Simon Cowell resurrects Betty Boop for new movie

Betty Boop, the 1930s cartoon character that has lived on via thousands of T-shirts and other ephemera, is to be brought into the 21st century by Simon Cowell.

The film arm of his company Syco Entertainment is partnering with Animal Logic, the team behind the animation on the Lego Movie, on a film described by Variety as “a music-driven hybrid animated comedy”.

Announcing the news, Cowell said: “Betty is an icon, and one of the biggest stars in the world – I’m thrilled to be working with her. Betty, I’ve worked with some serious divas but I think you could be the biggest of them all!”

Betty is an odd-looking creature, a 1920s flapper with an outsized head, bow lips and ever-blinking eyes, topped with immaculately styled curls. She starred in a series of cartoons in the 1930s, singing in a coy, babyish fashion, with her racy dress becoming decidedly more demure once codes were set that restricted sexual innuendo.

She’s rarely been seen in dramatic roles since, excluding a cameo in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and a couple of TV specials in the 1980s, but has had a considerable impact on pop culture. Her images can be seen in a huge amount of merchandise, and she inspired short-lived British rapper Betty Boo.

A film has been planned around her before, in 1993, when an animated film about her rise to fame in the golden age of Hollywood came within weeks of production. Songs had been written and 75% of the film storyboarded, but a new studio boss abandoned the project.

The new film is the latest of Cowell’s screen productions, which include the recent Pudsey the Dog movie as well as the Paul Potts biopic One Chance, starring James Corden, and the One Direction documentary This Is Us – two more concert movies from the band are in the offing.

The Betty Boop movie – whose writer or director haven’t been announced – will be the first fruit of his collaboration with Animal Logic, which was announced in May. Cowell hailed their work as “pure genius”, while Animal Logic’s CEO Zareh Nalbandian said he expected the partership to be “a very powerful force in family entertainment”.

Cowell said of the forthcoming films that “the music has to be current”, but Betty Boop’s mode of 1920s flapper pop strangely dovetails with today’s charts. The likes of Paloma Faith, Meghan Trainor and Imelda May have all scored hits with brass-led dance tracks, while the electro-swing style of bass-driven dance blended with big band jazz has also been a cult passion in recent years.