Interview With Mae Questel

[bluto]

You can hear a short interview with Mae Questel from the 1980s here:

www.fradiavolo.co.uk/convention/conventionpart12.mp3

Unfortunately, she shows some signs of the confusion and memory loss which would plague her later years, but it's still a fun interview and she was an energetic lady.

[mhberest]

An interesting interview. A couple of things I noticed, that Betty Boop was her favorite, but she in no way acknowledged Betty's debt to Helen Kane. Kane sued Fleischer for using her image without her permission--and somehow lost! Yet in Woody Allen's film Zelig, Questel does Kane singing "Chameleon Days." I think Betty was based more on Questel than Kane, but Kane was the first to "boop boop a doop." Maybe Mae didn't want to give away the game even after all these years.

The sad thing on the interview was not the confusion, which actually seemed pretty minimal and typical of someone around 80 (she died this month 8 years ago at 89) is the mention she still had a contract with KFS to do Olive, but, of course, she hadn't been used, likely because her voice was not what it used to be.

This is agism as much as anything else is. Whether she sounds perfect or not, She's still Olive Oyl, and we can be glad we had a few more seconds of her as Betty Boop in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" because not everyone felt that way.

"Yes, Betty. You still got it."

P.S. BTW, one long term memory she showed she still had was when she talked about Betty not walking but hopping and skipping. There's an old Yiddish song called "Die Greeneh Cuzineh" (The Greenhorn Cousin) who comes into America with roses in her cheeks and after a few months in New York she's aged decades. Lines from the song go, "She didn't talk, she sang/She didn't walk ,she sprang."