Mask-A-Raid
1931 film by Dave Fleischer

Mask-A-Raid is a 1931 Fleischer Studios Talkartoon animated short film starring Betty Boop. It is the first Betty Boop cartoon to show Betty as a human.
Synopsis
Betty Boop is queen of the Masquerade Ball. She gets annoyed by the king of the ball, who is coming on too strong. Bimbo uses Italian scatting to confuse the king in order to spend time with Betty, but the King catches up on him. Bimbo and the king pull on Betty's arms. Her skirt goes up, showing her underwear and her two garters and a little creature pins the dress closed. Betty wants the two to fight it out, to determine who is worthy of her affections, and pulls out two wooden swords, one big and one small, and tosses a coin to determine who gets which — Bimbo gets the short one. The king and Bimbo fight, Bimbo loses and is taken away by a knight, revealing to be Betty, then says "What would you say if I married you?" with the cartoon ending with Bimbo doing more Italian scatting.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mask-A-Raid” as 1931 film by Dave Fleischer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 1931 film by Dave Fleischer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6783360. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1931.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mask-A-Raid” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.