Casper the Friendly Ghost
Casper the Friendly Ghost is the fictional character who serves as the protagonist of the Famous Studios theatrical animated cartoon series of the same name. He is a translucent ghost who is pleasant and personable,[4] but often criticized by his three wicked uncles, the Ghostly Trio.
This article is about the character. For the theatrical shorts, see Casper the Friendly Ghost filmography. For the feature-length films, see Casper the Friendly Ghost in film.Casper the Friendly Ghost
- The Friendly Ghost
- November 16, 1945
Seymour Reit
Joe Oriolo[1][2]
Vincent E. Valentine II[3]
Ghost (deceased human in some versions)
Male
The Friendly Ghost
The Ghostly Trio (uncles)
The character was featured in 55 theatrical cartoons titled The Friendly Ghost from 1945 to 1959.[5] The character has been featured in comic books published by Harvey Comics since 1952,[6] and Harvey purchased the character outright in 1959. Casper became one of Harvey's most popular characters, headlining dozens of comic book titles.
Following Harvey's purchase of the character, he appeared in five television series: Matty's Funday Funnies (1959–1961), The New Casper Cartoon Show (1963–1970), Casper and the Angels (1979), The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper (1996–1998) and Casper's Scare School (2009–2012).[7] The character made his theatrical film debut in a live-action adaptation of the series by Universal Pictures: Casper (1995), to where he became the first computer-generated character to star in a film.[8] He would later appear in four direct-to-video and made-for-TV follow-up films.
Creation[edit]
Casper was created by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo, the former devising the idea for the character and the latter providing illustrations.[9] Initially intended as the basis for a children's storybook, there was at first little interest in their idea and the book went unpublished.
In the original Harveytoons animation, Casper has been seen standing next to a grave inscribed with "Casper", that supports the theory he is indeed a ghost. Originally, stories have shown that his visibility is due to wearing a sheet. In the Casper live-action film, this is not shown and it is implied that he is naturally visible to humans as a white creature.[10] When Reit was away on military service during World War II before the book was released, Oriolo sold the rights to the book to Paramount Pictures' Famous Studios animation division for a total of $175. This one-time payment was all that he received, missing out on a share of the revenue earned from the films, comic books and merchandise to come.[11]
The Friendly Ghost, the first Noveltoon to feature Casper, was released by Paramount in 1945 with a few differences from the book. In the cartoon adaptation, Casper is a cute ghost-child with a New York accent who inhabits a haunted house along with a community of adult ghosts who delight in scaring the living. Casper, in contrast, is a nonconformist among ghosts: he would prefer to make friends with people. He packs up his belongings and goes out into the world, hoping to find friends. However, the animals that he meets (a rooster, a mole, a cat, a mouse named Herman, and a group of hens) take one horrified look at him, scream: "A ghost!" and run off in the other direction. Distraught, Casper unsuccessfully attempts to commit suicide (apparently forgetting that he is already dead) by lying down on a railway track before an oncoming train, before he meets two children named Bonnie and Johnny who become his friends. The children's mother, apparently widowed and impoverished, at first is frightened of Casper, but later welcomes him into the family after he unintentionally frightens off a greedy landlord, who, unwilling to own a "haunted" house, tears up the mortgage and gives her the house outright. The short ends with the mother kissing Bonnie, Johnny, and Casper as she sends them off to school, with Casper wearing clothing as if he were a living child.
Casper appeared in two more subsequent cartoons, There's Good Boos To-Night and A Haunting We Will Go. There's Good Boos To-Night differs wildly from later Casper cartoons: although the theme of Casper trying to find a friend and failing in these attempts before succeeding also occurs in later cartoons, the tone of this short turns remarkably dark when a hunter and his dogs appear, chasing the little fox cub named Ferdie that Casper has befriended. Although Casper scares the hunter and dogs away, Casper discovers Ferdie dead after a harrowing chase scene. Happily, however, Ferdie returns as a ghost to join his friend Casper in the afterlife.
These were later adapted into Noveltoons before Paramount started a Casper the Friendly Ghost series in 1950, and ran the theatrical releases until summer 1959. Although having much success, the series was later criticized by animation historians and viewers, mainly due to the story of each entry of the series as being largely the same: Casper (now slightly thinner than the pudgy figure that appeared in the earlier cartoons) escapes from the afterlife of a regular ghost because he finds that scaring people can be tiresome year after year, tries to find friends but inadvertently scares almost everyone, and finally finds a (cute little) friend, whom he saves from some sort of fate, leading to his acceptance by those initially scared of him. In 1955, composer Winston Sharples composed an instrumental theme for Casper's cartoons.
Home media[edit]
In 2011, Shout! Factory released a DVD set titled Casper The Friendly Ghost: The Complete Collection 1945-1963 which contains The Friendly Ghost, There's Good Boos To-Night, A Haunting We Will Go, 55 theatrical cartoons, and all 26 episodes of The New Casper Cartoon Show.
Copyright status[edit]
As a result of a lawsuit between Harvey and Columbia Pictures in 1984, a court determined that a lapsed copyright had dumped Fatso, Casper's sidekick, into the public domain. Former Disney researcher Gregory S. Brown later discovered that Harvey had failed to renew other copyrights covering the company's ghosts, including Casper.[38]