Bosko

Bosko is an animated cartoon character created by animators Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising. Though considered somewhat dull in comparison to later Looney Tunes players, Bosko was the Termite Terrace studio's first major recurring character, and the star of over three dozen Looney Tunes shorts released by Warner Bros.

Creation and first film
The origins of Bosko go back to 1927. In that year, Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising were still working for the Walt Disney Studios on a series of live-action/animated short subjects known as the Alice Comedies. Hugh Harman created Bosko in 1927 to capitalize on the new "talkie" craze that was sweeping the motion picture industry. Harman began thinking about making a sound cartoon with Bosko in 1927, before he even left Walt Disney. Hugh Harman made drawings of the new character and registered it with the copyright office on 3 January 1928. The character was registered as a "Negro boy" under the name of Bosko. After leaving Walt Disney in February of 1928, Harman and Ising went to work for Universal on the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons until April of 1929. After leaving Universal, Harman and Ising began to market their new cartoon character. In May of 1929, they produced a short pilot cartoon, Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid, that showcased their ability to animate soundtrack-synchronized speech and dancing. The short, plotless cartoon opens with live action footage of Ising at a drafting table. After he draws Bosko on the page, the character springs to life, talks, sings, and dances. Ising returns Bosko to the inkwell, and the short ends. The short is a landmark in animation history as being the first to include synchronized speech. This cartoon set Harman and Ising "apart from early Disney sound cartoons because it emphasized not music but dialogue." The short was marketed to various people by Harman and Ising until Leon Schlesinger offered them a contract to produce a series of cartoons for the Warner Bros.

In his book, Of Mice and Magic, Leonard Maltin states that this early version of Bosko "was in fact a cartoonized version of a young black boy... he spoke in a Southern Negro dialect... in subsequent films this characterization was eschewed, or perhaps forgotten. This could be called sloppiness on the part of Harman and Ising, but it also indicates the uncertain nature of the character itself."

Bosko and Looney Tunes
Leon Schlesinger saw the Harman-Ising test film and signed the animators to produce cartoons at their studio for him to sell to Warner Bros.. Bosko became the star vehicle for the studio's new Looney Tunes cartoon series. Bosko wore long pants and a derby hat, and he had a flapper girlfriend named Honey and a dog named Bruno. He was also sometimes accompanied by an orphan cat named Wilbur.

Although Harman and Ising based Bosko's looks on Felix the Cat, Bosko, like Mickey, got his personality from the blackface characters of the minstrel and vaudeville shows popular in the 1930s. Whereas Disney masked Mickey by making him a mouse, Harman and Ising made Bosko a genuine black boy.

Keeping with the stereotypes of the minstrel shows, Bosko is a natural at singing, dancing, and playing any instrument he encounters. In fact, Bosko has the ability to play virtually anything as an instrument, be it a wooden bridge-turned-xylophone or a Dachshund-turned-accordion. In early cartoons, Bosko (voiced by Carmen Maxwell) even speaks in an exaggerated version of black dialect (later cartoons would give him a falsetto voice). Despite the parallels between Bosko and the blackface performers, Ising in later years would deny that the character was ever supposed to be a black caricature.

From his first Looney Tunes outing, Sinkin' in the Bathtub, Bosko would star in 39 musical films. His cartoons are notable for their generally weak plots and their abundance of music, singing, and dancing (though there were exceptions, such as Bosko the Doughboy, in 1931). These were the early days of sound cartoons, and audiences were enthralled simply to see characters talking and moving in step with the music. In terms of animation, the shorts are on-par with Disney's shorts of the same period. Harman and Ising were allowed production costs of up to $6000 per cartoon. During the same period, Disney was spending around $10,000 per cartoon. The smaller budgets forced Harman and Ising to recycle footage much more often than Disney did. In terms of music and sound recording, however, Harman and Ising had one up on Disney as the Warner Bros. provided access to a large musical library with all the popular tunes of the day, lavish orchestras (e.g. Abe Lyman) and sound recording equipment and staff all for free whereas Disney had to pay for all this himself. Disney also had another handicap, he had no access to a music library and was forced to rely, for the most part, on public domain music. In addition, Harman and Ising did not have to worry over details concerning the distribution of their cartoons as the Warner Bros. handled all this.

Vaudeville was the major entertainment of the time, and the cartoons of the era are better understood when compared to it rather than to animation of later decades. Though they might seem boring and rudimentary by today's standards, Bosko's films were quite popular in their day and he rivaled Mickey Mouse in popularity in the early 1930's.

Bosko at MGM
In 1933, Harman and Ising broke with Warner Bros. over budget disputes with Schlesinger. Having learned from Walt Disney's experiences with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, they had carefully kept all rights to the Bosko character, and they took him with them. The two found work with MGM where they launched the Happy Harmonies cartoon series. At first, Bosko appeared in his original design and some of the old animation from the Looney Tunes series was even reused in those Happy Harmonies that features Bosko. The character was later redesigned into an identifiable black boy. Bosko only starred in a handful of cartoons before Harman and Ising discontinued the character.

Bosko on television


Bosko's cartoons were largely forgotten until the advent of television. Since the films could be shown cheaply, programmers put them into constant rotation in the 1950s. Bosko's shorts were on the air up until the 1990s on both Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network.

Bosko made a surprise cameo in a 1990 episode of the television series Tiny Toon Adventures in which Babs Bunny, after being told by the Acme Looniversity's mysterious vaultkeeper about Honey, is led by a mysterious voice to build a theater that shows nothing but cartoons of Bosko's girlfriend, Honey. Babs does so, and the resulting audience laughter rejuvenates the ailing Honey and reveals the voice, as well as the vaultkeeper to be none other than Bosko himself. Curiously, the cartoon depicts Bosko and Honey as dog-like creatures reminiscent of the lead characters of the later TV show Animaniacs, presumably so as not to offend viewers with the original black-face characters. Another reason may be that this episode served as a "bridge" between Tiny Toons and Animaniacs. In an even briefer cameo, Bosko is seen in a portrait in the 1996 movie Space Jam, this time in his original form.

Today, the majority of the cartoons are available on VHS and DVD in the Uncensored Bosko series from Bosko Video. In 2003, Warner Home Video officially released the initial pilot film Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid as an extra on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 1 DVD box set. Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 3 (released in 2005) also includes the first Looney Tunes short, Sinkin' in the Bathtub (which originally introduced Bosko and Honey to audiences in 1930) as an extra.