The Warner Bros. Archives joins those who are mourning the loss of Ted Turner, a giant among media moguls of the last 50+ years.  One of his accomplishments we are proudest of is the fact that through his actions, Warner Bros. was able to regain a huge portion of its legacy that was absent from the studio for four decades.  The story of how this happened is complicated, so hold on tight…

In 1956, Warner Bros. sold the rights to all of its pre-1950 feature films (over 750 sound and silent titles ), along with over 1,100 live action and animated short subjects, to PRM Inc., a Canadian-American investment company.  Later that year, PRM changed its name to Associated Artists Productions (A.A.P.), and began licensing its new library to television stations.  Children of the 1960s and 1970s will certainly remember the A.A.P. logos in front of the WB cartoons broadcast constantly on television during that era.

A.A.P. was purchased by United Artists in 1958, and United Artists was acquired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1981 (after the disastrous failure of the previous year’s “Heaven’s Gate”), renamed MGM/UA. In 1986, Ted Turner, eager to have a film library to show on his television station WTBS, purchased MGM/UA in its entirety .  However, he eventually sold much of the company back to MGM’s former owner Kirk Kerkorian.  This left Turner with what he truly prized: the MGM, RKO  (with limited rights), and pre-1950s Warner Bros. film and television libraries.

His acquisitions continued over the next ten years, adding Hanna-Barbera in 1991, and both Castle Rock Entertainment and New Line Cinema in 1993.  With the merger of Turner Broadcasting System and Time Warner in October 1996, all of these classic libraries came under one company, and the pre-1950 Warner films returned to their original home, where they remain to this day.  Large portions of the library are aired daily on channels like TCM, and on Blu-ray and 4K releases such as the Warner Archive Collection.

To his eternal credit, Turner continued the important film preservation program which had been started at MGM more than twenty years prior, always funding and protecting the library.  Since Turner’s merger with Time Warner, Warner Bros. has continued this preservation program to this day.  His commitment and contribution to the preservation and exhibition of decades of over 100 years of film and television history cannot be overstated.