Khaji-da!

In case you missed it over at the Newsarama blog...

an incarnation of the Blue Beetle will finally be showing up on your TV screens, in the latest Batman cartoon, Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

While characters running the gamut from The Creeper and Booster Gold to Aztek and B'wana Beast managed to get themselves cameos in the DCU in media other than comics, we have been denied any appearances of any of the Blue Beetles - neither Garrett, nor Kord, nor Reyes - in any form, whether it be Justice League Unlimited, or even Teen Titans. Why? Well, apparently Fox Feature Syndicate, the company that created and owned the blue bug in the forties until they went kaput and sold the rights to Charlton, had short-sightedly signed away the broadcasting rights to the character in order to produce a radio program. While I can only speculate, it would seem that they concluded that comic books were a fad, and were due for a crash sooner rather than later. It was, therefore, better to get their money now, and if that meant losing out on holding the rights to a worthless asset in a few years, than so be it.

That license finally expired in 2006, but by then it was too late to feature him in JLU - the cartoon had been canceled. Luckily for us Blue Beetle fans, though, no matter how many such shows are shit-canned, there will always be room for more Batman on our Saturday mornings.

The case of Blue Beetle is pretty enlightening, actually. I used to believe that if you tried hard enough, and maybe wrote a few letters, you could get a cartoon or toy based on any character you wanted. After searching for information about the Blue Beetle rights, though, I came across this post on the boards at Action Figure Insider, and was thoroughly humbled. I wasn't really disappointed, though - I felt more informed, and less like DC had something explicitly some of my favorite characters. It was calming to find out that, sometimes, no matter how popular a character, or how much money you could make out of it, you just can't use something - even if you own the character! Who knew making action figures, or cartoons, could be so complicated?