Ralston Purina entered into a licensing agreement with King Features Syndicate and other comic strip publishers in 1988 to produce Morning Funnies, a fruit-based cereal that landed on shelves for about a year or two, but no more. In the ad, you'll see Dennis The Menace, Hagar the Horrible, and so much more.
Some of the strips, like Hagar, Dennis, & The Family Circus, are still with us. Others, like Tiger? Not so much.
6 comments:
Oddly Tiger is still being reprinted in some papers, so it's not a total loss (if only because this is King Features we're talking about).
http://comicskingdom.com/tiger
Reprinted? That means there's no more original material (a la Peanuts). When did they stop making first-run strips for Tiger?
2003 apparently. Again, I don't know why King Features likes to do that. I suppose they want to keep the copyrights alive.
Apparently they're also doing this with The Katzenjammer Kids too (that one ended in 2006, but is also being kept alive in reprints). I'm guessing they have enough material to get by this way (Kaztenjammer Kids does have a century worth to plow through). They probably do this with Popeye too.
https://comicskingdom.com/katzenjammer-kids/2017-11-19
I was right! It's a Sagendorf strip today, they're just re-copyrighting them to the current year. https://comicskingdom.com/popeye/2017-11-20
I've noticed that with the Peanuts reprints, there are separate copyrights. The original publication date, and a newer one.
At least they do that. Ironically my local paper once had a habit of removing copyrights on their daily strips through most of the 20th century until around 2000 when they stopped doing it. I never understood that practice.
In merchandising, at least back when United Features Syndicate owned Peanuts, they would have copyrights often mentioning 1950 along with another year or so based on what character or characters are used. Not sure if they still do that today but I noticed Sanrio likes to do that with Hello Kitty.
The only thing that could be gained from changing the copyright would be to just renew it, IMPO.
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