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y winter 1980–1981, The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle had been shuttled to Sundays at 8:00 a.m., and the Saturday schedule on CBS was rearranged. It was now The Tom and Jerry Comedy Show at 8:00 a.m., The Tarzan/Lone Ranger Adventure Hour from 10:00–11:00 a.m., The New Fat Albert Show at noon, and Jason of Star Command back on Saturdays at 1:00–1:30 p.m. More details on the Sandy Howard deal that we announced late last year began to emerge. The first of the live-action science-fiction comedy films was budgeted at $4,800,000 and was to be written by Barry Blitzer and Tom Ruegger. Filming was set to begin in June at the Warner Ranch, with effects by our own effects shop.
In January we made a deal with Columbia Pictures Television to utilize their library of movies and TV shows to develop new animated series for them to distribute. In mid-February, after six years with us, Arthur Nadel was promoted to vice president of development and creative affairs. Later that same week, Teleprompter Corp.—who now spelled their first name with only one capital letter—reported record earnings. Filmation had gained them $13,692,000 in revenue and $3,097,000 in income. On March 5th, Norm and I gave a speech at the UCLA campus on “Today’s Cartoon Industry.” Shortly after that, we announced to the industry that we would be licensing 250 half-hours of television to advertisers and syndicated stations, including The Archies, Star Trek, Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down, Jason of Star Command, Space Academy, and Gilligan’s Island. The U.S. syndication market was starting to open up more as cable became commonplace, but we were also planning to sell the shows across the globe. We also debuted an advertising campaign in the trade papers with Seidem & Moiselle to showcase our 15th anniversary. The eight partialpage ads ran on March 6, 1981, and noted it as our official 15th anniversary date. In mid-March, we promoted Joe Mazzuca to production chief in the animation wing, and Don Christensen to vicepresident and animation producer-director. We also completed the work on the final ten episodes of the second season of Sport Billy, giving Telemundi plenty of time to sell worldwide rights prior to the 1982 international World Cup. Most of the foreign countries were going to start airing the show in October 1981. In late March we set up a deal with Kid Stuff Records to release four records of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids songs. A few weeks later, we sold Fat Albert into syndication in 29 countries for the 1981–1982 season. And we licensed the rights to the British novel by William Horwood, Duncton Wood, which was a fantasy story about a race of moles in England. It was compared by many critics to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and we liked the allegorical nature of it. We were also talking with Shari Lewis about doing a Opposite: new puppet show with us. Promotional art and character designs for The Tarzan/Lone Ranger/Zorro Adventure Hour Remember how Warner Brothers and NBC burned off our Treasure Above: Island telefilm in spring 1980? Well, almost a year to the date after, Image from Oliver Twist CHAPTER 20: FORCED TO RUNAWAY 179