Killing Technology

Flip the Frog built a robot. Scrappy built a robot. Bosko built a robot. In all cases, they became uncontrollable monsters. Well, you wouldn’t have a cartoon plot if they didn’t.

In Bosko’s Mechanical Man, our hero desperately launches a small barrel of TNT at his metallic creation. That takes care of him. I like the greys in the explosion scene.



The end result.



There’s no post-script with Honey going “My hero!” and the robot chugging to life for a final indignity before the iris closes. It just ends with the scrap metal and a cuckoo bird. I guess Hugh Harman thought that was enough.

By the way, can someone answer this?



This, as any Bosko fan knows, is Bosko with his dog Bruno.



So what dog is this one, the one with the squeak-toy bark?

Friz Freleng and Tom McKimson are the credited artists on this short, released in 1933.