Bosko is a cartoon character created by animators Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising. Bosko is the first recurring character in Leon Schlesinger's cartoon series, and is also the star of over three dozen Looney Tunes shorts released by Warner Bros. He was voiced by Carman Maxwell, Bernard B. Brown, and Johnny Murray during the 1920s and 1930s, and once by Don Messick during the 1990s.
In 1927, Harman and Ising were still working for the Walt Disney Studios on a series of live-action/animated short subjects now 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 under the name of Bosko, ironically a few months before Mickey's creation.
Then, they released the pilot for Looney Tunes named "Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid" from 1929. A year later, they released the first Looney Tunes episode "Sinkin' in the Bathtub" from 1930 featuring Bosko.
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. After only two cartoons, the character was redesigned into an identifiable boy 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 cartoons before Harman and Ising discontinued the character.
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