Answerman

Whatever Happened To Saban Entertainment?

Drew asks:

As a child of the late-80s/early-90s, I grew up with a lot of anime dubbed by Saban (not even knowing it was anime half the time, i.e. Bumpety Boo.

The Saban you are probably referencing, Shuki Levy back in 1983 that adapted a huge number of Japanese shows -- mostly children's anime -- for an international audience. In the early days, they simply acted as hired producers (mostly for music) and didn't actually own any rights to those shows. Later they developed their own library of shows, including quite a few they produced or co-produced themselves.

This is the era that anime fans Saban Entertainment for. This is the era that brought us Samurai Pizza Cats, Maya the Bee, Digimon Adventure and many others. This is also the Saban that experimented with Western adaptations of tokusatsu shows, turning myriad Japanese series into Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Big Bad Beetleborgs and VR Troopers. But Saban was also a distributor, and co-produced many new Western shows as well. It can be very difficult to figure out from the outside which ones they actually owned.

At any rate, Saban Entertainment and Saban International were bought by Fox Family Worldwide (which Saban partly owned, and had folded themselves into). At that time, the entire library was transferred to Disney. The rights to most of the licensed shows have since expired, and while Disney still has most of the master tapes, they don't actually have the rights to do anything with them. Others, such as those Saban was able to buy outright, or co-produced, may still be active. From here, it's hard to tell which is which.

The thing is, the media landscape has changed a lot since 2001, and most of those old master tapes are pretty worthless today. Almost no broadcast outlets will take old, standard definition analog video. Netflix won't take them unless they're in absolutely pristine condition, and most of them aren't. They need to be digitally remastered to be worth anything, but even if they did, old 2D kids' cartoons still don't fetch a very high price, and probably aren't worth the trouble. Besides, in most cases, Disney probably doesn't even have any film elements from which they could do a remastering.

In any case, today there's a new Saban, Nicktoons, and began production on new series, which continue to this day. (A new movie is also in the works.)

Saban Brands has been very active in non-Power Rangers licensing, too. They bought California-based cute/family/hipster merchandise company Paul Frank Industries and the now-defunct kids' website Zui.com. They re-bought the rights to the Digimon franchise in 2012, which they continue to develop with Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight.

But for Japanese shows, that's basically it. Power Rangers, Digimon, Beetleborgs and Kamen Rider. Some of the old stuff is still owned (at least partially) by Disney, but most of it is back with its Japanese rights holders. Whether they'll ever find a home in North America again is anybody's guess.

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