Casper, The Friendly Ghost

Casper the Friendly Ghost is a 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, but often criticized by his three wicked uncles, the Ghostly Trio.

The character was featured in 55 theatrical cartoons titled ''The Friendly Ghost'' from 1945 to 1959. The character has been featured in comic books published by Harvey Comics since 1952, and Harvey purchased the character outright in 1959. Casper became one of Harvey's most popular characters, headlining several 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). 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. He would later appear in four direct-to-video and made-for-TV follow-up films.

American mascots

Creation

The origins of Casper are disputed, with both Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo claiming to be the character's creator. According to Oriolo, Casper was created on a Halloween night to assuage his four-year-old daughter Joan's fear of the dark. He made a cardboard cutout of a friendly ghost and hung it in the backyard tree to show her that not all ghosts are bad.

Though Joan has corroborated this story, Seymour Reit maintains that Casper was born with a short story which he conceived and wrote entirely by himself and gave to Oriolo to illustrate. Reit concluded, "Joe riolocreated the actual ''cartoon'' of the character - but the concept, series, idea and plotline were mine, prior to Joe's involvement. Joe played an important part, but I was Casper's legit 'Poppa'." mphasis in originalref name=RetFan11/>

Reit and Oriolo intended to sell the story to either Fleischer Studios (where they were both employed as animators) or to a children's storybook publisher, and they eventually lined up a deal with Grosset & Dunlap. 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. For his part, Reit received no payment for the book at all.

In the original Harveytoons animation, Casper is 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.

''The Friendly Ghost'', the first Noveltoon to feature Casper, was released by Paramount in May 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, 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 attempts 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, is frightened of Casper. She 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 cartoons, '' There's Good Boos To-Night'' and '' A Haunting We Will Go'', released in 1948 and 1949 respectively, even though Famous Studios's president and general manager Sam Buchwald had already given approval for Casper to have his own series. In these cartoons Casper's appearance was cuter and more infantile than in his debut cartoon; head animator Myron Waldman has claimed credit for the redesign. ''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. Ferdie returns as a ghost to join his friend Casper in the afterlife.

These three cartoons were initially billed as Noveltoons before Paramount started the official ''Casper the Friendly Ghost'' series in 1950, and ran the theatrical releases until summer 1959. Most of the entries in the series were relatively 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. Animation historian Leonard Maltin, in his book ''Of Mice and Magic'', criticized the series for its repetitious plot devices, saying that Casper was "the most monotonous character to invade cartoonland since Mighty Mouse. It seemed as it every Casper cartoon followed the same story line, with only minor variations." One of the animators, Lee Mishkin, similarly complained, "With the Casper series, you never knew what picture you were working on because they were all exactly the same."

Appearances

Harvey Comics

Casper was first published in comics form in August 1949 by St. John Publications, running for five issues until September 1951. In 1952, Alfred Harvey, founder and publisher of Harvey Comics began producing ''Casper'' comic books. Casper appeared in ''Harvey Comics Hits'' #61 (Oct 1952), and then moved to a solo book with ''Casper the Friendly Ghost'' #7 (December 1952), picking up the numbering from the St. John Publications series. The series was written and edited by Sid Jacobson and drawn by Warren Kremer

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