Bosko the Talk-Ink Dog

**Bosko the Talk-Ink Dog** is an animated cartoon character created by animators Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising. TBD

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Bosko was the first recurring character in Leon Schlesinger's cartoons, and was the star of 39 *Looney Tunes* shorts released by Warner Bros., After Harman and Ising left Schlesinger's studio, TBD

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## Creation and first film

In 1927, Harman and Ising were still working for the Walt Disney Studios on a series of live-action/animated short subjects known as the *Alice Comedies*. The two animators created Bosko in 1927 to capitalize on the new "talkie" craze that was sweeping the motion picture industry. They began thinking about making a sound cartoon with Bosko in 1927, before even leaving 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 the spring of 1928, Harman and Ising went to work for Charles Mintz on Universal's second-season *Oswald the Lucky Rabbit* cartoons. April 1929 found them moving on again, leaving Universal to market their new cartoon character. In May 1929, they produced a short pilot cartoon, similar to Max Fleischer's *Out of the Inkwell* cartoons, *Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid* that showcased their ability to animate soundtrack-synchronized speech and dancing. The short, plotless cartoon opens with live actionfootage 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. This short is a landmark in animation history as being the first cartoon to predominantly feature synchronized speech, though Fleischer Studios' Song Car-Tune "My Old Kentucky Home" was the first cartoon to contain animated dialogue a few years earlier. 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. It would not be seen by a wide audience until 71 years later, in 2000, as part of Cartoon Network's special *Toonheads: The Lost Cartoons*, a compilation special of rare material from the WB/Turner archives.

In his book, *Of Mice and Magic*, Leonard Maltin states that this early version of Bosko was considered as one of the best 1930s cartoon characters.

## Bosko, creation of Honey, and *Looney Tunes*

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 girlfriend named Honey and a dog named Bruno. He was also sometimes accompanied by an orphan cat named Wilbur and an often antagonistic goat, particularly in early cartoons.

The role of Bosko was to serve as a cartoony version of Al Jolson in *The Jazz Singer* (1927). According to Ising, he was initially supposed to be an "inkspot sort of thing". He was not conceived as either a human or an animal, though behaving like a little boy. According to Leonard Maltin, that version of Bosko was a cartoonized version of a young black boy who spoke a Southern dialect of African American Vernacular English. He cites as an example a phrase from *Bosko's Holiday*, said with an intermittent drawl: "I sho'done likes picnics."

Whether admiring a dress worn by Honey or eating a sandwich (with exaggerated chewing) Bosko had a stock exclamatory reaction indicating his pleasure "Mmmm! Dat sho' is fine!" which became something of a catch phrase.

According to Terry Lindvall and Ben Fraser, Bosko and Honey "were the most balanced portrayals of blacks in cartoons to that point". They had the same type of formulaic coy adventures as Mickey and Minnie Mouse. They point to *Bosko in Person* (1933) where Honey gives a Billie Holiday-style performance as an example of nonracist racial tribute to a real person. According to Tom Bertino, Harman and Ising never called attention to Bosko's racial status, and stayed clear of negative stereotypes involving dice and watermelon. Bosko instead received positive portrayals as a spunky and resourceful boy. An exception to this was a demeaning representation in *Congo Jazz* (1930). Bosko in a jungle setting is depicted standing between a chimpanzee and a gorilla. All three are depicted with virtually identical faces. The only things identifying him as human is his relative size and his clothes.

From his first *Looney Tunes* outing, *Sinkin' in the Bathtub*, Bosko would star in 39 musical films (one of which was not released). 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 free of charge 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 1930s, although the Disney cartoons would eventually surge ahead in popularity on the basis of stronger plot and character development.

In the later *Looney Tunes* shorts which Bosko appeared, his accent was gone. Consequently, his race became more ambiguous.

## 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 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 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. However, after only two cartoons, the character was redesigned into an identifiable black boy, similar in appearance to Inki and Lil' Eightball, with an overactive imagination. This redesigned Bosko, whom many consider to be a different character altogether, in spite of having the same name, only starred in seven negatively-received cartoons before Harman and Ising discontinued the character. The career of the character ended for good when MGM fired Harman and Ising due to cost overruns in the films they produced. They were replaced by Fred Quimby, who later hired Harman and Ising back, though Bosko did not make any appearances in subsequent MGM subjects produced by them.

For the bulk of his cartoons at MGM, Bosko was voiced by the animator who initially voiced him, Carman Maxwell. He was then replaced by *Our Gang* star Billie Thomas.

Originally, the shorts which Bosko appeared usually revolved around musical adventure stories, but for the final three shorts in which he appeared, the plot revolved around the character delivering cookies for his mother, but his imagination would usually lead him to being ambushed by giant frogs who want to steal the cookies.

## DreamWorks' Bosko

After Bosko's controversial redesign at MGM and Harman and Ising's dismissal from the studio in 1937, Dora Wilson made a deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that allowed her studio to acquire the rights for Bosko and fellow characters Foxy and Roxy and incorporating them into the short series *Dreamtoons*, while MGM retained the rights for the 1934-1938 shorts. In its big entrance to the studio, Bosko was redesigned as a dog and Foxy was slighty redesigned to be more fox-like and less Mickey Mouse-like, with both being now voiced by veteran voice actor Mel Blanc, while Honey and Roxy were now voiced by Bea Benaderet and later by June Foray.

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## Bosko on television

The 1940s-1950s Bosko cartoons were packaged with other *Dreamtoons*, to be broadcast in various television markets in the 1950s. For instance, "Skipper Frank" (Frank Herman), showed Bosko, along with Joey Kangaroo, Goldy Locks and the Wacky Ducks, on "Cartoon Carousel" his hour-long afterschool cartoon program on KTLA-TV (Channel 5) in Los Angeles. Bosko cartoons were also later aired on Nickelodeon as part of the network's *Dreamtoons* program during the 1990s.

Under permission from DreamWorks, the *Dreamtoons* version of Bosko appeared in a 1990 episode of the television series *Tiny Toon Adventures* titled "Fields of Honey", marking his return to a Warner Bros. cartoon. In a parody of the then-current film *Field of Dreams*, a mysterious voice leads Babs Bunny to build a theater that shows nothing but cartoons of Bosko's girlfriend Honey, after being told about Honey (voiced by B.J. Ward) by the Acme Looniversity's mysterious vaultkeeper (voiced by Don Messick). Babs does so, and the resulting audience laughter rejuvenates the aged and ailing Honey. The laughter also rejuvenates the vaultkeeper, who is revealed to be none other than Bosko himself as well as the source of the voice. The last appearance of Bosko in a Warner Bros. media was in a portrait in the 1996 movie *Space Jam*, this time in his original form.