ShyViolet wrote: ↑May 2nd, 2020, 6:17 am
I know it has to do with their parent studio not renewing copyright or something, but I’m kind confused as to why, say, a bunch of Loony Toons shorts would be considered public domain while others are definitely under the ownership/distribution of Warner Bros.
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(There aren’t any Disney PD ones are there?)
They're all considered Public-Domain--since the studio honchos at Warner didn't much care what happened to the shorts when they folded their theatrical-short division in the 60's--
EXCEPT for what fans know as "the Saturday-morning cartoons". (Ie., why they never showed "What's Opera, Doc?" or "One Froggy Evening" on the afternoon local stations.)
The reason for that IS: Warner bought back a handful of the shorts in 1960 to create the prime-time "The Bugs Bunny Show", where the cartoons were joined with interstitials of Bugs on stage hosting his show. That applied to most of the Chuck Jones classics, and a few of the Sylvester & Tweety's, etc., but the Road Runner toons didn't join them until Friz Freleng tried creating a 60's spinoff Saturday-morning series mixing the old toons with the cheesy new made-for-TV ones. If you remember "The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show" from 70's-80's Saturday morning, that's where most of those two shows went...Complete with Friz's Road-Runner theme ("Roooad-Runner...The Coyote's after you!") and all the Bugs-on-stage interstitials ("You said I could be on next week!...This week was next week last week!")
As for why the rest, particularly the early 40's cartoons, showed on afternoon local-station TV, that would be the same reason those same stations used to show Casper, Popeye, and Mighty Mouse--PD stuff was cheap. It was only after the 70's and into the Boomer 80's that Warner realized they had a pop-culture legacy on their hands.