00. Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid (1929)

Release date: May 1929 

Series: Pilot 

Director: Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising 

Starring: Rudolf Ising (Cartoonist), Carman Maxwell (Bosko) 

The start of it all! In 1929, Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising created Bosko as a pilot film, pitching it around to Hollywood distributors. Leon Schlesinger found the film and thusly produced/sold a number of Bosko cartoons to Warner Bros., thus starting the phenomenon that is Looney Tunes.

This 5 minute cartoon is, simply put, plotless. It consists of Rudolf Ising drawing up the character of Bosko, who comes to live and performs for Ising, including tap dancing, playing the piano, and singing.

Bosko was described as an “inkblot” of a character, but the racial stereotyping is pretty evident, right down to the voice (his voice would later change to sound more like Mickey Mouse). Buddy, the mascot who would later replace Bosko in 1933 was even described as “Bosko in whiteface” (but I digress, I’m getting way too ahead of myself.) 

Rudolf asks Bosko to show him what he can do. Bosko shows off and does a variety of dances like this one: 

Bosko notices the audience and asks what they’re doing. Rudolf explains that there’s an audience watching (which is quite ironic, considering this was a pilot on a demo reel. No large audience was intended to see this! It was first broadcast to a wide scale audience on Cartoon Network in 2000) and asks “Can ya make 'em laugh?” Bosko thinks for a moment before asking if Rudolf can draw him a piano, which he does, to Bosko’s excitement.

Bosko plays the piano and a variety of gags come in, such as hitting a few sour notes, swiping his finger along the keys, and even singing and retracting his tongue back into his mouth with the pull of a single hair (which reminds me of Daffy doing the same thing in Baby Bottleneck—once again getting 17 years ahead of myself!) 

Bosko serenades the audience (quite poorly), and Rudolf, fed up with Bosko’s grating singing, sucks Bosko back up into his pen and dumps the ink back into an inkwell.

Finally, Bosko pops out of the inkwell and says: 

“Well, so long, folks! See you all later!” the phrase “So long, folks” would be used as a sign off for the Merrie Melodies cartoons, whereas the Looney Tunes cartoons would use “That’s all, folks”.

This cartoon is interesting, but not necessarily for its content. Honestly, it’s a pretty boring cartoon, and of course the racial stereotype is hard to get past. It’s essentially plotless and just Bosko doing a bunch of gags. But, with that said, it WAS a pilot, it WAS 1929, it WASN’T meant to be seen by large audiences. Even if it was shown to audiences, it certainly would’ve been a LOT more impressive 90 years ago than it is now.

Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid is basically just showing “Hey, we can synchronize audio and animation”, obviously a common theme back then. While it’s not a riveting cartoon whatsoever, it’s interesting to think back on context. I’m so unaffected by it today, but 90 years ago it would’ve been pretty riveting, and just thinking about that alone is exciting. And plus, Looney Lunes is all traced back to this pilot, so there’s a lot to be grateful for.

Again: it’s stereotypical and a product of its time, so be warned, but I’ll put a link to it anyway just because I think it’s an interesting watch. This 5 minute clip lead to such a major animation phenomenon! It’s fascinating to think about.