"I never knew what Bosko was. Hugh designed him like Felix the Cat; if you took the same head and put pointed ears on him, Bosko would be Felix. That was very typical of the early cartoon characters—they all had pipestem legs and no anatomy."
—Animator Mel Shaw, who described himself as "one of the original Harman-Ising boys"; quoted from "Hollywood Cartoons"
"We never knew what he [Bosko] was. A lot of people who saw the films thought Bosko was a little colored boy, but we never thought of him that way. He was just a character with a Southern voice. When Rochelle Hudson did the dialogue for Honey, she used a Southern voice, too. She and Maxwell did wear blackface makeup, but that was part of our recording process. We shot them in live action at the same time we recorded the dialogue, then we studied the footage on a Moviola. Each animator also had a mirror in which he studied his own mouth movements. By the time we learned how to read the voice tracks, we had made charts of lip motions."
—Rudy Ising, quoted from "Hollywood Cartoons"
"We had a cleaning man or ‘handy man’ or whatever who used to hang around the studio and he asked me one day, ‘You got Mickey the Mouse and Felix the Cat but Bosko the What?’ I couldn’t answer. No one admitted openly that he was a little black boy but it was true. Perhaps the beginning of a racist conscience?"
—Animator Jack Zander; quote from Cartoon Research.
