The Ballad of Tobio rights issues

After Osamu Tezuka's death in February 1989, there have been many legal issues surrounding his 1965-69 manga The Ballad of Tobio and its various adaptations. mostly between Tezuka Productions and Paramount Pictures, a subsidiary of Paramount Global, this has prevented the characters Tobio and Hannah as they appear in the series from appearing in various Tezuka crossover media, with few exceptions. sometimes to circumvent this, Tezuka would usually create new loosely based characters with their names, such as in the 2003 Astro Boy anime.

Original manga
As the manga was published before the Paramount deal, Kodansha and Tezuka's estate currently holds all Japanese rights to the manga, when it came time for the US publication in 2005 however, Viz Publishing had to pay Paramount a fee to allow publication, leading to their logo appearing on all non-Japanese copies.

1975 film adaptation
The 1975 film adaptation directed by Carl Andy was produced independently as Andy had bought the rights and settled a deal with Joseph E. Levine Productions to produce the film with United Artists distributing. UA would continue to distribute the film until 1979, after which Andy took rights to make future adaptations to Paramount whilst Levine would keep the 1975 movie.

Following Levine's death in 1986, the rights to the film reverted to De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, which had absorbed the library from Levine's previous company Embassy Pictures. in turn the library would transfer to Paravision International and eventually to StudioCanal. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (UA's successor of interest) made a deal that would allow them to regain the US home media rights with StudioCanal handling the rest of the world as well as worldwide digital rights. Paramount Pictures, the current International license holder of the Tobio IP, eventually gained the US television rights via Trifetca Media Entertainment & Media through a deal with StudioCanal.

Post-1978 media
In 1979, Andy took the rights and made a deal with Paramount, Andy had initially wanted to produce a dub of the then upcoming 1979 Anime series but was offered to do a Live Action sitcom instead, this resulted in the short lived 1980 series Day After Day which was cancelled after one season. as a result, Paramount decided to go with Andy's initial offer of dubbing the Anime, which had completed its first season by then with its second season in-development. Paramount paid $16,000 for International (non-Japanese) distribution rights to both seasons, which made it the most expensive purchase of a Japanese Animation at that time.

The first season was aired in late 1984 by HBO as no network wanted to air it due to its content, this made HBO a last resort for Andy and Paramount, this gave the pay-cable channel a slight edge in the animation market as well as their first dealing with a major Hollywood studio for an original series.

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