Michael Phillips: Betty Boop, now Broadway bound, had many influences. One is a remarkable 1920s South Side Chicago story

CHICAGO — The new Broadway-bound “Boop! The Musical” imagines what might happen if the early 1930s animation film-short sensation, born at Fleischer Studios and distributed by Paramount, found herself in modern-day New York City, where she becomes a key player in mayoral politics, a loving mentor to a Boop-obsessed teenage girl and a bewitched, bothered and bewildered woman falling in first love with a jazz trumpeter.

In the musical we start, and periodically return to, the Fleischer Studios. Betty Boop is the studio’s star attraction, which is historically accurate. In the “Boop!” production, she exists in a hermetic, black-and-white universe of fame. Her reason for being is simple: to be “whoever you want me to be” — aviatrix, cowgirl, presidential hopeful — and then move on to the next acting assignment.

But she’s lost inside. And tired of movie scenarios putting her character at sexual risk, even if her storylines rarely tip over into assault. Enough with the “flashbulbs and slobbering men,” she says. It’s time for more.

There’s a distinct element of historical critique going on in “Boop!” Beyond that, there’s a remarkable story of how Max Fleischer created the tiny, gartered flapper girl with the enormous baby head, and then cleaned up her act once the Production Code, Hollywood’s rules and regulations for what it could and couldn’t depict on screen, went into more aggressive enforcement in mid-1934.

Like every landmark cultural figure, of many previous personae and a host of influences. Originals