More theatrical cartoons transformed into faux TV episodes | Casper the Friendly Ghost

@keyword_expert​ 

How is there no safeguard against transforming old theatrical movies into TV episodes? It's just incredible.

Meanwhile, after years, the Betty Boop theatrical shorts are still listed on IMDb as TV episodes from the 1930s!

@jay_spirit​ If it makes you feel any better, it's only been about 14 months since IMDb allowed the Betty Boop theatrical shorts to be converted into TV episodes.

On the other hand, IMDb was notified of this problem 13 months ago and hasn't done anything to fix it. See https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/data-issues-policy-discussions/no-betty-boop-was-not-a-tv-series-in-1930/61417e5e7999fd0798c634a5.

So now that I think about it, it doesn't make me feel any better.

@jay_spirit​ 

If you do not specify what should happen with each episode, can you have faith in the results of a cleanup by IMDb staff, who may not have any particular knowledge of the films?

Alternatively, you could submit the edits yourself and post the reference numbers here.

@Peter_pbn​ It shouldn't be our responsibility to review every episode and figure out what should be done with each, when the IMDb staff can just change them back to what they were before before this problem occurred. I would hope that they have a change log they can refer to.

But if they need further guidance, for "Casper the Friendly Ghost" (1945), they should do the following:

1. For each episode, see if there is a theatrical short with the same title and year. If so, merge the episode into the theatrical short with a title change.
2. If there is no theatrical short with the same title and year (which is the case for all the ones I have checked), do a title change to change the episode into a theatrical film.
3. Once all the episodes have been dispersed into theatrical shorts, delete the series.

@Peter_pbn​ 

Title type corrections are the only kind I submit that routinely get rejected—somewhere between 25-50%. The rejections are always reversed on appeal, but the process is tiresome.

God knows how some contributor is able to convert theatrical shorts into TV episodes. I have trouble enough making legitimate title type corrections.

Title type corrections are also one of the few types of corrections that don't appear on the beta update history page. That means I don't know if they are rejected until the time for their acceptance has expired, which may be a week or more.

Just the same, I attempted to convert one of the fake Betty Boop TV episodes back into a theatrical short, just to see if the staff would let me do it, and they did not. And so obviously, I would not to try to do more of that kind of clean-up.

I'm loathe to do clean-up work for IMDb for another reason. I stopped contributing to IMDb for six years because someone was routinely corrupting certain cast data that I had submitted. I cleaned it up, the contributor would corrupt it again, I cleaned it up a second time, the contributor would corrupt it a second time, and on and on.

The staff agreed with me that my data was correct and that the contributor's data was a corruption, yet for a year and a half this situation persisted, often along with shabby treatment by certain staff members. Col Needham apologized to me personally, and yet still the corruption continued.

I came back only because it seemed the situation had changed. I like IMDb a lot better these days, even though I'm experiencing similar corruption with my keyword submissions. (Keywords are less important to me than cast data, but it is still aggravating.) And seeing theatrical shorts converted into TV episodes is particularly disheartening.

@dgranger​ 

The blurred distinction between theatrical cartoons and television cartoons has indeed created an unholy mess, and it's always been a mess on IMDb.

And I agree that the confusion is not entirely IMDb's fault.

But allowing a contributor to change a theatrical cartoon, that has been listed on IMDb as a theatrical cartoon for decades, into a TV episode? That's embarrassing.

This is not a case of a theatrical cartoon being duplicated as a TV episode. The theatrical cartoon has been converted into an episode.

We've always had duplicates, and fake series, and general misinformation, but never this.

In most ways, I believe IMDb is better than ever. But this is just awful, and would not have happened five or ten years ago.

@dgranger​ While I agree with some of your premises, I disagree with your conclusion.

Did theatrical animated shorts, including Casper, Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, Pink Panther, and Mighty Mouse, get shown on television, with the lineups being rearranged from episode to episode and season to season? Definitely yes. And would it be extremely difficult, if it were possible at all, for IMDb to keep track of which shorts were shown in which episode of which syndicated series 50 or 60 years ago? Yes, extremely difficult and maybe impossible. If anyone was keeping a record of that, I doubt those records would be available to the public in 2022. 

But the good news for IMDb is that I -- and many of the other contributors here -- don't expect IMDb to have that data. To the extent that this information is missing, I'm not bothered by that at all.

What I do expect from IMDb is that the data that they do include should be true. In the case of "Casper the Friendly Ghost", there was no TV series by that name in 1945. By the end of 1945 -- in fact, by the end of 1947 -- there had only been one Casper cartoon released at all. And IMDb's Company Credits correctly indicate that the first distributor of Casper cartoons was Paramount Pictures, in 1945, for theatrical release. (See https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6280432/companycredits .) But what the IMDb entry at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6280432/ claims is that there was a TV series titled "Casper the Friendly Ghost" which made its television debut in 1945. That isn't true, and nobody has provided any evidence that it is.

And when IMDb takes theatrical shorts and turns them into TV episodes, that means IMDb is claiming that the title was not originally a theatrical short and was originally a TV episode, when that is not the case.

As discussed in my other thread, this problem doesn't exist just for Casper, but for some other theatrical cartoons from the 1930s before television broadcasting came into common use. In some of those cases, the "TV series" are just blatantly wrong. It would be like someone going to a music collectors' convention and trying to sell a compact disc personally autographed by Elvis Presley. Either you should already know that the item is a fake, or with two minutes of research you could learn that it must be a fake, without even looking at the CD.

So, yes, I do blame IMDb for allowing some of their data to be turned into an unholy mess, when it wasn't an unholy mess before.

@gromit82​ some one didn’t look to hard and even I got corrected. Casper bounced around between studios. But his first tv appearance is in 1959 to 1960 in Matty’s Funday Funnies (with Beanie and Cecil) which the show introduced the Barbie Doll and also ran cartoons of not just Casper, but  Herman and Katnip, Little Audrey and Baby Huey. you see “Matty” was the cartoon logo for the Mattel toy company at the time.  There is a lot of crazy connections here. 
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casper_the_Friendly_Ghost

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matty%27s_Funday_Funnies

then Casper gets his own show in 1961 and more shows listed in the 1st article. Again a ton of crazy connections.

@dgranger​ However crazy those connections may be, none of them are crazy enough to have put a "Casper the Friendly Ghost" TV series on television by 1945.

@dgranger​ here is more evidence linking Casper to Matty’s Funday Funnies.

https://youtu.be/nHi4k2DxucI?t=184

@gromit82​ read it again. It proves that Casper wasn’t on air until 1959 in “Matty’s Funday Funnies. Every thing made of Casper before 1956 , when - “

The other Famous produced Casper cartoons had already been acquired by television distributor U.M. & M. TV Corporation in 1956. U.M. & M. retitled just "A Haunting We Will Go", but credited "Featuring Casper The Friendly Ghost" as "Featuring Casper's Friendly Ghost".

New cartoons were created for The New Casper Cartoon Show in 1963, also on ABC. The original Casper cartoons were syndicated under the title Harveytoons (initially repackaged as Casper and Company) in 1963 and ran continuously until the mid-90s. Casper has remained popular in reruns and merchandising.” aka before 1956 were theatrical shorts! It proves you case. And it basically says the all of the ones ran on “Matty’s Funday Funnies were theatrical shorts reran on tv.