Trivia / The Bozo Show

• Defictionalization: Of a sort. "Bozo's Grand Prize Game" was a popular ticket-redemption game at arcades during the 80s and 90s, and are still fairly common today.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The show hasn't really been rerun since cancellation due to most of the classic Bob Bell-era episodes being destroyed, and what does survive is hard to come by even on the Web. WGN has never released the Bozo, Gar, and Ray special or any surviving episodes on DVD either. Use of outside licensed content in the special could be a factor, but holding onto it until its two annual holiday airings does ensure it remains special in name and purpose for the network. The Bozo the Clown episodes that circulate on DVD are from the version that aired in Boston from 1959-1970.
• Missing Episode: Much of the 1960s-70s run is missing, as WGN needed to reuse the videotape.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: One perpetually circulating one centers on the [in]famous "Cram it, clown!" (or some other off-color, disrespectful remark) made by a bratty kid after Bozo or another of the show's cast was merely trying to be nice to him. Stories and details vary wildly, and as most programs aired live or — if they were pre-taped — erased after airing (due to VHS recording being an expensive commodity prior to the early 1980s) there is no way to verify for sure ... but most accounts suggest the comment came after the kid, picked to play the Grand Prize Game ^note (a skill game, similar to today's beer pong, with the object being to land a ping pong ball into buckets progressively farther away from the contestant, with larger-ticket items won for each successful attempt, up to the sixth one where a grand prize (often a larger-ticket item such as a trip) lost on the first attempt, and in his frustration that he didn't win anything except a cheap Consolation Prize for "doing his super-duper best" (either a towel with Bozo's likeness on it or a balsa-wood airplane) uttered the infamous words, after which he was rebuked ("That's a Bozo no-no").
• Recycled Set: Rather eerily, Bozo's set later went to paranormal talk-show Beyond with James van Praagh. The ovals which held the portraits of the Bozo characters had been painted over in a dark pastel blue.
• Referenced by...: In Superman story arc "Brainiac: Rebirth", when Kid Flash asks Superman if he could use the Teen Titans to stop Brainiac, Superman replies he would use Bozo the Clown if he'd help.
• Screwed by the Network: The show was bumped from its long-held weekday morning slot to Sundays to make way for news; the E/I-compliance laws made it worse, as was the position of being the only kids show WGN Chicago had on the schedule at the time (unlike their superstation feed, they didn't carry Kids' WB! until 2004, instead pushing it to WCIU-TV 26).

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