Who owns these cartoons?

[jhaimleds]

Casper and Pink Panther? CN shows all the great MGM and WB toons, but what about toons like Casper and the Pink Panther?

[Sogturtle]

Originally posted by jhaimleds
Casper and Pink Panther? CN shows all the great MGM and WB toons, but what about toons like Casper and the Pink Panther?

The Panther (and Inspector, Ant & Aardvark) are in the clutches of MGM... But MGM may sell itself off shortly.

[Thad Komorowski]

The Casper the Friendly Ghost (along with Baby Huey, Herman & Katnip, Little Audrey, and Buzzy the Crow) cartoons were originally owned by Paramount, but Harvey Comics bought them in the late 1950s. The last time the Harveytoons (which they were retitled) were seen on TV was on Fox Family's short-lived Harveytoons Show. In 2000, Casper and the others were sold to Classic Media.

There is some news that in the near future, classic Casper DVDs will be released! :D


-Thad

[ota]

Some of the first Caspers are in public domain and can be found in these cheap tapes. Someone forgot to renew the copyright and anyone can use them, still the Casper character and trademark is still protected.
Paramount/Famous Studios sold all Casper and related characters (Baby Huey et al) in the beginning of the sixties (or was it end of the fifties?) to Harvey, the company that already published the comic-books. Harvey re-packed them for a TV series and comissioned new ones specially for TV. That show had the Casper, Herman and Katnip, Baby Huey and the "bouncing ball" toons and the HarveyToons logo. In the new toons, characters created by Harvey for the comics were used.
That´s as far as I know. It seems that Casper changed hands again later, maybe more than one time.
The cartoons were re-repacked in a "new" Casper and Friends (I dunno the correct name because I live in Brazil and translating it back may not lead to the correct title).
this Casper show had a new opening with Casper in an open car in a great avenue. Credits disappeared in the repacking. I´ve seen it on local TV some 10 years ago and also in the spanish cable channel ZAZ.

With the constant selling-and-buying and incorporated companies in the past years, It´s very difficult to identify who owns what by these days.
Maybe the original Caspers are owned by the company that produced the new series (a spin-off of the Casper recent theatrical movie)?

Ota

[Thad Komorowski]

Casper and Friends HAS to be the WORST show featuring classic cartoons ever! With the constant editing, and dubbing ALL of the characters voices with new ones (and not JUST Buzzy), it was certainly a bad show.


-Thad

[Jon Cooke]

Originally posted by Thad K
Casper and Friends HAS to be the WORST show featuring classic cartoons ever! With the constant editing, and dubbing ALL of the characters voices with new ones (and not JUST Buzzy), it was certainly a bad show.

I always wondered WHY they ruined the cartoons like that on the syndicated Capser and Friends show. I figured money must have been involved. Well, today I stumbled on the answer in this file (http://www.harvey.com/aboutus/investorinfo/asset/sec_12-31-99.pdf) buried on Harvey's website. It's really long, less-than-interesting and now outdated, but here's the piece I found interesting regarding their old cartoons-

http://looney.toonzone.net/picts/harvey-music.gif

So... they must have redubbed all those cartoons in the mid-1980s so they wouldn't have to pay any royalty money to Paramount for using the original music! Luckily, they came to their senses when Fox Family Harveytoons Show came along.


-Jon

[Dub]

RE: Pink Panther, Ant and Aardvark, etc

If MGM sells itself off again is there any chance that CN would be back in the running to air Pink Panthers once again? I miss his silence gracing my TV screen :)


What about the Terrytoons - Mighty Mouse and Heckle And Jeckle? Gawd I havent seen those in AGES...and I'd kill to see Mighty Mouse one more time...Does Viacom own them?

[Sogturtle]

Originally posted by Jon "WB" Gray
RE: Pink Panther, Ant and Aardvark, etc

If MGM sells itself off again is there any chance that CN would be back in the running to air Pink Panthers once again? I miss his silence gracing my TV screen :)


What about the Terrytoons - Mighty Mouse and Heckle And Jeckle? Gawd I havent seen those in AGES...and I'd kill to see Mighty Mouse one more time...Does Viacom own them?

Jon "WB" Gray ~

There remains a good chance that MGM MIGHT be bought by (you guessed it) AOL-Time-Warner. Ifffffff so then the entire DePatie-Freleng library would likely turn up on CN (and other owned networks),

As for Terry's stuff... YES it remains in the clutches of Viacom (CBS-Paramount-Republic)... Will you see any of them any time soon??? Heaven only knows!!! (They own the Betty Boops as well). They are sitting on it all.

[Joe Tully]

Originally posted by Jon "WB" Gray
RE: Pink Panther, Ant and Aardvark, etc

If MGM sells itself off again is there any chance that CN would be back in the running to air Pink Panthers once again? I miss his silence gracing my TV screen :)


If AOLTW was able to acquire them...then yes, it could be very possible. :cool: It was the first thing I thought of when I heard that MGM was up for sale.

I believe you are right, Viacom has Terrytoons. Some people have complained about how Nick doesn't show any of them.

[Nelson]

Regarding the Pink Panther & and the rest of the other shorts, was owned by Turner/MGM back in the early 90s. Then about two years ago United Artists(the cartoon's original film distributor) bought back all of the titles from Turner/Aol Time Warner.

As for the classic Terrytoon shorts, Viacom does indeed owns all of the entire Paul Terry library.Universal/MCA which owns the video rights for the last ten years or so, has done nothing to release them on video/dvd which is a real shame.Thank God! I have so many Terrytoon shorts(in very excellent film & video prints) on video. :D

[Sogturtle]

Originally posted by Joe Tully


If AOLTW was able to acquire them...then yes, it could be very possible. :cool: It was the first thing I thought of when I heard that MGM was up for sale.

I believe you are right, Viacom has Terrytoons. Some people have complained about how Nick doesn't show any of them.

The mucho-ugly catch to it all is this... Las Vegas casino-owner Kirk Kerkorian continues to own 80- 81 % of MGM. He now is insistent that he wants to trade his ownership of all that stock for... stock in the purchasing company!!! Sooooo does AOL-Time-Warner really want Kerkorian on board (he's 84 but in darn good health mind you) as ANOTHER Ted Turner??? I strongly doubt it...

[Sogturtle]

Originally posted by Nelson
Regarding the Pink Panther & and the rest of the other shorts, was owned by Turner/MGM back in the early 90s. Then about two years ago United Artists(the cartoon's original film distributor) bought back all of the titles from Turner/Aol Time Warner.



Nelson~

MGM (MGM/UA) had continued to own the UA features and DF cartoons outright... What had happened is that they released them through Warner Home Video. MGM simply bought back the contract for the home video. Ted Turner owned all MGM-UA for less than a year back in the mid-Eighties, before selling it off piecemeal to Warner and back to Kirk Kerkorian. Kerkorian sold the company again, and has repurchased it... Confusing isn't it???

[J Lee]

As for the Paramount/Terrytoons cartoons, here's actually a case where the made-for-TV stuff could actually help the situation.

Nickelodeon has started up their game channel, which is basically their game shows from the main channel given their own network. And over the past 12 years they have built up a pretty large stock of Nicktoons, to the point that they have a lot of stuff that doesn't air, but still not enough stuff to run 24/7/365 on a Nickelodeon cartoon channel.

So if Viacom did decide to start its own animation channel to compete with AOL Time Warner and Disney, they would need some "filler" material, which is where Betty Boop, Mighty Mouse, Heckle & Jeckyl, Little Lulu and even Goodie the Gremlin and Honey Halfwitch would come in. The cartoons would no doubt air in awful time slots, but they would have a chance to air, which is more than what they're doing right now (and aside from it's Nick stuff, Viacom also owns all of the MTV-based cartoons like "Beavis and Butthead" and "Daria," so odds are the channel would go for a more adult-flavor like CN and are those cartoons, along with the Paramount/Terrytoons shorts, in the later hours, than focus completely on the kiddies, the way Toon Disney tries to do).

[hiphats]

OK, short version of these rather long answers...

...Classic Media does indeed now own the Casper character, as well as the original elements to the classic cartoons (they are, of course, in the public domain).

United Artists (through MGM) still owns the Pink Panther cartoons, as well as the character.

That was simple, wasn't it...

[Sogturtle]

Originally posted by hiphats
OK, short version of these rather long answers...

...Classic Media does indeed now own the Casper character, as well as the original elements to the classic cartoons (they are, of course, in the public domain).

United Artists (through MGM) still owns the Pink Panther cartoons, as well as the character.

That was simple, wasn't it...

Yes Hiphats that is simple... But it leaves out complicating factors such as... The DePatie-Freleng cartoons were made under a complex arrangement... The Pink Panther was thought up for the Mirisch company and Blake Edwards, so the copyright and ownership of them is to "Mirisch-Geoffrey-DePatie-Freleng". The same is essentially true of the Inspector cartoons ("Mirisch-DePatie-Freleng"). I don't know if Blake Edwards still has any ownership in the Panther cartoons (doubtful). The remainder of the DF toons were jointly owned by UA (50%) Friz Freleng (25%) and David H. DePatie (25%). UA is recently resurrected, this time as a maker of cheap arty films, so their hand in the cartoons is gone forever, MGM is the real owner of record now. The DF TV specials are owned by others altogether... Things are never as simple as I want them to be...

[hiphats]

Originally posted by Sogturtle


Yes Hiphats that is simple... But it leaves out complicating factors such as... The DePatie-Freleng cartoons were made under a complex arrangement... The Pink Panther was thought up for the Mirisch company and Blake Edwards, so the copyright and ownership of them is to "Mirisch-Geoffrey-DePatie-Freleng". The same is essentially true of the Inspector cartoons ("Mirisch-DePatie-Freleng"). I don't know if Blake Edwards still has any ownership in the Panther cartoons (doubtful). The remainder of the DF toons were jointly owned by UA (50%) Friz Freleng (25%) and David H. DePatie (25%). UA is recently resurrected, this time as a maker of cheap arty films, so their hand in the cartoons is gone forever, MGM is the real owner of record now. The DF TV specials are owned by others altogether... Things are never as simple as I want them to be...

In a way, you're right about MGM owning the cartoons, since MGM does own the UA studio and its library. The cartoons themselves continue to carry the UA label, but MGM is the distributor since they have a distribution unit that handles all UA as well as MGM titles.

[Sogturtle]

....And for a fair number of years UA was out of business, existing only as a name in MGM/UA. It was the remaining UA library that Kerkorian re-bought in 1985 from Turner (*as a production studio UA was already dead, even though corporations have more lives than cats). When he similarly re-bought the still functional MGM a months later he simply had Metro gobble up the UA library. As I said before, UA has only recently been resurrected as a functional studio. It is for all intents and purposes a minor division (or maybe a subsidiary) of MGM (but wholly owned). It is analagous to Chrysler buyed American Motors to get Jeep, then killing off American Motors, but maintaining production of Jeeps... (Oh-oh, Kerkorian tried to buy Chrysler too).

[TeamFX]

Originally posted by Sogturtle

Yes Hiphats that is simple... But it leaves out complicating factors such as... The DePatie-Freleng cartoons were made under a complex arrangement... The Pink Panther was thought up for the Mirisch company and Blake Edwards, so the copyright and ownership of them is to "Mirisch-Geoffrey-DePatie-Freleng". The same is essentially true of the Inspector cartoons ("Mirisch-DePatie-Freleng"). I don't know if Blake Edwards still has any ownership in the Panther cartoons (doubtful). The remainder of the DF toons were jointly owned by UA (50%) Friz Freleng (25%) and David H. DePatie (25%). UA is recently resurrected, this time as a maker of cheap arty films, so their hand in the cartoons is gone forever, MGM is the real owner of record now. The DF TV specials are owned by others altogether... Things are never as simple as I want them to be...

You got a point there. It's difficult to place DePatie-Freleng in a specific list of who's-the-owner. Their cartoons are virtually scattered everywhere. I know of at least 3 studios that have connections with DFE in one way or the other.

Their early theatrical cartoons released by Warner Bros. are under license by AOL Time Warner. Most of the cartoons released by United Artists are owned by MGM, of course. And some of their TV series are said to be under license by The Walt Disney Company.

I bring that studio up on a count of their connections with Saban Entertainment, who was acquired by Disney along with Fox Family (now ABC Family) from News Corp in 2001. It's a little-known fact that Saban had previously acquired the rights to the DePatie-Freleng and Marvel Studios program backlog. Marvel was the successor animation studio to DePatie-Freleng, which happened shortly before Friz Freleng's departure in 1980. Speaking of which, I wonder what's the story on Marvel Comics? I lost track of who their current parent company might be. However, IIRC, they too were also a part of News Corporation (through New World Entertainment) in the late 1990s. I guess we'll have to find out more about this and other information later on.

:wakko:

[mlr]

<<There remains a good chance that MGM MIGHT be bought by (you guessed it) AOL-Time-Warner.>>

Oh, goodie. Another film library for Warner Home Video to largely ignore.

Mike