Actor David Arquette has bought the rights to Bozo the Clown, with plans to open a museum in Chicago filled with Bozo-iana. For decades in the middle of the 20th century, Bozo was an iconic character and a model for a new form of consumerism aimed directly at children.
While children’s television programming subsequently evolved, catering to children’s educational needs (“Sesame Street”), family viewing (sitcoms) and satire (“The Simpsons”), Bozo remains dear to people who, like Arquette, initially saw his show as a child and felt spoken to directly by the character. Bozo fostered his viewers’ sense of themselves as consumers and his likeness has since lived on in American entertainment, even long after the peak popularity of clowns.
In the years after World War II, American economic growth was grounded in abundance and consumption. The growing middle class consumed suburban houses, cars and home televisions. Americans’ identities and role in the economy were increasingly tied up with their consumer habits. And children were a largely untapped market.
Capitol Records invented Bozo as a tool to sell products for children — and initially did so by appealing to mothers. He was born as part of an entire line of read-along record albums starting in 1946 advertised by record stores as “Kiddie Records” for children, which would help mothers get their domestic work completed. It was the age of the baby boom, and middle class women were under new pressures to perform the role of “housewife” with zeal.
“Now … my children entertain themselves,” reads one magazine ad headline, with a happy mom pointing to her children playing records. Capitol Records sold music, too, along with read-along books, advertising “wholesome entertainment helping children’s eager minds learn good taste and appreciation for finer things.”
Starting in 1948, Bozo’s white face, painted smile and orange hair became the logo for “Bozo Approved” books with other children’s stories produced and promoted by Capitol. Daffy Duck, Peppy the Possum, Hopalong Cassidy and Bongo the Circus Bear joined Bozo with books that went along with their audio records.
Each of these characters also became household names for children, but Bozo was the biggest celebrity to grow directly out of the records.
Bozo became real to children who listened to the records while following along with books such as “Bozo Under the Sea,” “Bozo and the Birds” and “Bozo at the Circus.” With each page, he’d ask them to turn the page, tell them what they were seeing, making sure they were all looking at the same page that he was narrating.
Voice actor Pinto Colvig, a former vaudeville actor who was the voice of Goofy and Pluto for Walt Disney Studios, gave the clown a real voice and persona. The records were sufficiently popular that Capitol named him “Bozo the Capitol Clown” and placed his face on every read-along record.
With the advent of television in more suburban homes during the 1950s, moving the popular character to the TV was a natural extension of Capitol Records’ marketing campaign. Two years after stations aired “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” the first television show produced exclusively for children, Bozo, played by Colvig, appeared on a weekly show teaching children about the circus in Los Angeles.
When the show started, Bozo was already something of a household name to youngsters and parents. But television cut out the mediating mom in the marketing chain and spoke directly to children.
In 1951, Capitol released a syndicated promotional show to stations called “Bozo’s Circus” to encourage viewers to keep buying records and books. “I’m sure you’ve heard me on the records,” Bozo noted at the start, “and enjoyed all the Bozo Approved albums too.”
After touring the circus with trained animals and acrobats and such, Bozo told youngsters that at that very moment, “I’d like to meet every one of you personally. Come right down and shake you by the hand. Then we’ll aaallll [sic] go the place where they sell those Bozo Approved records. I’ll even autograph one for you.” Bozo’s producers were counting on children feeling an individual connection to the clown and translating it into in-store purchases.
The popularity of the syndicated shows for children and Bozo himself led to copycats as TV’s popularity grew. Stations started running locally produced programs for kids, based on the popularity of early nationally syndicated shows such as “Howdy Doody” and “Captain Kangaroo.” Characters like Flippo the King of the Clowns in Columbus, Happy A. Clown in Nashville and Milky the Clown in Detroit appeared on television starting in the 1950s, with stations collecting advertising revenue from sponsors who wanted to reach the burgeoning market of young and malleable consumers.
Those selling products were effective. For example, Milky the Clown was a magician sponsored by Twin Pines Dairy; the company’s milk orders and delivery routes tripled in the years the show appeared. Children pressed their parents to choose products with logos and characters designed to appeal to them.
Capitol Records moved beyond stories for kids by the mid-1950s as popular music exploded. In 1956, it sold the rights to the clown to Larry Harmon, who portrayed Bozo at the time in Los Angeles. Harmon then transformed Bozo into a national sensation starting in 1957 when he first sold Bozo as a franchise.
Local TV stations across the country paid Harmon for the rights to produce their own Bozo programs with their local actors — for example, the TV news weatherman — portraying the clown; the appearance and general show format were standardized across the country. The stations then sold advertising space on the show to local sponsors.
That’s how weatherman Willard Scott became Bozo in Washington, D.C., between 1959 and 1962. Later, Scott was the first Ronald McDonald, but only after McDonald’s had used Bozo in earlier advertising. Within just a handful of years, almost every major television market had a Bozo show with his orange hair, baggy suit and white makeup becoming synonymous with on-screen clowns, with stations reaping revenue from advertisers.
This was the context for the memorable 1975 “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” episode “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” in which the station’s own clown passes away and Mary’s colleagues gather to mourn — and laugh.
In Chicago, Bozo was played by Bob Bell, an announcer and actor on WGN. He first appeared in “Bozo’s Circus” in 1960, won an Emmy for his portrayal in 1970 and appeared nationally via cable starting in 1978 — when Arquette, born in 1971, was the right age to be watching such shows. Bell’s portrayal was the inspiration in both appearance and voice for Krusty the Clown on “The Simpsons.”
Bozo and the television clowns he inspired focused on children and had an air of innocence that has since unraveled. During the 1970s, John Wayne Gacy donned a clown disguise and persona to lure children into his home before murdering them. This helped associate clowns with menace rather than mirth.
By the time Krusty came along, the puppet in “Poltergeist” had already planted the notion of frightening clowns in the popular imagination. Stephen King advanced the idea with his clown Pennywise that became a miniseries, with a terrifying Tim Curry playing the clown.
Others followed in films, to the point that it would never dawn on us today to think of a clown as an appropriate character for children. In one 2016 poll, almost two-thirds of people ages 18 to 29 were at least a bit afraid of clowns. For those who grew up watching Bozo and his ilk, however, that number is only about 1 in 4.
It is the positive childhood feelings about Bozo rather than the sinister associations that Arquette plans to showcase. Arquette hasn’t said if he’ll don the white paint and orange hair himself and reprise the role. He told WGN that “we want everyone to get in touch with the Bozo in the hearts.” No red ball nose required.