Betty Boop and Felix is a King Features Syndicate newspaper comic, running from 1984 to 1988, being written by Brian, Morgan, Greg and Neal Walker, the sons of Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker.
It is a crossover comic between the classic cartoon characters Betty Boop and Felix the Cat, although Betty Boop is the main focus of the stories, as Felix mainly acts as her housepet and only speaks through thought balloons.
Tropes:
- Adaptational Personality Change: Granted, the whole franchise is rather inconsistent with Felix's personality, but the Betty Boop & Felix incarnation of Felix is by far the most brazenly changed in character, since it turns him into an Expy of Garfield, complete with speaking with thought balloons and saying acerbic things in his head.
- Adapted Out: Felix's Cartoony Tail abilities and the Magic Bag of Tricks are absent from this series.
- Alternate Continuity: Felix acts as a normal, non speaking house pet to Betty Boop, basically replacing Pudgy the dog from Betty's own cartoons. The Felix of this continuity was a lot closer in personality to Garfield in that he was given acerbic things to say via thought balloons. He never spoke and had neither a detachable tail nor his Magic Bag of Tricks. Betty was very much the Jon Arbuckle to Felix's Garfield, an owner & her pet cat, and a lot of the humor in this strip relied mostly on name-dropping current celebrities and puns. Betty herself was the main focus of the comic, with Felix himself usually being off to the side. Eventually, Felix was dropped from the strip altogether when King Features Syndicate realized they didn't actually have the rights to use him, making it a solo Betty Boop comic from then on.
- The Cameo: Betty's old friends Bimbo and Koko the Clown make a cameo appearance in one comic strip.
- Crossover: The whole premise of the series. Felix the Cat appeared as Betty's pet in the beginning, but the strip later dropped Felix altogether when it was discovered that King Features didn't actually own the rights to the character despite having distributed his comics before, so it just became a Betty Boop comic later on. One of these comics also had a cameo appearance of Wimpy. Bullwinkle the Moose also makes a cameo appearance in one of the comics.
- Deadpan Snarker: The Felix in this comic is more snarky than the other incarnations of the character, since he's basically an ersatz of Garfield in this continuity.
- Expy: Betty Boop in the Betty Boop & Felix newspaper comics is basically depicted as Miss Buxley in personality (unsurprising, considering the artists behind the strip were behind the Beetle Bailey comic). Felix himself is basically turned into an acerbic Garfield clone and also serves as an expy of Pudgy, Betty Boop's pet dog. Most of the other ancillary characters in the comic are also straight out of Beetle Bailey.
- Furry Confusion: Felix is a housepet in this series, but is shown to be able to stand up and walk around with Betty like a normal person, and he even dresses up for the occasion in one comic.
- Lighter and Softer: Predictably, Betty Boop's famous sex appeal is heavily downplayed in this comic.
- Out of Focus: Felix was usually just a side character in the comics, with Betty Boop being the focus of the stories.
- Put on a Bus: Later on, King Features Syndicate found out that while they distributed the Felix the Cat newspaper comics in the past, they didn't actually own the rights to the character, so they were eventually forced to drop him from the comic altogether, making the strip a solo comic for Betty Boop from then on out.
- Shout-Out:
- In one of the comics, Betty meets a shark named Jabberjaw. While the name is a reference to Hanna-Barbera's cartoon shark, his design is lifted from DePatie-Freleng's Misterjaw shark character.
- Bullwinkle the Moose appears for a gag in one comic.
- Sliding Scale of Animal Cast: The comics fall into type 6 (Human Cast With Animal Protagonist). The occasional other talking animal pops up (i.e. Misterjaw and Bullwinkle) but the bulk of the cast is human.
- The Voiceless: Felix can't speak in this series, and communicates through thought balloons ala Garfield.
