The officers shoot at the boss, and Betty fires pencil stubs at him from a sharpener. His building, suddenly alive, seems to channel his desires and, chillingly, the doors lock, trapping Betty in with her aggressor. When she rebuffs him, he begins to chase her, even as she repeatedly says no. The boss hires her and stares greedily at Betty as she types. The enormous, grotesque boss selects Betty based on her looks when he asks what she can do, however, she seems to reciprocate his lust with flirty suggestions. When a company erects a sign calling for a female secretary, women flood into the corporate building-designed with vaguely phallic architecture-to apply, heading to its top floor. The Big Bad Wolf, stripped of layers of symbolism, has slipped from carnivorous to carnal predator: he is now, merely and more disquietingly, a man preying on girls, a threat to be found far beyond the forest the folktale’s original wolf hunts in, a threat many women in the industry-and outside it-would have recognized well.Īnother 1934 short, “Betty Boop’s Big Boss,” explored workplace sexual harassment. Perhaps more disturbingly, what the man attempts to do to her is never revealed, and she is only saved by chance, when another man, alerted by Red Riding’s Hood agitated dog, hurries to the grandmother’s house to rescue her. Moments after Red Riding Hood enters the house, she screams. In it, Red Riding Hood travels to deliver sweets to her grandmother along the way, she meets a grinning man in a fancy automobile, who then speeds ahead, lecherous smile unswerving from his face, to her destination. Disney’s Little Red-Riding Hood, for instance, transformed the fairy tale into an analogue of sexual predation.
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Six years before Mickey’s debut on the screen, Disney was producing a series of grainily animated retellings of classic folktales with Laugh-o-Gram Films between 19, some of which featured more pronounced harassment.
In such small ways, Hollywood’s earliest cartoons reflected the commonplace nature of the harassment that would soon come to define the industry. The cartoon depicts its womanizer as a buffoon who, after Minnie’s rejection, comically crashes his eponymous plane, yet the casualness with which Mickey decides to force romance upon a female character is disconcerting. In Mickey Mouse’s first cartoon, “Plane Crazy” (previewed in 1928, the same year as “Steamboat Willie,” the more successful cartoon that cemented the mouse’s popularity), Disney’s anthropomorphic icon acts quite differently from how he does today: while taking Minnie on a ride in a makeshift airplane, Mickey gestures to Minnie to kiss him multiple times, and, after she rebuffs him, he simply grabs her and forces her into a kiss, a common trope of harassment in cartoons. Nowadays, Walt Disney’s best-known animated features often serve as stereotypical icons of “family-friendly” entertainment, but some of Disney’s older projects depart from that image.
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