Six Flags extends Peanuts licensing to 2030

Celebrate good times.... come on

I legit snorted.

Kids in 2025 love Kool & The Gang.

(And it's a newer IP than BOTH Looney Tunes and Peanuts!)

MDOmnis:

They could just sterilize it all and use no IP and the area would probably look like crap.

Newest version of spying SF executives list:

• More Shows
• Less Hours during special events
• L̶i̶c̶e̶n̶s̶e̶ ̶S̶n̶o̶o̶p̶y̶ ̶&̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶G̶a̶n̶g̶
• Kool & The Gang Themed Children's Areas

2027 at Six Flags is gonna be 🔥

The Kool & The Gang theme can even be incorporated in the live shows. Maybe with the band itself. I wonder what the cost difference would be to use them as IP vs. Peanuts.

Kool & The Gang wants $70 to $100k per appearance.

But...and hear me out...we could get Bonfire (an AC/DC tribute band) for 1/10th of the cost instead and then sell the kids those little Angus schoolboy outfits at $79.99 a pop.

(We could contact them for a more accurate use-case quote.)

Guys, management says plans for the Jungle Boogie dark ride are on hold.

I only can think of Pulp Fiction when I hear Jungle Boogie. So what kind of dark ride could that be? Something involving The Gimp, I hope?

Not if he's sleeping.

Well I guess you're gonna have to go wake him up now, won't you?

Sharpel007:

The long-term license includes DC Comics characters, Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera, and Cartoon Network properties. The deal has been reported by some to expire in 2053, which would make it a 55-year agreement from its start in 1998. The specific terms and expiration date are not publicly released, but sources close to the company have cited this timeframe.

The Six Flags licensing for Hanna-Barbera and Cartoon Network seems to have ended a number of years ago. Six Flags Great America rethemed Camp Cartoon Network to Camp Cartoon in 2007, then it rethemed all the Hanna-Barbera themed rides inside that kids area in 2017. Does anyone know if there are any Scooby Doo or Flintstone's rides left in the chain?

hambone, it wasn't Kinzel. Cedar Fair inherited the Peanuts license when they bought Knott's. Although Kinzel was smart enough to expand on that license.

I have to wonder if the Peanuts are just a safer contract than any of the Looney Tunes or Hanna-Barbera licenses. Peanuts are licensed from UFS, which is likely to retain that ownership for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile Looney Tunes were owned by Warner Brothers, who at the time also owned Six Flags, making that an attractive IP. By the same token, Taft owned Hanna-Barbera, making that an obvious fit for the KECO parks. When Paramount bought KECO and Kings Island, at roughly the same time, Hanna-Barbera got sold to Turner (resulting in the launch of the Cartoon Network) which later merged with Time-Warner. And suddenly Scooby Doo shows up at Six Flags as an in-house IP.

Paramount buys Viacom, so Nickelodeon becomes an in-house IP, until Paramount sells the parks to Cedar Fair. Now for Cedar Fair, Nickelodeon isn't in house, so everything reverts to the IP they actually licensed, the Peanuts. Meanwhile, along comes Premier Parks, which buys Six Flags apparently out of spite for being denied the management contract for Six Flags over Texas. Somehow Premier gets a fantastic deal for the Time-Warner IP as part of the sale, and renames itself Six Flags.

Whew. I think I got all that mostly right. But then things get confusing. Time-Warner gets bought, if I remember correctly, by AT&T, which promptly spins off most of it into WarnerMedia. Which, while nobody was looking, got bought by Discovery to form Warner Brothers Discovery. Naming things is not the company's strong suit; just look at what they've done to HBO. Anyway, it looks like Paramount now wants to buy that company.

So you're an independent theme park chain that has undergone several ownership changes and you want to license the Looney Tunes to some additional parks. At this point, do you have any idea who controls the license or what the terms of any addition or expansion will be? As things now stand, there is a contract with agreeable terms. But changing that agreement might be a tricky and probably expensive proposition because of the ownership changes. The license was sold along with the parks as part of the package, but the current or future owners might not be amenable to extending the terms of that license to the new, combined company.

I suspect that Six Flags will remain status quo with the Looney Tunes until either the existing license expires or the ownership settles and a renegotiation becomes practical. I think we are more likely to see the Peanuts invade the legacy Six Flags parks than we are to see the Looney Tunes show up at the legacy Cedar Fair parks.

I hope that makes some kind of sense.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Thanks Dave. My point about Mr. Kinzel was that he stuck with Peanuts at a time when they seemed to be losing relevancy (rather than, for example, going all in on Nickelodeon - which, again, may never really have been an option). And as it turns out, Snoopy and Woodstock have greater durability than I would have guessed.

(Don't call it a comeback. Which reminds me - anyone license LL Cool J yet?)

I rode Snoopy’s Boxcar Racers at KI for the first time a few months ago. Those Peanuts character spiels were so cute. Peanuts are more timeless than I thought, and I’m glad they’re sticking around.

All I hear is

Wah-Wah-Wah-wah-wah-wahhhhhhhhhhhhh

Peanuts at a time when they seemed to be losing relevancy

More likely the cheaper option in true Dick fashion, they also could of kept some Nick stuff up to I think 6 years after the sale but rethemed to peanuts after a year.

As far as licensing you generally pay an upfront fee, an agreed small annual fee, and they get a percentage of sales from merch generally from 10-18%.

Also don’t forget it was Cedar Fair who shut down the Trek Vegas Experience, which was way ahead of its time.

There's nothing small about the annual fee for licensing IP.

That rhymed, and I apologize for that.

Depends on the license, if you’re licensing from the mouse, good luck! If you’re trying to revive Rainbow Bright more affordable, if you’re licensing Vintage Kellogg’s, very affordable, some brands have no fees.

New for 2026! The Chili Willy roller coaster and The Wacky Races carousel. Only at Six Flags.

“Some brands have no fees”

…Especially if your corporate parent owns the IP. That’s why we got Hanna-Barbera in the KECO parks, Warner Bros. in the Six Flags parks, and a switch to Nickelodeon in the Paramount parks. Pity poor Cedar Fair with no in-house IP to exploit.

—Dave Althoff, Jr.