In the 1950's, Warner Brothers was trying to cope with the changes that television was bringing to the entertainment landscape. The idea of newsreels, animated shorts and multiple features all for one ticket was quickly becoming a thing of the past. One of the first things to go were animated shorts. As the major studios stopped producing them, there was a question of what to do with the old shorts. Disney chose to guard its product, doling the shorts out on television at its own pace and on its own programming. Warner Brothers chose a more disastrous path.
With a dearth of TV programming, television stations were looking for quick stuff to throw on the air. Blocks of cartoon shorts were deemed to be just what they needed, but Disney wasn't selling. The Warners, however, were looking for quick cash. Thus a disastrous deal was struck; the studio would SELL (not license or lease, but SELL) all of its black and white cartoons and copyrights to Guild Films, which planned to syndicate them to local TV stations. One year later, it would do the exact same thing to its color cartoons, selling them to Associated Artists Productions.
For much of the 1960's, Warner Brothers did not own its most prized creations. Guild Films, however, went bankrupt and was bought out by Seven Arts, which was later purchased fortuitously by Warner Brothers. By 1969, the black and white Looney Tunes cartoons and their valuable copyrights and trademarks were back under WB's control. The company would not repeat its mistake; from now on, these beloved characters would not be taken for granted.
The color cartoons, however, still remained out of the company's reach. It was overbid for a.a.p in 1969, with United Artists winning the bidding war. Transamerica, which owned UA, was very interested in exploiting the cartoons further and spurned WB's advances to buy the package back. It was at this time that the controversial "Censored Eleven" cartoons were removed from distribution. Transamerica had no stomach for controversy and declared that eleven Looney Tunes cartoons they considered racist would be locked in the vault forever.
By the early 1980's, Transamerica had grown tired of Hollywood and sold UA to MGM. MGM was dealing with numerous issues of its own at the time; its Las Vegas casino had suffered a disastrous and deadly fire and its movies were not doing well at the box office. Ted Turner offered tons of quick cash for the studio's storied back catalog, including the Looney Tunes cartoons. They accepted and Mr. Turner soon owned the cartoons. Despite pleas from film scholars, he kept the "Censored Eleven" deep in his film vaults.
In 1995, all of the Looney Tunes cartoons finally ended up back home when Warner Brothers bought Turner Broadcasting. Bugs and friends were finally fully back home.
