Mae Questel provided the voice for Betty Boop beginning in 1931, at a time when talking cartoons were still new and studios were figuring out what animated women were supposed to sound like. She based the voice on Helen Kane, a real singer whose "boop-oop-a-doop" style was wildly popular in the late 1920s. Kane sued the Fleischer studio for stealing her persona, but the lawsuit collapsed when the defense produced evidence of a Black jazz singer named Baby Esther who had been performing the baby voice years before Kane ever claimed to have originated it. The case became one of the earliest disputes over vocal performance rights in American entertainment law, raising questions about who can own a vocal style that would resurface repeatedly in the age of sampling and AI-generated voices. Questel also voiced Olive Oyl in the Popeye cartoons for decades, and her remarkable versatility kept her working through the entire golden age of American animation. Born in the Bronx on September 13, 1908, she started performing in vaudeville as a teenager, winning a Helen Kane impersonation contest that led directly to her casting as Betty Boop. She voiced both Betty and Olive through hundreds of theatrical shorts in the 1930s and 1940s, returned to the roles in later productions, and also appeared in live-action films including a small part in Woody Allen's New York Stories. Her final major screen role was as the memorable pigeon lady in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York in 1992, a performance that introduced her to an entirely new generation of viewers who had no idea they were watching one of Hollywood's original voice actresses. She died on January 4, 1998, at 89, in New York City. Her voice work spanned nearly seven decades, making her one of the longest-working voice actresses in American entertainment history, and the Betty Boop character she defined remains an iconic figure in animation a century after its creation.