Around The World By Rocket With Bozo The Clown

Stephen Worth says:

In 1946, a young producer at Capitol Records, Alan Livingston was assigned the task of developing a children's line for the fledgling record company. He came up with the idea of a read-along record and book set featuring a circus clown named Bozo. The album, Bozo At The Circus, sold over a million copies, and helped to push Capitol to the top of the charts.

Along with Disney voice man, Pinto Colvig and musical director, Billy May, Livingston also produced Bozo On The Farm, Bozo And The Birds, and this one... Bozo And His Rocket Ship. All of the sets were re-released in the LP era, but this one was heavily edited, for obvious reasons. In this album, Bozo makes a survey of just about every ethnic stereotype imaginable! But that isn't the reason we're featuring it. We're spotlighting the wonderful work of the illustrators, Norm McCabe and Cecil Beard.

Link

[#1 posted by arrghiamapirate , October 25, 2007 1:29 PM]

I have all of these and they are wonderful! They are very politically incorrect, but the artwork is amazing.

[#2 posted by Stefan Jones , October 25, 2007 4:24 PM]

I recently digitized a couple of RUSSIAN kids' albums. I found them at a thrift store.

One looked like it might be a version of Pinnochio. The other showed a boy (with a surprisingly contemporary haircut) looking at a sort of chubby elf with a propeller on his butt. They had two and three 33 1/3 rpm records apiece, respectively.

They're probably Soviet era -- there's a CCCP on each box -- but I couldn't find a date.

I should scan in the covers so I can have someone translate the titles for me!

[#3 posted by Michael Una , October 25, 2007 5:59 PM]

That's not just "a circus clown," that's Bozo the Clown of the long-running Chicago public television kid's show.

Bozo's pranks on his fellow clowns and other circus freaks were well-engineered feats of humiliation, never paralleled.

Every kid on the block was a big fan of Bozo, and even as sulky pre-teens we still secretly wanted to win the Grand Prize Game.

[#4 posted by Stefan Jones , October 26, 2007 12:56 PM]

Michael:

Bozo was once a franchise. There were Bozo the Clown shows all over the country. The Chicago Bozo was (is?) the last survivor.

A savvy marketer named Larry Harmon (who did not create Bozo, merely turned him into a big business) was responsible. Under his management there were Bozo toys, a Bozo TV cartoon, and at least one Bozo needlepoint kit. (The finished, framed result hung in the Stony Brook SF library for many years.)

There was a Bozo on a NYC station when I was a kid. In 1969 we went on a trip to Little Rock, AK. They had their own Bozo, on a different set. Man, that freaked the hell out of me!