Little Known Facts About LSD

stuff 68 Comments

Invented by Swiss chemists – tested by American animators.

For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, this is not suitable for children.

68 Replies to “Little Known Facts About LSD”

  1. Almost not suitable for anyone of sober mind.
    But seriously, these were actual cartoons for the little kiddies?
    Is this from the 50’s?
    Might help explain the 60’s though.

  2. Jippo… gyp… Gypsie.
    Rascist filth!
    Actually, considering the age of the Betty Boop cartoons I’m quite surprised there weren’t ALOT more un-pc references in it.

  4. Idd: “Is this from the 50’s?”
    The earliest Betty Boop cartoon was 1930, and others were produced for several years after. All are from the ’30s, as far as I know.
    Bizarre stuff.


  5. Way back in 1930     Betty Boop Boop-Oop-A-Dooped for the first time.

    Of course, those of us who were young in the 1950s were watching them on what passed for kiddie cartoon hours then.
    Ah, memories…

  6. Cartoons were for the grown-ups, before the main feature. No kiddie cartoons in the old days. Check out the old Bugs Bunny stuff, its pretty racy.
    Of course these days Saturday morning cartoons are pretty out there, some of them make ol’ Betty Boop look tame.

  7. Funny how “liberalism” has forced us to tolerate so much that is marginal, yet reject so much that is harmless.
    We are to accept and consider normal that men parade through our cities, in the nude, making lewd suggestive gestures … yet we are to reject Betty Boop because of what she might suggest. We are to accept as normal and healthy that women be forced to wear hijab, yet we will not permit a Canadian beauty queen to wear her crown at a Toronto event because the crown demeans women.
    Wake me when it all ends and becomes sane again.

  8. Hey, maybe we could ship some Jippo over to Librano Party HQs. I’d love to see Bob Rae and co. do the thing at the very end of the cartoon.

  9. Paul, I don’t accept nude men making lewd gestures or, worse, the debauchery that Bill O’Reilly and others reported on in San Fransisco when you had open sex acts in the streets with children and cops walking around in view… whether it’s homosexual or heterosexual sex makes no difference to me.
    However, that Betty Boop cartoon was disgustingly racist and indefensible.
    Two wrongs, etc.

  11. “However, that Betty Boop cartoon was disgustingly racist and indefensible.”
    It’s an interesting exercise to envision how future generations may describe our generation.
    Believe me, they won’t be any kinder.

  13. Thanks Kate. I enjoyed that. And, being a big Leon Redbone fan and erstwhile imitator, I enjoyed hearing “Nobody’s Sweetheart Now”, and all the terrific mute trumpet playing, scatting, etc.

  14. If this cartoon was from 1932, it couldn’t have been inspired by LSD as Albert Hoffman didn’t discover it 1943. More precisely, the first time he dropped acid was on 19/4/1943. Hoffman is still alive at 102 , incidentally. This cartoon doesn’t have an acid feel IMHO but there were lots of psychedelics one could get perfectly legally in 1932.
    Reminds me a lot of the movie Fritz the Cat for some reason.

  15. Thanks Kate, I’ve been looking out for a Betty Boop for SDA LNR, but my earlier research in the archives proved fruitless. The Betty Boop cartoons were of the same era as this amazing Mills Brother’s cartoon: tinyurl.com/4ljggk
    I s’pose technically I should note that these cartoons in ’32 pre-dated the invention of LSD by 6 years. On the other hand, considering that what we have in opposition is people who would like to ban the study of history, because it doesn’t match their utopianist model of how things should be, I consider that a minor point.

  16. The first time I ever heard Cab Calloway was on a Betty Boop cartoon. There was some great tunes on those ‘toons. As for being disgustingly racist and indefensible,those were different times,maybe one should consider directing their self-righteous anger at real evil that is going on today.

  18. I knew the chronology from researching the post, but I just couldn’t resist…
    BTW – I only watched it once, but I don’t recall anything racist jumping out at me. Maybe I’m just colour blind.

  19. I saw Cab Calloway live at the Royal York once in my misspent youth. I knew the sound man. They gave me a jacket to wear and everything. ~:D
    It was Cab Calloway and the Cotton Club Revue. They had a pretty good ventriloquist, a torch singer (woo!) this old geezer tap dancer who moved like greased lightning, and Cab Calloway. He was the only one on the stage who could make those stuffy Toronto suits get up sing along.
    Awesome.

  20. I should like to draw your attention to the frames ca. 1:06 into the cartoon, in the advertisement for “Betty Boop’s Jippo”, where in large letters in the lower right it says of this delightful beverage: Stops Breathing!
    That so many people can watch a whole cartoon like this and not see the parody and the satire at work is indeed an unfortunate judgement of the normative behaviour of the species.

  21. I’m planning on digging up a few more of these old cartoons.
    BTW – does anyone here recall a weird dark little cartoon about a Crow that walked through walls and skipped every few feet? There might have been a fox.

  22. Try watching it with this idea in mind: it’s actually a damning indictment of snake-oil salesmen. These old cartoons always had a moral story, like Grimm’s fairy tales. So while it is so easy to see the facade as aged, forget not that the basic message here is the same as if the story line were Mr. Suzuki’s Jippo, or Peter Popoff’s Jippo.
    Strip away the facade: what’s the moral lesson?

  23. “BTW – I only watched it once, but I don’t recall anything racist jumping out at me. Maybe I’m just colour blind.”
    You watched the last minute and didn’t notice anything racist? C’mon.
    I assuming you’re exercising your well known dry wit, and not serious. At least, I hope so.
    I’d hate to give Jason ammunition.
    On the other hand… he’d probably shoot himself with it. Again.

  24. “Strip away the facade: what’s the moral lesson?
    Posted by: Vitruvius at April 8, 2008 12:22 AM”
    Buy from snake-oil salesman and your baby might turn into a broad nosed black with overly exaggerated canines?

  25. No, I really didn’t. Maybe I was just distracted by all the skeletons and squiggly necks and beard growing babies. Or are there races I’m not properly sensitized to yet?

  26. No, buy from a snake-oil salesman and you’ll believe anything. A caricature of every sort of fool who falls for the bogus claims of snake-oil salesmen, including fools of every race, class, and gender, which is the moral lesson of the referenced Betty Boop cartoon, is, Christoph, not racist, classist, or sexist; it is wise.

  28. Right at the end when the baby drinks Jippo and turns into a “broad nosed black with overly exaggerated canines” the baby actually turns into a fairly exact copy of The Wolfman from a famous 1930s horror movie. No need to take offense Christoph but you’re seeing something “disgustingly racist and indefensible” where no such thing exists, a too common human failing these days.

  29. “Posted by: abcd at April 8, 2008 12:51 AM”
    Well, then it’s even worse, abcd, because they’re violating another’s intellectual property and as conservatives, that should trouble us all.
    Yes, kidding. It isn’t worse, assuming my theory is true, which it may not be. In any event, Kate’s view that it’s not appropriate for children (or mentally unstable adults, i.e., liberals 😛 ) on account of general weirdness has merit.

  31. Vitruvius, I saw the “Stops Breathing” on the wagon cover, along with a few other gems, such as nnoring, the perennial wedge between the sexes…
    The snake-oil salesman is an archetype. Gets very interesting, all this analysis about needs, and so on…
    Jippo. The Trudeaupian’s Beverage Of Choice.

  32. Kate, the crow you mention is likely the mynah bird from the “Inki” cartoon series. Check out “Inki and the Minah [sic] Bird” or “Inki and the Lion” on YouTube for examples.

  33. Just so, Shaken. Watch the repeating theme. Whatever the sucker who takes the snake-oil wants, they get too much of. The thin man gets too fat. The fat man gets too thin. The old man gets too young, the young man gets too old. Each of the vingnettes in the caricature is an instance of this same sort of old lesson, from the Midas touch, to the three wishes.
    As to the matter of why it takes me, a techno-nerd, to explain these subtleties of the matters of the interplay between art and morals, well, now, that’s beyond my ability to understand. Either that, or logic is more powerful than we thought.

  37. Kelly, I was being mildly sarcastic… I know logic implies thinking. I was commenting on when you said “…or logic is more powerful than thought?”
    Anyway, have a fantastic night.

  38. Hmm, logic v. thought… call for Mr. Spock, white courtesy telephone please. But seriously, folks, when you watch cartoons, be aware that the classics survive because of their moral lessons ~ it’s the meat and potatoes of cartoons, without it they crumble to dust. Though, for that matter, that’s a property of classic fiction in general, isn’t it.
    On that note; I agree with Christoph ~ best wishes and good night.

  39. Trusty Tory: “Is this stuff why they took Loony Toons off the air?”
    ‘Don’t know. But this stuff, I’m sure, is why they called them Loony Toons!
    The last minute of the cartoon racist? I think not. If anything it was werewolfist–I’m with abcd on this. Gosh. We’re going to have all the werewolves screaming bloody murder. And, BTW, how DARE Michael Jackson assume the werewolf persona? That was pretty non-werewolf rights of him. Shouldn’t werewolves of the world have made a gazillion off Jackson’s album?
    Thank God we didn’t have the PC brigade around in 1932. No Betty Boop cartoons. No Popeye. No Bugs Bunny. No Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, or Pluto. No Archie, Betty, and Veronica.
    No childhood.

  40. No childhood…just Politically Correct Tales for Tots–and look where that’s been taking us for the last couple of generations: Moony Tunes (as in Moonbat)…

  41. I thought perhaps you were making an allusion to the censorship of the “Hays Code” which is what effectively doomed the animated career of Betty Boop (who started off life as a kind of hybrid dog, funnily enough…) Anyway, whatever. That was a very amusing and deeply weird cartoon. Looking forward to more.

  42. Even Bullwinkle talks about giving someone ‘the bird.’ So Much stuff went right over the censors’ heads…

  43. I remember a documentary describing the LSD experiments by Dr. Hoffer at the psychiatric institute in Weyburn. I think it was during the 1930s and they were trying to treat schizophrenia. (Look, doctor, mountains!!!)
    When i lived there decades later the experiments were still continuing…in a less formal setting.

  45. “When i lived there decades later”
    I meant the town, not the institute, contrary to popular opinion.

  46. If you like weird cartoons,check out the early Popeyes.Another series that appears to have been made by those familiar with chemistry.

  47. LSD??
    Isn’t that code for “Licenced Socialist Drug”
    That would explain a lot.

  48. I think the kid at the end turned into Mr. Hyde. Fredric March won an academy award for that role the year before I think.
    Moe

  49. Christopher Rivers: “When i lived there decades later the experiments were still continuing…in a less formal setting. ”
    That brings back memories – I remember the one guy ran from the 7-11 all the way to the Zippy Mart because he thought his half eaten O Henry Bar was chasing him.
    Good Times.
    🙂

  50. Is Heckle and Jeckle racist ?
    How about those two doped up Mexican crows that chase the grasshopper.
    I can’t remember what it was specifically that turned me into a “knuckledragger”
    Has anyone got Whoopi (My Bush) Goldberg intro to the Looney tunes DVD I’m sure she, (no offense) will prove helpful.

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