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Answerman - Do Anime Studios Own The American Shows They Contributed To?


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prime_pm



Joined: 06 Feb 2004
Posts: 2333
Location: Your Mother's Bedroom
PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 11:13 am Reply with quote
The Drew Carey Show has a similar problem of being released, since several copyrighted songs were played throughout the series' run. It's the reason why only the first season is available on DVD and the rest are only available as clips on Youtube.
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SrkSano



Joined: 05 Oct 2008
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 11:28 am Reply with quote
Disney is the absolute worse with releasing any TV show on DVD. Maybe it's just as Answerman says, the money is just not there. They own the rights to pretty much every Marvel cartoon (before they even bought Marvel) but won't put anything older than 2000 on DVD. They play these games with shows they own too. Heck I think to this very day you can only get like 6 random episodes of Goof Troop on VHS.

I'll say this for Warner Bros. They put everything on DVD. EVERYTHING. If it's not on DVD there's a licensing issue like the Wonder Woman TV Show or the 60s Batman TV show but eventually they work around it and bring it out anyway.
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WingKing



Joined: 27 Apr 2015
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 11:54 am Reply with quote
This is a common problem with shows that use copyrighted content from other sources, since getting clearance from the copyright holders to use their IP on television and getting clearance to use it on a home video release are two different beasts. The "Muppet Family Christmas" holiday special has the same issue, where several scenes from the original TV version got completely cut out of the home video version because they couldn't get permission to re-use certain copyrighted songs.

The big problem with Muppet Babies, though, is what Justin alluded to: it has other companies' copyrighted IP in practically every episode, and in many cases having the IP is integral to the plot, so it's not like little side scenes you can edit around or edit out if permission is denied; you'd have to scrap the whole episode. Trying to get rights and clearances for all of it would no doubt be hideously complicated, and even if they did miraculously get it all together and get it out to stores uncut, it probably still wouldn't be a very profitable series to release anyway, especially once you start looking at how many different entities would be owed royalties from the sale of each boxset (never mind the overhead costs of remastering the old audio and video and manufacturing the sets).
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Hoppy800



Joined: 09 Aug 2013
Posts: 3331
PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 12:08 pm Reply with quote
It could be worse like the epic disasterization that's Baby Felix. I saw one episode of that anime and wondered who thought that making this anime was ok, it's in the realms of Abunai Sisters and Wonder Momo bad. I have yet to see another work based off an American franchise to be destroyed this badly, even Halo Legends was nowhere near this level of bad.
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
Posts: 7163
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 12:25 pm Reply with quote
Huh, I didn't know John Kricfalusi had an entry on this site's encyclopedia. I do know he hated working on Tiny Toon Adventures though. (And in a weird inversion of this trope of spin-off babies, you have Back to Bedrock and Quack Pack, in which the setting is pushed forward by several years to a decade and the child characters in the base franchise are now teenagers. For some reason, I really liked watching those shows, but they've become obscure so I can't really watch them now to understand why I liked them so much.)

The Japanese animation studios being the center for outsourced animation is brought up a lot by animation historians, way more than anime itself is brought up. I always found that odd, but I think a newer generation of animation historians who grew up on anime is changing that. But yeah, they all agree that no, companies like Toei and TMS did not have any ownership in these series (though some of the old guard are hesitant to even name them at all lest people actually go look up what these studios have actually done).

prime_pm wrote:
The Drew Carey Show has a similar problem of being released, since several copyrighted songs were played throughout the series' run. It's the reason why only the first season is available on DVD and the rest are only available as clips on Youtube.


I've observed similar problems with Beavis and Butt-Head too, particularly the sequences in which the two of them would watch music videos and criticize and mock them. That was thoroughly a product of it being on MTV and wouldn't have functioned outside of it.

SrkSano wrote:
Disney is the absolute worse with releasing any TV show on DVD. Maybe it's just as Answerman says, the money is just not there. They own the rights to pretty much every Marvel cartoon (before they even bought Marvel) but won't put anything older than 2000 on DVD. They play these games with shows they own too. Heck I think to this very day you can only get like 6 random episodes of Goof Troop on VHS.

I'll say this for Warner Bros. They put everything on DVD. EVERYTHING. If it's not on DVD there's a licensing issue like the Wonder Woman TV Show or the 60s Batman TV show but eventually they work around it and bring it out anyway.


I've been waiting for Kim Possible season sets, and I don't think they will ever happen. As for WB, there was a recent release of a new animated Batman special done in the style of the old Adam West TV series and even brought back as many of the actors as they could. I'm guessing it's for the 50th anniversary of the show, but it was incredibly strange.

Hoppy800 wrote:
It could be worse like the epic disasterization that's Baby Felix. I saw one episode of that anime and wondered who thought that making this anime was ok, it's in the realms of Abunai Sisters and Wonder Momo bad. I have yet to see another work based off an American franchise to be destroyed this badly, even Halo Legends was nowhere near this level of bad.


And I'll say that the anime of Powerpuff Girls, while drastically inferior to the original version, was just really, really bland. The writers had no idea what to do with the characters and just stuck them in silly situations without making them feel natural while the humor was forcefully inserted in. (One can say the remake is like that too, though at least the remake is fast-paced and they do more than just "magical girl show with humor for little kids.")

Stitch! is all right though, but again, not nearly as good as Lilo & Stitch: The Series.
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varmintx



Joined: 31 Jul 2006
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 1:07 pm Reply with quote
prime_pm wrote:
The Drew Carey Show has a similar problem of being released, since several copyrighted songs were played throughout the series' run. It's the reason why only the first season is available on DVD and the rest are only available as clips on Youtube.

The DVD release of Daria resolved this problem by just cutting all of the copyrighted music out and replacing it. Not exactly the greatest way to get the show on home media, but I took that over nothing.
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Zin5ki



Joined: 06 Jan 2008
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 1:47 pm Reply with quote
Justin wrote:
At its best, this trend gave us shows like Tiny Toons Adventures, and at its worst we got crap like Tom And Jerry Kids.

On that note, I can only wonder where such variations on the theme as Popeye and Son and James Bond Jr. would fall in the ranking.
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mrsatan



Joined: 06 Jul 2005
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Location: Olympia, WA, USA
PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 1:54 pm Reply with quote
I have a lot of good memories of being a kid in the mid 80s and all the cartoons looking like anime. I naively thought that it would be like that forever. Sad

It's been very difficult to piece together what Japanese studios and artists worked on these outsourced shows. Many (most?) of these cartoons didn't credit them.
Something interesting I noticed on the syndicated season of Real Ghostbusters was that those episodes were even storyboarded in Japan. I don't know how common that was.
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 2:07 pm Reply with quote
mrsatan wrote:
It's been very difficult to piece together what Japanese studios and artists worked on these outsourced shows. Many (most?) of these cartoons didn't credit them.


Some did. Hanna-Barbera shows tended to credit every outsourced animator, even if they didn't always mention the name of the company they outsourced to. I definitely saw Japanese names come up a lot, though eventually they switched to Korean companies (and still do to this day, to an extent).

They've stopped doing that now, with the prevailing style being the reverse, where the outsourced studio is mentioned by name but treated as a collective entity, with no one's names listed.
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 2:14 pm Reply with quote
Zin5ki wrote:
Justin wrote:
At its best, this trend gave us shows like Tiny Toons Adventures, and at its worst we got crap like Tom And Jerry Kids.

On that note, I can only wonder where such variations on the theme as Popeye and Son and James Bond Jr. would fall in the ranking.


Keep in mind, by the 80's, the syndication market was starting to fall through: It would be almost nothing by the 90's by the time Sailor Moon and DBZ took over the job, and what there was in the 80's was the gold rush for new syndie series.
So, between that and the glory days of "old" Cartoon Network still holding an iron fist on Bugs Bunny, Hanna-Barbera and Tom & Jerry, there WERE no local stations showing the old classics anymore.
And with the decline of Saturday-morning in the 80's, there weren't as much network resources for the Old-school studios to think up new characters, so the declining corporate studios had to rally their money characters for a "New generation" if they couldn't show the old ones:
Hanna-Barbera was making fewer shows, so there always had to be a "Yogi's-gang" series about the classic 60's-critter toons, a new spin on the Flintstones, and some variation on Scooby-Doo; DePatie-Freleng had almost nothing left except the Pink Panther, and Warner/H-B had managed to salvage Popeye and Casper away from Paramount/Famous.

Muppet Babies was a different issue, though: Jim Henson in the mid-80's seemed to be wanting to get AWAY from Kermit & Co. (and build his new special-effects empire), and when he used "The Muppets Take Manhattan" to wrap up a series-finale for the characters, he also used it as a pilot for the Babies, as only "kids" would now want to watch felt puppets...Yeah, don't think so hard figuring out why he was now pitching Kermit and Piggy to preschoolers.
It became a hit, and that gave the other waning studios all the greenlight they needed to "jumpstart" their last remaining corporate properties for a new spin.

(And John K. acting like the Holy Defender of Sacred Commercial-US Animation is a tad hypocritical, if you look back historically at how all of CN's school-bully Hanna-Barbera/Scooby-Doo bashing in the early 00's dated back to a certain episode of "Mighty Mouse: the New Adventures" in the 80's...And yes, he didn't personally direct that one, but like everything else he did, it was made with his own personal ex-HB animator grudges.)
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Theodore Relic



Joined: 21 Aug 2017
Posts: 63
PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 2:20 pm Reply with quote
Heh. I own the two DVDs of Galaxy High School; think there was 13 eps total. Always remembered Chris Columbus worked on it but didn't remember TMS did, much less owned it. Probably the only cartoon showing on Saturday mornings at that time that I saw was directly influenced by Japanese anime.
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Kadmos1



Joined: 08 May 2014
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 2:34 pm Reply with quote
SrkSano, the Walt Disney Company has become somewhat infamous for lobbying Congress for longer copyright terms. While other media companies and literary estates have done the same thing, the House of Mouse is perhaps the most singled out and for good reason.
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belvadeer





PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 2:43 pm Reply with quote
leafy sea dragon wrote:
And I'll say that the anime of Powerpuff Girls, while drastically inferior to the original version, was just really, really bland. The writers had no idea what to do with the characters and just stuck them in silly situations without making them feel natural while the humor was forcefully inserted in. (One can say the remake is like that too, though at least the remake is fast-paced and they do more than just "magical girl show with humor for little kids.")

Stitch! is all right though, but again, not nearly as good as Lilo & Stitch: The Series.


Examples like what you and Hoppy pointed out are why Japan really shouldn't try to come up with their own interpretations of U.S. and European properties. It's generally all style (and not necessarily a visually pleasing style) and no substance with them. The Powerpuff Girls Z anime was just incredibly stupid, and that's being generous. Stitch! was terrible too.
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prime_pm



Joined: 06 Feb 2004
Posts: 2333
Location: Your Mother's Bedroom
PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 2:54 pm Reply with quote
varmintx wrote:
prime_pm wrote:
The Drew Carey Show has a similar problem of being released, since several copyrighted songs were played throughout the series' run. It's the reason why only the first season is available on DVD and the rest are only available as clips on Youtube.

The DVD release of Daria resolved this problem by just cutting all of the copyrighted music out and replacing it. Not exactly the greatest way to get the show on home media, but I took that over nothing.


Yup, and all DVD's and re-airings of Married With Children have the intro song "Love & Marriage" by Frank Sinatra replaced with an alternate nonvocal standard.

Problem with Drew was that the copyrighted songs often became focal to the episodes therein. The dance battle between Time Warp and Shake Your Groove Thing alone must have been a copyright nightmare.

Great episode though.
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matt78



Joined: 25 Jul 2015
Posts: 249
PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 3:06 pm Reply with quote
leafy sea dragon wrote:

I've been waiting for Kim Possible season sets, and I don't think they will ever happen. As for WB, there was a recent release of a new animated Batman special done in the style of the old Adam West TV series and even brought back as many of the actors as they could. I'm guessing it's for the 50th anniversary of the show, but it was incredibly strange.


I actually own the first 2 seasons of Kim Possible. I got them through the Disney Rewards program. I believe the only way to currently buy them is by being a member of the Disney movie club. I believe they did this with the last sets of the Disney Afternoon cartoons as well.
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