History of Bozo the Clown

In 1946, Capitol Records producer Alan Livingston created Bozo the Clown as a children's sing-along record character. The original voice of Bozo was played by Pinto Colvig, who was best known as the voice of Walt Disney's Goofy. In 1949, the first Bozo the Clown television show began in Los Angeles with Colvig appearing in white-face makeup as the first television Bozo. He played Bozo for ten years.

When Alan Livingston left Capitol Records in 1959, Larry Harmon, an actor who had played Bozo at various live performance appearances in Southern California, bought the licensing rights to the character from Capitol. Harmon then embellished the character, creating his trademark red fright-wig. Then he started an animation studio that produced "Bozo the World's Most Famous Clown" cartoons. Harmon did the voice-over for Bozo.

He then created a television business first, when he franchised the Bozo character to local television stations throughout the country, personally hiring each market's TV Bozo. As each local show developed, each local Bozo wound up developing their own unique personality and, in a few cases, their own unique physical appearance. (A side note: In 1959, Pinto Colvig Jr., son of the original Bozo, was hired for the Los Angeles market)

Of all the local Bozos, the most popular was Bob Bell's Bozo at Chicago's WGN-TV. In 1978, when WGN-TV became one of the first cable television "superstations", Bell's Chicago version of Bozo became the nationwide version.

The only Bozo actor who went on to become famous was the Today Show's Willard Scott, who wore the clown outfit in the Washington D.C. market. Carroll Spinney, one of the side actors in the Boston version of the Bozo show, went on to portray Sesame Street's Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch.

A popular Bozo urban legend was that an unruly kid on the Boston show, who had just lost a contest, told him on-air to "Cram it, clownie." To which, Bozo responded, "That's a Bozo no-no." In a TV Guide interview, Larry Harmon claimed that the incident really happened. But then, there had been some other incidents where Harmon had been known to stretch the truth.