Gourt Home::Gourt :: Bosko
Related Topics:Boskovic
Bosko is an animated cartoon character created by animators Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising. Though considered dull in comparison to later Looney Tunes players, Bosko was Warner Bros. Studios' first major recurring character and the star of over three dozen Looney Tunes shorts.
Creation and first film
Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising were veterans of Walt Disney Studios, and they created Bosko to capitalize on the new "talkie" craze that was sweeping the motion picture industry. Harman designed the character (consciously modeling him after Felix the Cat) and, in 1929, starred him in a short film, Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid, that showcased his 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.
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. Through these early Looney Tunes, Harman and Ising would turn Bosko into a near duplicate of Walt Disney's creation, Mickey Mouse, who was then the most popular character in cartoons. Bosko himself looked like Mickey, albeit with long pants and a derby hat, and he had a Minnie Mouse flapper girlfriend named Honey. Bosko even had a Pluto substitute 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 Mickey Mouse-like falsetto). Despite the parallels between Bosko, Mickey, 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.
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 are on-par with Disney's shorts of the same period (though smaller budgets forced Harman and Ising to recycle footage much more often). Harman and Ising wanted little else.
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 that 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. 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.
References
- Barrier, Michael (1999): Hollywood Cartoons. Oxford University Press.
- Maltin, Leonard (1987): Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. Penguin Books.
- Schneider, Steve (1999): That's All Folks!: The Art of Warner Bros. Animation. Barnes and Noble Books.
- Beck, Jerry and Friedwald, Will (1989): Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons. Henry Holt and Company.
External links
"Bosko"