Betty Page Bondage Loops
Betty Page Strip Loops
Something Weird Video
A couple months back, this fine rag published an article about Bettie Page, written by our local artist Randy Prinslow, creator of the `Psychic Stripper’ comic. Amazingly enough, I was walking through Portland’s Movie Madness, possibly the largest mixed mainstream/psychotronic video store in the United States, and spotted Betty Page: Bondage Loops and Betty Page: Strip Loops. Both of these titles (found in the rear, Psychotronics, subsection of the building) certainly live up to the publishing company’s name, Something Weird.
Both tapes are very similar in structure, narration, video quality, and content, so we’ll review them as a single unit.
This collection of Bettie Page footage, while in sad shape, is probably the most complete in existence. There are approximately two hours of Bettie bouncing, prancing, simpering, and smooching big wet kisses for the camera; all on sets of heels that really should give less Olympianly-physiqued persons nosebleeds. (For those of you who are aficianados, it looks like this is the most complete collection of Irving Klaw’s original groundbreaking work that you’re going to find in the continental United States.)
I originally was a little ho-hum about Bettie; I mean, she’s a sexual icon, but she doesn’t exactly satisfy my particular tastes in a sexual fantasy, see? But I examined these videos because Bettie’s far more than merely a pin-up; she has some weird magnetic power with her whips and handcuffs and ankle-breaking shoes, and I thought that examining these hours of badly printed, off-color (in hue) footage would be a kick for the fans of Bettie, as well.
If you have the chance, examine this footage. Even if Betty isn’t your fetish; even if the stripteases and leather aren’t your bag, Bettie really does have deep charisma in her smile and expressive eyebrows that even grainy home-developed early color movies with a downright absurd soundtrack can’t fold, spindle, or mutilate.
At the very least, you owe it to yourself to examine this footage to see the beginnings of it all; the beginnings of erotica out of dank sexual repression, the movement to get sex out of backdoor whispers in the tight-anused world of 1953 and where it belongs – as a natural extension of any adult’s sexuality and sense of play, of fantasy, of `naughty’ adventure. Bettie, with her `naughty’ clothes, milky-white body, and utterly ingenuous face, encapsulates with her shameless grin and come-hither index finger exactly what that could be and was.
These videos, and so many more, are available at Fantasy Adult Video and other friendly video shops near you.