Fishing for pearls: Breast Expansion before the internet

by Aaron Mystery

After five years of writing, animating, editing, voicing, & publishing cartoons for Suckermouth.com, it's obvious Breast Expansion isn't new to me (possibly the biggest understatement of all time). But B.E. wasn't new to me back in 2006, either. So let's get in the wayback machine...

I've always been attracted to women (& boobs), even when I was as young as 5 or 6. Hot women, especially hot cartoons, turned me on in much the same way as they do now, taking into account the added hormones. Who else remembers the big, round naked boobs on the succubi in Walt Disney's Fantasia? I also remember - as a very young kid - a (Ralph Bakshi?) cartoon I watched in the middle of the night where a woman stripped her clothes off after she got drunk; the motion of her breasts bursting forth as she removed her bra had a Breast Expansion quality to it.

But I was more privileged to be exposed to Benny Hill, the British comedy legend imported to America via PBS, unedited with no commercials. As far as I know, it was this great man who technically invented "Breast Expansion" as an art (he also created She-Hulk, but Marvel Comics literally stole his parody). I found myself looking forward to any clip that included Breast Expansion (there actually weren't very many).

But the ultimate childhood Breast Expansion memory for me is from the Playboy Channel (yes, I would stay up at night & watch it). "Booby Chew" was just a stupid little skit that I believe was run between shows. This really unattractive '70s-looking women would chew this gum, & their breasts would inflate (modestly) beneath their shirt. It's really quite awful, but it had an amazing effect on me: I would never stop thinking about B.E. again.

However, B.E. was not easy to find before the internet age. What few clips there were couldn't simply be looked up on a second's notice, & creating your own B.E. meant writing stories or drawing pictures, not creating film clips or cartoons; as a young man, I had few places to look for my favorite thing. And when I did find a B.E. scene, it was often the exact opposite of what I wanted: i.e., the boob popping in Flesh Gordon 2 or that horrible scene in one of the Leprechaun movies.

Later on, Howard Stern offered what (was) a great B.E. clip in his film Private Parts, Mad TV did "Maliboobs", the lame spoof Mafia featured a B.E. scene that was suited for me at the time, & Dude, Where's My Car? stands as the only Hollywood film that is really just a long Breast Expansion story (think about it).

There were films & television shows I saw & didn't see among these, of course, but these stand out as great clips for the time. With the exception of Where's My Car, the others don't really hold up today (Mafia's competent, but it's a kid). I actually appreciated Where's My Car more with each passing year, which is surprising.

Modern cartoon Breast Expansion shout outs go to that great episode of American Dad; Lois's modest B.E. in a Family Guy episode; at least one Striperella cartoon; & one of my favorite new discoveries, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, the 2009 animated film that features lots of big, naked, round cartoon boobs, but even more importantly: Breast & Butt Expansion. If you haven't watched this Rob Zombie masterpiece, you need to treat yourself (oddly enough, it was a couple of giant-titted drawings on the back of a White Zombie album that confirmed I wasn't alone in the world as a lover of monstrous breast sizes).

Thanks to the internet, I could now name dozens of clips - from many countries - animated & live-action - that were released from before I was born through today. Most have a quality that makes them worth watching at least one more time, if for no other reason than to recapture that magical age in our life when searching for new Breast Expansion video was like fishing for pearls in the ocean.