The Warner Brothers Discovery Animation Situation

It’s an…interesting time to be a cartoon fan. Not all of the news is good, what with the likes of Velma and Netflix’s live-action demakes around. Disney doesn’t really make its own cartoons for TV outside of Disney Junior (and I’m willing to bet even the Mickey Mouse and Winnie The Pooh material was made by an outside company) unless its disasters like Strange World and Wish, while Pixar hasn’t been up to their usual standards either. Meanwhile, I hear Max, the Warner Brothers Discovery streaming service, is pulling down animated shows from their line-up. Cartoon Network and Boomerang, which charges extra to go to a higher cable tier or a subscription online, don’t have the best offerings. And did any of you remember Nicktoons existed before I just mentioned it a few words ago?

On the other hand, Netflix has put out some good animation, Cartoon Network still has the Toonami block, and we have a new player in the TV cartoon game. MeTV, which I can’t get on my current TV provider because they don’t want to pay the new higher rate and I don’t have an HD antenna, is entering the game with their third channel in the classic television family with MeTV Toons. This will join regular MeTV and MeTV+, their second channel, both of which do already show some classic animation among their offerings. Variety reports that there will be some original content and Bob Bergen, the current Porky Pig, will serve as the voice of the ads. Bounding Into Comics collected a bunch of shows not on the list, including a few old DIC Entertainment shows. Their own website is teasing a ton of shows, many of which comes from the Warner Brothers, Hanna-Barbera, and Rankin Bass, among other classics WBD doesn’t own like Popeye and The Mask. They’re even teasing Challenge Of The GoBots! And Kwicky Koala. I was convinced I was the only person who remembered that show. What’s next, Pandamonium? Wonder Wheels?Now I really wish we could get this channel!

The question is of course why so many of these Warner-owned shows are showing up outside of the offerings they have. Discovery Family has some Looney Tunes stuff and Hanna-Barbera’s take on the Smurfs along with their own programming and some leftover shows from The Hub (that time Discovery Kids was rebranded and ran with Hasbro) they still rerun. Due to all the acquisitions that led to Warner Brothers Discovery they have one of the biggest animation libraries on the planet, fighting Disney for the top spot, yet do little with it while other contenders are also out there. Then there’s streaming, official YouTube channels, and we’re not even going to get into anime. Do you know how easy it is to watch cartoons now, and yet somehow Warner Brothers Discovery is still not fully embracing their huge library despite so much competition.

Go on YouTube and Sony has a couple of different animation channels while their Real Ghostbusters material ends up on the official Ghostbusters channel as well. Kartoon Channel doesn’t have the best shows but between then and Toon Goggles there are a bunch of YouTube and free advertising supported streaming television (often shortened to “FAST”) coming out of them. Hasbro is offering their stuff on a few different YouTube channels, all over the ad-sponsored free sites both on-demand and streaming (even giving Transformers their own streaming channel), and still offer stuff on home video through Shout Factory. Some of those “FAST” sites have their own cartoon channels as well streaming and on demand, with public domain classics easy to broadcast because there’s nobody to pay unless they use a cleaned-up or upscaled version done by someone else, and that’s only because of the clean-up work owned by whoever worked on it.

Has Warner jumped into this? Yes and no. In addition to the takedowns from Max, they license shows to Tubi, MeTV Toons, and their own channel on Freevee, WB TV Cartoon Rewind, as part of a series of streaming channels WB maintains on Freevee. As mentioned, Discovery Family has Looney Tunes related shows and The Smurfs (Toon Goggles has the rights to a Spanish language version of Hanna-Barbera’s Smurfs and put “Los Pitufos” on a 24/7 stream) plus their own shows. That’s it. Cartoon Network and Boomerang have a small library they use as well, with a few classic shows on Boomerang, the channel created to be the home of classic cartoons once Cartoon Network started producing more original material, and while Cartoon Rewind has some really cool shows–sat down to a SilverHawks marathon over the weekend and they have Mr. T and Pac-Man according to what schedules I can find–they’re working on a binge model. MeTV and Tubi are not their properties. Fox owns Tubi while MeTV is one of a family of classic TV networks run by Weigel Broadcasting.

Company Man on YouTube should do an episode of his “Bigger Than You Know” just on the Warner Brothers Discovery animation library. A quick summation:

• Hanna-Barbera was still on good terms with Ruby-Spears Productions after Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, creators of Scooby-Doo and company, went to form their own production company, even doing a joint programming block on ABC’s Saturday morning line-up at one point. So when Ruby-Spears closed down they sold the library to Hanna-Barbera
• Ted Turner bought the Hanna-Barbera library when they were closing to have ready material for his new Cartoon Network, Turner being a big animation fan. That would be both HB and RS, plus when Time Warner came around that gave him access to the Warner Brothers library, which is more than just the Looney Tunes.
• Meanwhile, the current Discovery Family started out as Discovery Kids, with a mix of live-action and animated programming. They co-ran the channel with Hasbro as The Hub, and while Hasbro probably owns their own shows, hence the various live-streaming Transformers shows, there are still shows they either have some rights or a license to from that period. Discovery Family has also created their own shows.

And none of them have Superfriends/Super Power Team. Why?

That means right now Warner Brothers Discovery has all the Warner Brothers Animation shows, the Cartoon Network Studios shows, Hanna-Barbera shows, Ruby-Spears Production shows, and the Discovery Kids/Family libraries, plus whatever rights they have with Williams Street, who runs Adult Swim and Toonami blocks on Cartoon Network, and leftover Hub programing. They have four networks–three on television and at least one streaming–to air ALL of those programs on. They don’t, as of this writing. Disney has the stuff they got from Marvel Studios, 20th Century Fox, and Pixar, but most of their library is still Disney material. Not that they care about their animation legacy these days.

I know David Zaslav doesn’t seem to care about comics because he’s a TV guy, but if he’s part of the “toon sux” crown in Hollywood, he’s still making a mistake. It’s poor asset use, Dave. If I were in charge of overhauling this, here’s what I’d do.

• End the binge models. You can have maybe an hour or two of the same show, but an all day or all night marathon is taking up space best reserved for all those television shows and movies…don’t forget the movies…at your disposal. It’s why Turner bought Hanna-Barbera for Cartoon Network in the first place, a large animation library with less licenses. None, when he started out.
• Rejigger Cartoon Network from the ground up. Leave Adult Swim and Toonami alone because they’re best thing about the network. Have the preschool shows in the morning like you’re doing with Cartoonito. The rest? Look at what’s currently being made and what’s doing well. Sadly, this might include Teen Titans Go! but if I was running AMC I wouldn’t kill the Walking Dead franchise because I hate zombie shows. I’m not Les Mooves or the BBC. If there aren’t enough new shows after that, go back to older Cartoon Network shows as a nighttime or family programming block, maybe something for the weekends.
• And bring back Cartoon Theater or create a dedicated cartoon movie channel. TV or streaming, I don’t care. There’s more than enough in your vaults, guys.
• Boomerang would get a major overhaul. Right now it’s mostly Scooby-Doo, Tom & Jerry, and Looney Tunes related shows, with some Flintstones and Yogi Bear, one episode of Thundarr The Barbarian on Saturday, and not much else. Part of me wants to move all the classic shows to Cartoon Rewind but that’s currently a Freevee exclusive streaming channel. I don’t know why. Combine the two since they should be doing the same thing, and really tap into that huge library of comedy, action, and action-comedy shows, the slice of life shows with a gimmick they made in the 1970s, and introduce new viewers to old classics and stuff they’ve never seen before. Thanks in part to the Hollywood strikefest and partly due to the low quality of so many modern offerings, people have been looking into older material, and that could include cartoons. MeTV seems to understand that.

Heck, you guys have studios around the world, including the last surviving branch of Hanna-Barbera Studios in Europe. Bring some of those shows in. Meanwhile, Discovery Family is still a mix of live-action and animated shows, some of which come from other channels like Food Network and a few international shows like Get Out Of My Room. That might be a good place to do it. Dub or subtitle them with a host like the scholar MeTV is bringing in for their original shows and introduce people to animation around the world. We already pull from Canada, Italy, Australia, the UK, Korea, Mexico, and of course Japan. It’s where some of the other YouTube and live streaming channels I mentioned and a few I didn’t get their shows. There’s a large enough audience of the nostalgic, the curious, and those who want new shows that with the library at Warner Brothers Discovery’s disposal could blow the competition to Oz. Why would you not want to do this unless you hate money? Make that the live-streaming channel.

There are so many ways to watch cartoons, and most of them are even good. Not most of Kartoon Channel’s line-up mind you. Superhero Kindergarten is depressing for how bad it is compared to PBS’s Hero Elementary and I don’t even want to attempt Shaq’s Garage because the premise alone is nonsense. Mondo TV has a history but it also has The Magician and that was a Saturday Night Showcase. People of all ages love cartoons. When I was with Reviewers Unknown we had two dedicated animation reviewers and others that covered animation alongside other TV and movie offerings, and there are a ton of YouTube channels dedicated just to examining animation. It has to be doing well. With so much out there, it’s a shame that possibly the biggest and greatest collection of many studios’ dreams and many a child’s media history sits collecting dust.