Cartoons on TV

Also possible that it was one of the few Bugs Bunny cartoons that fell into the public domain. There's even now quite a few DVD releases which take advantage of that, using a public domain cartoon with a well known character, using that character's name a picture on the cover, then filling the rest of the set with other obscure public domain crap nobody's heard of.

In the early 2000's, it wasn't uncommon for Disney channel shows such as Even Stevens or Lizzie McGuire to be on the CBBC channel (I think the movie was broadcast on CBBC? Possibly the only time that rule has been broken then, as it was a theatrically released movie. Genome lists a single airing on BBC One in 2006 straight after Watch My Chops, but also CBBC channel listings don't exist for most of 2005-2007.)

Weirdly, for Disney being extremely protective of their movies, I've seen signed versions appear overnight on Two.

And yet it seems that Dreamworks does allow the movies to air on CBBC, but appears to not allow signed versions.

EDIT: Somehow I managed to post this right as the thread was split.

A bit of reasearch shows Disney weren't responsible for the international distribution of Even Stevens and Lizzie McGuire, only in the US, which is probably how they ended up on the CBBC Channel (the CITV channel also showed the former at one point).

Listing from 2006:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007c3tl

I think Even Stevens was an Indie production for Disney Channel. Their own production arm, It's A Laugh Productions, was set up in 2003 to effectively feed the Disney channels with live-action content, which effectively took the entire production process for that genre in-house. I think there is another production company that does the range of animated series on the networks, but that's almost certainly again owned by Disney to feed the TV stations with content.

Lizzie McGuire was most probably "officially" indie, although it was created by somebody who created other content for ABC, which of course is owned by Disney.

The cartoon library you're referring to actually starts at August 1948, Warner sold its pre-1950 feature film library to Associated Artists Productions in June 1956. However, it retained it's live action short film library from August 1948 during the purchase, as well as the black and white Looney Tunes cartoons and non-Harman/Ising black and white Merrie Melodies, under the subsidiary Sunset Productions, which they licensed the TV distribution rights to Guild Films.

But after Sunset ceased in 1957 and Guild Films followed in 1961, the library was sold to Seven Arts Productions, which merged with Warner Bros. in 1967, and became Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, reuniting Warner with much of their B&W cartoon library. Of course, after that, came the AWFUL redrawn versions of their B&W cartoons, produced by Fred Ladd, and as the Sunset prints were used as the source material, the titles were redrawn, too.


They did receive computer colourised versions, supervised by Warner in the early 1990's, straight from the original film negatives. As you say, the pre-1948 library sold to a.p.p. ended up being owned by Turner Broadcasting System, which merged with Time Warner in October 1996.


About Rolf's Cartoon Club, Paul Wells, the director of the Animation Academy at Loughborough University, says they've preserved the master copies for the whole series, for better or worse. Judging from the title sequence of said show, Harris apparently visited Bumper Films, the original production company behind Fireman Sam.

I actually have a recording of a CITV showing one one of said colourised Looney Tunes cartoons from 1993, you can see the start and end of the cartoon in this video:



Also a trailer for Rolf's Cartoon Club there (with an in-vision Steve Ryde in costume) for what would have been its final series.

Pretty sure I stumbled across an episode or two of that Disney Time thing on some old tapes recently. One about Mickey Mouse and one about Donald Duck.

Early episode of Stay Tooned:

Disney Time was definitely still running past 1998, albeit on ITV. One of the recordings I have is the junction into an episode from some point in 1999, according to the announcer that edition was presented by Mel Sykes, though the recording ends only a few seconds into the start.

There's an advert during the break promoting The Rugrats Movie as being "in cinemas now", it was released at the end of March, so I'm assuming it's probably from the Easter bank holiday.

There's a trailer for "Dr No" at Wednesday at 8:30, so someone who has a knowledge of ITV Screenings of Bond films can probably use that to date it too.

I remember CITV reairing a few Looney Tunes shorts in 2013/14(?).

Channel 5 also aired some shorts in 2012.

In America Warner Brothers decided to consolidate all the rights to the older Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies to their own partners, more specifically Cartoon Network, and I presume this happened to a limited extent outside of America as well - those cartoons (and also Tom & Jerry, since MGM was bought by Turner who later sold it to Warner Brothers, effectively putting them all under one roof) all appear on the same networks. Boomerang started as a strand on Cartoon Network for the archive material, though it was later decided to spin Boomerang off as a separate channel and put all the flagship new stuff on the Cartoon Network, though its gone back in the other direction as of late.

Anyway into the 2010s the Looney Tunes material was rebooted/rehashed as "The Looney Tunes Show" and later "New Looney Tunes" which may have been what you saw on CITV.

Warner Bros tends to have a refresh for many of their IP every couple of years. Scooby Doo for example has has three different series in the last decade alone!