Watch 38 Minutes of Lost 'Bozo's Circus' Show, March 29, 1972

For 40 years he was Chicagoland’s favorite clown and star of the most successful, locally produced children’s television show in the nation.

Unfortunately for Bozo and his sidekicks -- Ringmaster Ned, Oliver O. Oliver, Sandy the Tramp, “our kooky cook Cooky,” and big top bandleader Bob Trendler -- much of their work during Chicago’s golden age of television has been erased, ash canned or is sitting somewhere in a box of old Beta tapes.

Preservationist Rick Klein, curator and founder of the Museum of Classic Chicago Television (Fuzzy Memories TV), has uncovered 38 minutes from an original “Bozo’s Circus” show not seen since it first aired March 29, 1972, on WGN.

Posted on the Museum of Classic Chicago Television. Best viewed in HD.

“WGN would either tape over the shows or wouldn’t tape ‘Bozo’ at all because it was a live show,” Klein said. “The station might have saved each day’s broadcast for a week or so, but eventually they would reuse the tapes. This was standard practice for TV stations all across the country because quad reels were expensive and cumbersome to store.”

“Bozo’s Circus” was beloved by millions of kids blessed to have grown up in Chicago during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. WGN licensed the character from Larry Harmon, who aggressively marketed his Bozo franchise in nearly every major television market before the development of videotape.

Chicago’s Bozo was by far the most popular and successful of the many locally produced Bozo shows due largely to the talents of the show’s cast, Bob Bell, Ned Locke, Ray Rayner, Roy Brown and Don Sandburg, who all filled multiple gigs at WGN.

Before the show moved to mornings in 1981, “Bozo’s Circus” ruled the noon hour, with a five-year waiting list for tickets to be part of the “cast of thousands.” Chicago was also unique in that many school buildings did not have cafeterias, requiring most schoolchildren to go home for lunch, an untapped demographic for toy advertisers.

The lost 38 minutes fell into Klein’s lap when a Fuzzy Memories TV fan asked for help converting a tape of the show recorded on an ancient reel-to-reel home video recorder.

Aside from the material featured in “Bozo, Gar and Ray,” and a rare 1971 recording Klein found in the Peabody archives that WGN produced as a primetime special in 2012, this is the first time the lost 38 minutes have been seen publicly since the show aired 43 years ago.

Klein says he’s sitting on a backlog of “Bozo’s Circus” shows that followers have donated to his online museum, much of it recorded on VHS and Beta machines of live broadcasts they attended as children.

“If someone recorded an episode of Bozo even as late as 1983, there’s a good chance its the only existence of that episode,” he said.

Like the hundreds of other Bozo shows from its 40-year run, the March 29, 1972, broadcast features the Grand Prize Game, some Alaskan sled dogs, a pair of Laurel and Hardy impersonators, a Huckleberry Hound cartoon, Bozo and Cooky schtick, and a boy vs. girl relay race.

Klein, 41, who works in the IT industry, grew up in the area and now lives in Lisle. Preserving Chicago’s television history is his passion. He started the Museum of Classic Chicago Television as a YouTube channel in 2007 and eventually moved it to the fuzzymemories.tv website and Facebook.

In addition to kids’ shows, Klein and his team seek out local commercials, newscasts, station promos, signoffs and filler, such as the early 1970s ice storm warning slide from WLS-TV that he posted on Facebook during Monday’s winter storm watch.

“For me personally, it’s nice to recreate the experience of watching TV the way we saw it in Chicago, the good and the bad,” Klein said. “I’m a preservationist. There is a lot of material that would be lost otherwise if we didn’t start rooting it out and saving it.”

And now, let’s go back to 12 o’clock noon, March 29, 1972.

Want to help preserve Chicago’s television history? If you have early home VHS or Beta recordings of Chicago broadcast television from the 1980s or before, contact Rick Klein at fuzzy@fuzzymemories.tv.