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Your ad here.
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2 superheroes in Gurnee next season? Oh the humanity. :)
SF has rights through Warner Brothers and Cartoon Network.
Paramount has rights through Hanna Barbara.
Confused?
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PPP Quote of the Year:
"I got a B and M shirt"
Let's go ride The Fonicks
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LeWiS
If that is the thinking, then it rightfully belongs to Fred Silverman, the creator of Scooby Doo. Or Frank Sinatra, whose song Strangers in the Night prompted Silverman to name the dog that was until this time just a side distraction that was with the gang. He took the idea to Hanna-Babera.
Neither park chain owns the rights to Scooby Doo. They lease a contract from Hanna-Babera, and technically any park could get the rights (provided of course, all the safeguards Hanna-Babera has in place to protect existing contract holders are satisfied). To take a similar example, go into a shop and look at some of the Scooby-Doo merchandise, it'll be made by several different companies - even items that are similar, such as t-shirts.
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So what if the best coaster in Australia is a second hand Arrow?
Scooby is part of Hanna-Barbera, which is wholly owned by AOL-Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting Division. Under AOL-TW, he is now marketed as a Warner Brothers cartoon.
To say the least, Hanna-Barbera doesn't even exist as a company anymore, because to own it, you must own stock in AOL-TW.
Paramount had Scooby rides before the huge merger takeover thing and the current ownership developed, thats why both have it.
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"We don't sit on your dining room table, so please don't sit on our silver handrails"
Through a whole bunch of actions and changes, Taft split into other companies, with the amusement parks becoming Kings Entertainment (KECO) and Hanna-Barbera ultimately ending up in the hands of the North American Financial Group. That same group, incidentally, bought Kings Island away from KECO, but retained KECO under a management contract.
The practical upshot of all this is that Scooby Doo was well established in the KECO (nee Taft) amusement parks, along with the other Hanna-Barbera characters.
Meanwhile, Time-Warner has, by this time, purchased Six Flags, and, following KECO's lead, has been establishing the Looney Tunes characters (Warner Bros. characters) in the Six Flags parks.
Then, along came Paramount. Paramount decided to get into the park business by buying KECO, buying Kings Island, and buying Canada's Wonderland (the other KECO-managed park that KECO didn't own). At about the same time, North American sold the H-B properties to Turner Entertainment, allowing Turner Entertainment to launch the Cartoon Network. With me so far? Through the magic of long-term agreements, Paramount's parks have H-B characters, and through corporate association, Six Flags has Warner Bros. characters.
Next, in the (to that point) largest corporate media merger in history, Time-Warner buys Turner Entertainment. Because of Turner's IP purchases, this gives Time-Warner a slew of new properties including the MGM library and the Hanna-Barbera characters and cartoons. Since Six Flags is part of the Time-Warner corporate family, Scooby Doo is suddenly eligible to start working at Six Flags, even though he's already busy working for Paramount!
But wait! There's more!
It didn't take long for Paramount to get caught in another corporate takeover. Paramount gets itself bought by Viacom, which explains the arrival of the Nickelodeon properties in the Paramount parks. At the same time, Viacom was being swallowed up by Blockbuster, but as Blockbuster doesn't have any cartoon characters, we can safely ignore that bit for the moment. So Scooby Doo has no affiliation with Paramount at all, except that he's licensed to the Paramount parks because of previous association with KECO/Taft. And now that Six Flags has been purchased by Premier Parks (now Six Flags Theme Parks), Scooby has no affiliation with Six Flags either, except through the previous association with Time-Warner...which has since upstaged itself as the all-time biggest media merger by merging with America OnLine to form AOL/Time-Warner.
The bottom line: Scooby Doo and all the Hanna-Barbera stuff is part of the AOL/Time-Warner corporate family, but the long and winding road it took to get there has left Scooby Doo in particular, and H-B characters in general, working for two different amusement park chains, neither one of which has any ownership in the characters. Go figure...!
Are you completely confused now? :)
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
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I talked with the Dippin' Dots guy and he assured me that Cedar Point was to get that 10-inversion terra-woodie-invert-stand-up because Magnum is sinking. The current construction is for the new super-Dippin' Dots stall he is to run.
Meanwhile, Time-Warner has, by this time, purchased Six Flags, and, following KECO's lead, has been establishing the Looney Tunes characters (Warner Bros. characters) in the Six Flags parks.
Weren't the Warner Bros. characters at Great America (Chicago) when it was Marriott's? I remember going to see Bugs Bunny as a kid. Where does that play into all of this?
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Santa Claus rocks my world
What about the use of Scooby and the gang at Universal Studios? Last year while employed be the company, I saw the Mystery machine driving by countless times at the park. It stops and some of the characters get out for a photo opp with the kids. The Orlando park also has the soon replaced Hanna Barbara ride as well.
Add that to the confusion, please.
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But seriously folks, I respect the opinions of yall who don't like the thing, but if MF were human, I'd marry it.
Warner Brothers licensed their cartoons almost immediatley when both of the Marriotts parks opened in 1976. It's just coincedence that when TW bought the Six Flags name, the characters came with.
Even after Six Flags bought Great America (before the TW ownership) Great America was able to keep the Looney Tunes, but they did not migrate to other SF parks.
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"We don't sit on your dining room table, so please don't sit on our silver handrails"
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