Bosko

Bosko is an animated cartoon character created by animators Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising. Bosko was the first recurring character in Leon Schlesinger's cartoon series and was the star of thirty-nine Looney Tunes shorts released by Warner Bros. He was voiced by Carman Maxwell, Johnny Murray, and Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas during the 1920s and 1930s and once by Don Messick during the 1990s. Creation and the first film In 1927, Harman and Ising worked 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 1928 to capitalize on the recent success of talkies in the motion picture industry. They began thinking about making a sound cartoon with Bosko in 1928 before even leaving Walt Disney. Hugh Harman made drawings of the new character and registered it with the U.S. Copyright Office on January 3, 1928. The character was registered as a "Negro boy" under the name of Bosko. After leaving Walt Disney in early 1928, Harman and Ising went to work for Charles Mintz on Universal's second-season Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons. In April 1929 they left 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, titled 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, dances, and plays the piano. Ising returns Bosko to the inkwell, and the short ends. Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid was a landmark in animation history for 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 Warner Bros.