Above is one of my favorite Betty Boop cartoons. It gets particularly good at around the five minute mark, and wraps up with one of the most bizarre, non-sequester endings I’ve ever seen in any cartoon/movie/comic book.
Betty Boop is an interesting case. She’s almost universally known, but most people have never seen any of her cartoons. I bet people would be surprised by how weird they are. These days, Betty exists only to sell mundane, crappy mall merchandise.
Japan has a lot of characters like this. The grand daddy of them all is of course Hello Kitty, the character equivalent of Helvetica, so generic that it/she can remain in style decade after decade. Snoopy is also big here in Japan, but most people don’t know he comes from a comic strip. Stitch from the Disney movie Lilo and Stitch is also big, but I doubt most people have seen the movie he comes from…