BOZISTORY
Bozo, the rather startlingly red-haired clown known all over the world, was created by Alan J. Livingston for Capitol Records, for the first read-along book and music record ever produced. Immensely popular with children - as well as advertisers - Livingston and Capitol started to franchise the Bozo character out to merchandisers as well as local TV stations (Pinto Colvig was TV's first Bozo). By 1956, Larry Harmon and various investors bought the licensing rights to the Bozo character, tweaked the clown's appearance, and coupled with original Bozo animated cartoons that Harmon produced through his own company, offered local TV stations across the country the chance to create their own locally produced Bozo shows. In those early days of television, anything even
remotely aimed at kids took off in the ratings, and Bozo, The World's Most Famous Clown, became one of the most-watched characters on nationwide television, with participating towns airing the show to kids who thought
their local Bozo was the
only Bozo in existence.
In 1965, Larry Harmon secured sole rights to the character, and, in his bid to exercise more control over Bozo, personally supervised the filming of 130 half-hour episodes of Boston's WHDH-TV's
Bozo's Big Top, starring Frank Avruch as the Bozo Harmon thought most like his own conception of the clown. The plan was to offer this syndicated version of Bozo to markets in the hopes of centralizing Harmon's operations (no more supervision over countless local incarnations), and thereby maximizing his profits. Unfortunately, what Harmon hadn't counted on was the popularity of local Bozos with local viewers, nor the wish of local TV station managers to exercise their own control over their own shows. Most local stations chose to keep their own Bozos (Chicago's WGN-TV's
Bozo's Circus was a huge hit, with a production budget far larger than the syndicated version), while the syndicated version played in markets that didn't have a Bozo show.
