Stephen Slesinger
His mother, Augusta (née Singer), was a children's social worker, the Director of the Seward Guidance Bureau, and a published researcher for The NY Dept.
Always interested in new media, Slesinger took out patents for television presentations of comic strips, and experimented with broadcasting Winnie the Pooh as the first Sunday morning TV cartoon in the mid-1940s.
"No attempt to televise the film, which was in color, was made, but Slesinger, president of the group sponsoring the demonstration, said that experiments had been carried on through that medium successfully on the West Coast since 1944.
A. Milne,[3] and developed Winnie-the-Pooh commercializations for more than 30 years, creating the first Pooh doll, record, board game, puzzle, U.S. radio broadcast (NBC), animation, and motion picture film.
In 1933, Slesinger acquired the merchandising rights to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan character and produced a series of Big Little Books, games, premiums, toys, treasure maps and other products.
Other personalities and characters curated by Slesinger with innovative media and merchandise campaigns include Tom Mix, Zane Grey's King of the Royal Mounted, Alley Oop, Captain Easy, Wash Tubbs, Polly the Powers Model, Charlie Chan, Buck Rogers and Og, Son of Fire, Blondie and Dagwood (for television), as well as all Newspaper Enterprise Association comic strips.
Most prominent among these are Red Ryder and King of the Royal Mounted, which became Slesinger's most popular characters, syndicated internationally in newspaper comic strips and also generating books, radio shows, motion pictures and numerous ancillary commercial products.
Between 1938 and 1967, the long-running Red Ryder comic strip was also a comic book, the subject of a 12-chapter film serial, 26 motion pictures and numerous merchandising and promotional tie-ins, including the Red Ryder Daisy Carbine Air Rifle, which holds the longest continuing license in the history of the licensing industry and was depicted in the film A Christmas Story (1983).
It currently holds the trademarks and copyrights in the Red Ryder character franchise, as well as original Western and Adventure archives art and story content.
In the mid-1940s through the early 1950s, Stephen Slesinger Productions began producing films and television programs, including adaptations of Winnie-the-Pooh, Red Ryder, King of the Royal Mounted and The West That Lives Forever.
Among Slesinger's many honors was a 1953 proclamation by the County of Los Angeles which singled him out as a "nationally known humanitarian" whose works "are read by more than 25 million youngsters and adults" and who "has devoted much of his personal time and energy toward helping underprivileged children throughout the nation" and whose "interest in underprivileged children stems from the magnificent work done by his mother, Augusta Slesinger, who served as a psychoanalyst and social worker... for 40 years".
