Beetrice Lutz, also known as Betty Beet, is an unused boss in Cuphead. She is a female beet who would have moved around while throwing beets at the player. She was originally set to appear during the third or fourth phase of The Root Pack fight, possessing a desire of wanting to get the Cup Brothers out of her garden.[1]
Description[]
Appearance[]
As most of the current members in the Root Pack is stationary, her earlier concept designs has legs and wears wears heels or sandals. A few exceptions have versions of her without legs and planted on the ground is the closest to the current theme of the group, for example one have a very long stem and most of her facial features is on the stem. She always has cherry lips.
In the in-game prototype, she faces right and pops up from the left side of the screen. She is rather tall as the beet tail is mostly exposed. Her body is oval, has three leaves and holds her left hand in a sassy way. She holds her babies in a paper grocery bag. This is later finalized in the colored concept art.
From the only colored concept art, which appears to be in the same style as other Root Pack members. She still pops out from the ground on the left side of the screen and be stationary just like the in-game prototype. She does not show much her tail anymore and her body is a bit more triangular. Her characterization is changed dramatically but still holds her left hand in a sassy way. She has furrow brows like Sal Spudder. Her leaves are connect to a stem and spinning. Her beet babies are next to her also growing in the ground.
Personality[]
While her design has gone through a lot of iterations and she didn't make it into the game, one common theme is she always has sass as a core design, no matter if she has legs or not, being sedated or in a fury.
The in-game prototype version of Beetrice has a very similar personality and actions as Ollie Bulb. She is happy, but she look around worriedly and starts crying, not because of fear, but to sacrifice her beet babies as attacks. This means she cared a lot about her children but has to protect the group from signing the contract. In contrast as the personality was given to Ollie, the colored concept art version has no regard of her young and willing to slice them up, fitting for the macabre nature of the 1930s cartoons. This version also made her rather impatient to the fact she has to deal with the Cup brothers.
Battle[]
- In the game's unused code version, it shows that she would throw three types of beet babies to the top of the screen; a normal one, a fat one which explodes to deal Area-of-Effect damage, and a parryable one. When they hit it, the babies will explode and split into three pieces, spreading out and down to the ground. This may not apply to the colored concept art, as development has already been drastically different.
- Her main attack from the colored concept art is mentioned and storyboarded. She has a few idle animation concepts like drumming her fingers on the babies, squeezing them like a stress ball and throwing them up and down like a baseball. She still throws her babies, going through her spinning leaves. The babies are cut into pieces and will arc back down as projectiles. It is unknown if this would be her only attack as the most of the Root Pack, being one of the first boss of the game, only has one easy attack pattern.
Gallery[]
.png "Betty Beet Concept Art (1).png (415 KB)")
.png "Betty Beet Concept Art (2).png (396 KB)")
Trivia[]
- The most likely reason for the name change is because Betty Beet has a very similar name as Texas murderer Betty Lou Beets. It is enough of a reason to changed her name to Beetrice Lutz if the connection is a coincidence.
Inspirations and similarities[]
- Her other name Betty Beet is a reference to Max Fleischer's Betty Boop. Their first names are both "Betty" and their last names both begin with a B, followed by 2 vowels.
- Her last name Lutz is a reference to a character in the original Phantasy Star, Noah, as he is called Lutz in the original Japanese version.
References[]
- ↑ The Art of Cuphead, Beetrice Lutz, page 47