Casper the Friendly Ghost is a fictional character who appeared in animated short films produced by Paramount Pictures' Famous Studios. He is a translucent ghost who is personable and keen to socialize with living beings, much to the chagrin of 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.
The Apollo 16 Command and Service Module was given the call sign "Casper", since its pilot Ken Mattingly thought, "there are enough serious things in this flight, so I picked a non-serious name."
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 [Oriolo] created 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'." [emphasis in original]
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, Fleischer Studios' successor, 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 Famous cartoons, Casper is standing next to a grave inscribed with "Casper", indicating him to be deceased. 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.
Appearances
Theatrical appearances The Friendly Ghost, the first Noveltoons short 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 Noveltoons shorts, 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 Noveltoon shorts before Paramount started the official Casper the Friendly Ghost series in 1950, which ran until 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 reliance on repetition, 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."
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, who broke from the formula established in the cartoons by redesigning Casper to have feet, avoiding undue emphasis on the fact that Casper was a dead child, giving Casper a supporting cast of friends, and creating stories in which Casper used his powers to do good. In 1959, Harvey purchased the rights to the character outright alongside other Famous Studios properties.
Casper went on to headline a large number of comic book series, as well as appearing in back up stories and guest appearances in other titles. Many of the characters introduced in the comic book series went on to appear in the Casper cartoons. The Casper series inspired three popular spin-offs: Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost, Wendy the Good Little Witch, and The Ghostly Trio. Casper's titles include:
Casper Casper Adventure Digest Casper and... Casper and Friends Casper and Friends Magazine Casper and Nightmare Casper and Spooky Casper and The Ghostly Trio Casper: A Spirited Beginning (film adaptation) Casper Big Book Casper Digest Casper Digest Stories Casper Digest Winners Casper Enchanted Tales Digest Casper Ghostland Casper Giant Size Casper Halloween Trick or Treat Casper in Space Casper in 3-D Casper Magazine Casper Movie Adaptation Casper Space Ship Casper's Ghostland Casper's Scare School Casper's Haunted Christmas Casper Special Casper Strange Ghost Stories Casper, the Friendly Ghost Casper TV Showtime Famous TV Funday Funnies The Friendly Ghost, Casper Harvey Two-Pack Nightmare and Casper Richie Rich and Casper Richie Rich, Casper, and Wendy TV Casper and Company Casper and the Spectrals
In 2009, a new Casper comic was published, called Casper and the Spectrals by Arden Entertainment. Much like The Man of Steel and Batman: Year One did with their respective characters, it revamped Casper and several other Harvey characters for a new audience. After selling 6,400 copies of the first comic, the last two issues were published in 2010. Comic book publisher American Mythology picked up the Casper the Friendly Ghost title, and has also published Casper & Wendy and Casper & Hot Stuff.
Television Casper has starred in five television shows:
Matty's Funday Funnies (1959–1961) The New Casper Cartoon Show (1963–1970) Casper and the Angels (1979) The Harveytoons Show (known in the UK as Casper and Friends) (1990–1994) The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper (1996–1998) Casper's Scare School (2009–2012)
After Harvey bought the rights to Casper and many other Famous properties in 1959 (including Herman and Katnip, Little Audrey, and Baby Huey), they began broadcasting the post-September 1950 theatrical Famous shorts on a television show sponsored by Mattel Toys titled Matty's Funday Funnies on ABC in 1959 which introduced the Barbie doll to the public. The other Famous produced Casper cartoons had already been acquired by television distributor U.M. & M. TV Corporation in 1956. U.M. & M. retitled just "A Haunting We Will Go", but credited "Featuring Casper The Friendly Ghost" as "Featuring Casper's Friendly Ghost".
New cartoons were created for The New Casper Cartoon Show in 1963, also on ABC. The original Casper cartoons were syndicated under the title Harveytoons (initially repackaged as Casper and Company) in 1963 and ran continuously until the mid-90s. Casper has remained popular in reruns and merchandising.
Hanna-Barbera Productions also gave Casper two holiday specials, Casper's First Christmas (which also starred Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, Quick Draw McGraw, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy) and Casper's Halloween Special (aka Casper Saves Halloween), and also the Saturday morning cartoon series Casper and the Angels (an animated takeoff on two live-action hit shows Charlie's Angels and CHiPS) in the autumn of 1979, all on NBC. Also featured on the NBC version was a big ghost named Hairy Scary (voiced by John Stephenson). None of Casper's original co-stars appeared in the show.
Between 1990 and 1994, Casper appeared in The Harveytoons Show which was known as Casper and Friends in the UK. This show featured other Harvey Comics characters and series including: Little Audrey, Tommy Tortoise and Moe Hare, Baby Huey, Herman and Katnip, Buzzy the Crow, Modern Madcaps, Possum Pearl, Professor Schmatlz, Jeeper and Creeper and others. The show consisted of Famous Studios-produced cartoons from 1950 to 1964 and each episode of the series included three full cartoons and one "ToonTake" segment.
In 1996, Amblin Entertainment and Universal Cartoon Studios created a new Casper series for Fox Kids called The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper, based on the 1995 feature, that lasted two years and was never seen on television again after 1998.