of professional animators including Walter Lantz (who later created Woody Woodpecker) and individuals from Max Fleischer's (Betty Boop, Popeye) and Paul Terry's ("Terrytoons") studios. Disney animator Ward Kimball heard that "the laughter almost blew the top off the hotel where they were screening it," however the film was so extreme in its content that it had to be developed in Cuba because no U.S.-based film lab agreed to have anything to do with it.

BETTY BOOP

At the time, films like Buried Treasure and The Further Adventures of Super Screw (a much cruder animated stag film about a very well-endowed man and his aggressive sexual encounters with a gorilla) were being made way, way below the radar, but people like Fleischer were nevertheless introducing sex to cartoons in the Betty Boop series. As she evolved in the early 1930s, Betty established herself as the first sexually aware cartoon character: she wore high heels, short dresses and figure hugging tops, men tried to look down her cleavage, and on more than one occasion she did a topless hula dance, wearing only a lei and a grass skirt. In Chess Nuts (1931) and again in Boop-Oop-A-Doop (1932), attempts are made to take her virginity. In the latter film, she plays a high wire performer who is told she will lose her job if she does not submit to the advances of her boss, the Ringmaster; she attempts to rebuff him by singing "Don't take my Boo-Oop-A-Doop Away," and is saved from an attempted rape by Koko the Clown who hears her plaintive song. A year later, in Betty Boop's Big Boss, Betty is menaced by a different employer while she is working as a secretary, but this time her protests don't last long and the film ends with her happily in the arms of her boss — much to the annoyed consternation of the hordes of who had heard her cries and come to save her.

Betty Boop

However, in the mid-1930s changes in the Production Code (also known as the Hays Code), which introduced rigorous moral standards to all Hollywood filmmaking, forced Betty to clean up her act. She changed from a provocatively dressed flapper with her pick of men to a girl who settled down with a boyfriend, wore long dresses, had a cute dog and, ultimately, became much more of a children's cartoon character than one who represented the average progressive girl of the time. The broader impact of the Hays Code's restrictions was that the whole idea of suggestive or salacious cartoons starting to permeate the mainstream and exist as anything more than little-seen underground movies died a very quick death and was an impossibility for a considerable period of time.

POST-CODE REPRESSION

The idea of naughty, sexual animation returned to people's minds in the more permissive 1960s, and was in no small part put there because of the culture of risqué drawings and cartoons which emerged both in gentlemen's magazines such Esquire and Playboy, and also in underground comicbooks. Tijuana bibles, illicitly sold comicbooks featuring recurring characters' sexual exploits, were an underground phenomenon during the first part of the century, however risqué drawings slowly began appearing in legitimate publications. Through the 40s and 50s, Esquire's pin-up drawings by such artists as George Petty and Alberto Vargas were extremely popular, and Vargas was subsequently hired in the late 1950s by Hugh Hefner to produce double-page drawings of girls for Playboy. Hefner's publication pushed the boundaries not only with its photo pictorials but also with its art: the cliché about the magazine is that nobody read the articles, but fortunately minimal reading was required to enjoy the playful, risqué cartoons by such artists as Erich Sokol, Eldon Dedini and Doug Sneyd. While these were stand-alone, simple sketches in the style of New Yorker cartoons, the bar was raised in 1962 by Mad magazine artists Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's Little Annie Fanny who created a lavish, full-color, multi-page comic strip for Hefner about a busty airhead blonde who is constantly preyed on by lustful men. It ran until 1978 and was monthly during the 1960s, a considerable burden that forced Kurtzman to take on a number of assistants, one of which was Robert Crumb.

The overtly political, sexual and scathingly satirical cartoons of Crumb — a counterculture, underground artist thought of as one of the greatest living cartoonists — had a rougher, more chaotic look. Influenced by the Good Girl Art of the 40s and 50s (comicbooks which idolized beautiful, sexually unattainable women such as Torchy and Phantom Lady), Crumb drew his women as big-breasted, feisty and unashamedly sexual and they played an integral role in the narratives of Crumb's breakthrough character, Fritz the Cat. Fritz was everything Crumb aspired to be — confident, dashing and a hit with the ladies — and the comics developed a cult following that inevitably attracted attention from the film community.