BW Media Spotlight

With the recent disappearances of animated works on HBO Max and the cancelling of new shows (granted I’m working from what I’ve heard since I don’t have the service) has animation fans worried, I don’t think it’s because David Zaslav hates cartoons. He has no problem keeping Discovery Family, the result of a short-lived collaboration with Hasbro as “The Hub”, flowing with animated works. There’s also been talk that this and other decisions were done solely as tax write-offs but it’s hard to see canceling the race-swapped Batgirl movie as anything racist when Blue Beetle is coming out with a Latino hero that is actually Latino in the comics, plus a potential gender-swapped villain while the dad yells “Batman is a fascist” and both the director and the actress playing the villain has spouted polarizing sociopolitical messages. So let’s stop pretending the woke or lack of wokeness is factoring in here whatsoever, and that’s a message to both left and right. As far as the “tax write-off” theory…I’m not in the boardrooms so I don’t know what they’re thinking.

There have been concerns that Warner Brothers under any of the more recent names wasn’t doing that well and Zaslav’s people are doing what they can, but I’m totally not the guy to ask on that matter, so let’s get back on topic. What does any of this have to do with what’s going on with HBO Max’s animation library. Correct me if I’m wrong because I didn’t have time to research the new stuff, but isn’t Infinity Train for example a licensed show rather than a Warner property? Cartoon Network and later HBO Max only air the things rather than own it. Granted that doesn’t explain Batman: Caped Crusader moving to Amazon Prime while Batwheels is part of the Cartoonito section of Cartoon Network and HBO Max. I don’t understand what’s going on with the new stuff.

What I want to talk about here is all the OLD shows they have access to–older than me shows that seems to have fallen by the wayside since Cartoon Network started airing original material. Boomerang just airs a select group of shows–Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes, and Scooby-Doo franchises with a handful of Cartoon Cartoons classics and the odd appearance of Popeye and the Flintstones seems to be it. And we only have Boomerang temporarily. Once our current provider mess is done it’ll be gone again. Cartoon Network isn’t much better, with any real variety coming from the “Adult Swim” block run by Williams Street Productions. However, with all the acquisitions over the years Warner Brothers Discovery has so many animated shows that they’re doing nothing with. Do you even know how big their library is? Well, Company Man isn’t here so I’ll have to go over the highlights.

Continue reading →