Leonard Goldenson
Goldenson orchestrated the merger of United Paramount Theatres with ABC in 1953 (after Paramount was ordered to spin it off in the wake of "United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.", a 1948 decree of the U.S. Supreme Court). ABC was originally formed in 1943 in the wake of an earlier Supreme Court decree effectively ordering the spinoff of the largely secondary-status "Blue Network" from its then-parent, NBC; its buyer, industrialist Edward J. Noble, tried to build ABC into a competitive Broadcasting company, but by 1951 was rumored to be on the verge of selling the nearly bankrupt operation to CBS, whose management apparently wanted ABC's critically important owned-and-operated television stations.
American Broadcasting Company
In the early 1970s, Michael Eisner, who joined ABC in 1966, became the network's program development manager. He helped bring about ideas for many series including "Happy Days" (which originated as a segment on the anthology series "Love, American Style"), as well as several soap operas; however, Eisner's main credit at ABC was for developing youth-oriented programming. He was responsible for reacquiring the rights to the Looney Tunes-Merrie Melodies library, bringing the shorts back to ABC after spending several years on CBS, as well as developing "The Jackson 5ive" animated series and a series about the Osmonds, and greenlighting "Super Friends", based on DC Comics' Justice League of America series He also laid ground-work for the development of educational children's programming (predating the 1990 Congressional passage of the Children's Television Act) through interstitials such as "Time for Timer", "The Bod Squad" and, perhaps most famously, "Schoolhouse Rock!". Eisner left ABC in 1976 to become president of Paramount Pictures; he would later become the President of ABC's eventual parent company, Disney.