Cab Calloway regularly played the Castle Royal caves back in the 1930s — which is also when the Fleischer Studio* was producing Betty Boop cartoons. Cab “starred” in three of them.

This one, which ostensibly re-tells the Snow White fable, is my favorite. In the course of fleeing the Wicked Queen, Betty, Koko, and Bimbo end up in a series of haunted caves where they encounter Cab’s ghost, singing St. James Infirmary Blues. There’s layers upon layers of intertextuality going on here: the song, which is about dying after finding your girl dead in an infirmary, spliced into the well-known fable, the name of which is also an euphemism for cocaine**, with various horror and fable tropes worked into the whole thing.

But I digress. My point with all this is: I wonder if Cab's adventures at the Castle Royal might have inspired part of the cave sequence? Betty and her compatriots run from the witch's castle into a snowy landscape that looks not unlike Minnesota. Betty tumbles along bluffs that are quite like the bluffs of St. Paul and is transported in her ice coffin via gnome sledge. The caves are strangely furnished, albeit not at all in the way that Castle Royal was. Along the way, there is a table of dead men gambling; one of the stories told by the Wabasha Caves guide yesterday concerned a gangland murder that took place around a card table in the room adjoining the stage cavern.

There’s no way to really know, I suppose, short of resurrecting Max Fleischer. But isn’t it pretty to think so? Wouldn’t it be awesome if it was true?

*There’s a fascinating IP section in the Fleischer entry.
**Cab’s famous Minnie the Moocher also dies of a cocaine overdose, and the relevant Fleischer cartoon also features ghosts. The drug also figures heavily in other Calloway songs as well as the mythology surrounding him.