Okay, the copyright on the back of the box art is NBCUniversal. That clarifies things.
From what I can tell, NBC owns the copyright, CBS owns the distribution and video rights, and Bonanza Ventures (David Dortort's estate?) owns the character likenesses and remake rights (they also claim to hold the copyright, but that seems weak at best).
Yup...and after hearing that they sold off Tomorrow and Rankin/Bass in 1974 becausethey wanted out of the entertainment industry, their timidity makes sense. Hollywood is just not what they're good at.
Thought: I remember pretty much all of the classic WB toons I saw when I was little being redshifted, to the point where good prints with the right colors are unrecognizable. I suspect this was a combination of UA being cheap and 16mm Eastmancolor film being cheap, too.
I've learned to tolerate drama...except on the boat
The Chinese billionaires who are reportedly on the prowl for every major studio but ultimately never buy any (the closest any Chinese entity has come was when Wanda bought a majority stake in fucking Legendary, a co-financier that actually owns, like, Pacific Rim and nothing else worth owning)
Okay, you know how I had the Rainbow Brite theme song from the 1980s in my head? Well, it turns out Hallmark made a new version of it in 2014, and it is so obvious someone saw Friendship is Magic and said "now is the time!"
And from what little I can tell about it, it was produced in-house by Hallmark. I can't even tell which animation studio they used, since no one seems to have seen this (it was apparently run on their Feeln network and nowhere else).
You know, I may associate the late 1980s with boredom and ennui (I'm watching a reel on The Fun & Games Channel from late 1989 and I think I remember every commercial :O), but the commercials from back then seems so much less dated than stuff from the mid-late 1970s, early 1980s, or even the mid-to-late 1990s!
Of course, I may be biased because I still think 1989 was kind of cool, and because the 1975 and 1976 reels I saw had lots of ads for new cars—and for car service, which makes sense if you're aware of what junk 1970s American cars were.
While it was too late to save Detroit itself ("cost savings"—read that as "attempts to break the UAW by moving the factories to right-to-work states in the South"—and globalization ruined that by the mid-1990s), the US auto industry actually stopped and took a moment to learn from what Europe and Japan and Korea were doing sometime in the 2000s. (Ford was headed down that path as early as the 1980s, but that really only went as far as the Escort until much later; GM made a few half-hearted attempts, like their joint venture with Toyota, but they learned little and had a bankruptcy scare around 1990; Chrysler...lol, Chrysler.)
chrysler is lol because they had the know-how, but no one wanted to buy their cars. AMC was in the same boat, and had the extra problems of outdated tooling, worn-out factories, and a bunch of baggage related to interlocking deals with the rest of Detroit (they used a lot of GM and Ford parts because they couldn't make their own) and an aborted alliance with Renault. I'm still not sure how they managed to turn it around, however briefly, in the 1990s, but the Caravan was the big cash cow, and I guess they were hoping the same for Jeep.
I've learned to tolerate drama...except on the boat
I feel like Detroit and other industry-reliant cities in that region have a lot of environmental factors against them
There are people who have been lured to the Midwest by cheap housing, but a lot of Rust Belt cities seem to suffer from a perception that there's no jobs there, and that there's a lot of people who find the winters unbearable
I have to wonder if prejudice factors into it, too, and not just about the weather. People hear about crime and such in Detroit and keep thinking nothing short of a 1960s-style "urban renewal" project (razing the ghetto, as it were) will save it. :P
In Japan, at least, it was indeed a commitment to better build quality. Back in the day, people used to talk about "Friday cars", cars with corners cut here and there by a line worker who was anxious to get to happy hour quicker, whereas Japanese cars had more industrial discipline (based on a philosophy thought up by an American, in fact), and European cars had the vaunted German precision going for them. (British cars, of course, were another story, and they reportedly only got worse once British Leyland failed.)
This is a bit of fridge logic/loopy thinking, but indeed, I wonder if one of the unspoken goals of the Interstate system, especially in the cities, was to obliterate historically non-white neighborhoods and open them up to development on suburban developers' terms.
I'm thinking of that because that's a big reason why DC doesn't have an intricate freeway system. People saw what having 95 running right through the middle of town would do to a place that was already hurting after MLK was killed, and they saw to it that it wouldn't happen.
I'm watching a reel of old TV show openings from 1962, and I have to wonder if TV went through the same sort of obsession with goofiness and trend-riding that music did around the same time (thinking of that Todd episode where he was talking about "between Elvis joining the Army and Beatlemania").
The production values are Pretty Bad (they're using chromakey and what for all the world looks like digital zoom), and I have to wonder what those "faux diamonds" and "14K gold layered" really are. (Best guesses: Cubic zirconia or possibly even borosilicate glass for the "diamonds"—these shysters aren't going to be using something nice like lead or zinc crystal—and copper or brass with super-cheap gold flash for the chains and ring bodies.)
They were selling 17 pieces of cheap jewelry for $17 US in 1985, about $38 now, so I'm not expecting anything better than brass or maybe stainless for the base metal.
DC was (and is) one of the few places outside L.A. to have both Safeway and 7-Eleven, so that's immediately eye-catching for me. (Oh, and if you check the comments, Harry Marks saw the video!)
Comments
CBS mulled over trading WCAU to Fox for WJBK
I'm not sure why that fell apart but both sides must regret it in some way (though WTXF is better than WWJ)
Fox's difficulty with late night talk shows may be the result of "the Metromedia curse"
why can't they just call it Lorimar?