I am a huge fan of classic cartoons, especially of the ones from the Golden Age of the American Animation, including the works of the Fleischer Brothers. When I found out that one of the Betty Boop cartoons is lost, I was a little bit sad, thinking that I will never watch it, until one day when I had the pleasant surprise to find a remastered version of this cartoon and I was very eager to finally see it.
My excitement soon turned into a huge disappointment. This cartoon is pretty weak compared to the golden era of the Betty Boop series from 1932 to 1935, and it isn't even at the level of other shorts released during the same year ("The Swing School" and "Out of the Inkwell", also released in 1938, both have better plot and humor than this lame short). Betty Boop is a minor character in this short film, the main character is her annoying and uninteresting little cousin Buzzy Boop instead.
All the plot of this short is centered around the idea that classical music/opera is boring music that puts you to sleep, while jazz music is lively music that makes you wanna dance. Everyone in the audience and the orchestra falls asleep during the opera performance (a rather terrible performance of some slow and dull pieces of music, done in purpose that way), until Buzzy Boop convinces the soprano to sing jazz music instead, while everybody wakes up and starts to enjoy it. This is a harmful stereotype being perpetuated by such cartoons, and very inaccurate too, because there are hundreds of impressive and lively classical music pieces and many boring jazz songs as well. I am actually surprised that this came from the legendary Fleischer Brothers, considering that they previously made cartoons centered around classical music pieces, including "Morning, Noon and Night" from 1933, "The Spinach Overture" from 1935 and "A Car-Tune Portrait" from 1937, all of them being great animated films and far superior to this junk...they also used various classical music excerpts in Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons, that's how I discovered some of the pieces I still enjoy today.
This cartoon is maybe one of the worst from the Betty Boop series, having Betty more as a background character, it has no real plot, and it's very unfunny, with a humor of a very bad taste. I will give this short film a solid 1 out of 10. As I said earlier, some lost films deserve to remain lost...