Toot Toot Tootsie

Had some naive hopes for Comedy Central's new Drawn Together cartoon series: a mock reality program featuring animated icons from all eras of cartooning, the show features a plump Betty Boop figure named Toots Braunstein as one of eight characters thrown together in a Real World house setting. But after watching the series' debut this week, I'm much less optimistic. The Toots character is shown as fat and desperate; when she's not futilely attempting to put the moves on a gay knight, she's either squirting Cheez Whiz into her mouth or depressively cutting her thighs with razors. When the black-and-white character is attacked by a belligerent animé character named Ling Ling, her slashed open stomach oozes yellow gloppiness because she's fat. When she dances in the kitchen, we get an unflattering close-up of flabby thighs as the whole room shakes. To those FAs with fond memories of Betty Boop and her fluctuating weight (first seen in the early cartoons, but best memorialized in a later weight-loss-&-gain entry entitled "Betty Boop And Little Jimmy," where weight gain is seen as no big deal), the mistreatment of this zaftig icon is pretty depressing. Betty Boop fat? There's no way she can be appealing, right? The answer to that rhetorical, in teevee terms, is all too predictable. . .