In January 1936 Questel recorded with xylophonist bandleader Red Norvo, singing "The Music Goes 'Round and Around" and "The Broken Record" (see Red Norvo 1933-1936 - Classics 1085). Years later Questel would also provide voice-overs for Parker Brothers' Popeye video game. Legend has it that once during an emergency, Questel even filled in and voiced Popeye herself! For many years Questel's main occupation was providing personae for more than 450 Popeye cartoons until they stopped making 'em in 1967. Gravel-voiced Jack Mercer started voicing Popeye around 1935. Several singers hopped on the Boop bandwagon, including Annette Hanshaw and someone billed only as "the Mystery Girl," but Mae Questel out-Booped them all with a series of cutesy, Boop-infested records made in the mid-'30s, including "On the Good Ship Lollipop" and "At the Codfish Ball." These ditsy yet immensely popular million-seller recordings soon put her in direct competition with the prepubescent Shirley Temple.Īlso in the mid-'30s, Mae Questel came up with voices for the Popeye cartoons she spoke through both the infantile Swee' Pea and gangly, elastic Olive Oyl, whose voice she said grew out of her imitation of actress Zasu Pitts. Helen Kane eventually sued the Fleischer studios for swiping her persona - and lost. More than 150 Betty Boop cartoons were made over the next eight years, and most of them resounded with the voice of Mae Questel. In 1931, not long after Max Fleischer and his team of horny animators developed a flirtatious cartoon character who gyrated across the silver screen while emitting a steady stream of "boops" and "doops," Questel was chosen to provide voice-overs for this creature's outbursts. Triumphant and now armed with an RKO vaudeville circuit contract, she began working steadily as "Mae Questel - Personality Singer of Personality Songs" and even appeared at the Palace Theater in 1930, impersonating Fanny Brice, Marlene Dietrich, Ruth Etting, Eddie Cantor, Rudy Vallée, and Maurice Chevalier. Born in the Bronx in 1912, she chucked a prospective teaching career and entered showbiz at the age of 17 by winning a competition that was held in the RKO Fordham Theater in order to select a young lady who could most successfully imitate Helen Kane's whiny neurotic baby talk act, already becoming famous for its tag line, "Boop-boop-be-doop." The Helen Kane impersonation contest was held immediately after a live Helen Kane performance, which Questel claimed to have watched most carefully. Mae Questel was the woman behind the voice of Olive Oyl, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Little Audry, Little Lulu, and Betty Boop.
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