DuckTales
Walt Disney Television Animation began production on "DuckTales" in 1986, with the intention of having it ready for a premiere in 1987, and its episodes airing within a 4-6 p.m. placement, at a time when more children would be watching television, rather than within a morning timeslot. Seeking to create a cartoon with high quality animation, in comparison with other 1980s cartoons which had much lower budgets, the animation was handled by Tokyo Movie Shinsha, having previously been used on two other Disney cartoons in 1985 – "The Wuzzles" and "Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears" – both of which had demonstrated better quality cartoons on TV than in previous years. Although the Japanese provided them with more available artists for the cartoon, this also increased production costs, due to the currency exchange rates between the yen and the dollar, though Disney intended to invest heavily in its "DuckTales"s production, with plans to recuperate its money by having it syndicated via its syndication unit, Buena Vista Television, with a 2.5/3.5 syndicator/station ad split. While this was a concept that worked well with live-action TV reruns, it had only ever been used with inexpensive cartoon series in the past that either recycled theatrical shorts from decades past or only featured limited, low-budget animation, and thus had never been attempted with a high quality animated series, with the heavy investment considered a risky move.
Dragon Tales
"Dragon Tales" is based on characters created in 1978 by Laguna Beach, California artist and retired educator Ron Rodecker, Rodecker was recovering from a coronary artery bypass graft when he began sketching dragons as a means of symbolizing forces in life that were too big to control. In 1997, Jim Coane, then a producer at Columbia TriStar Television, founded the artwork and developed it into a television series with several writers. The project was considered something of a risky venture, because it was not based on a well-known franchise like many children's television programs, such as "Arthur" or "Paddington Bear". The series was originally shipped to PBS member stations in 1995 at the suggestion of PBS, but all passed at the time. In October 1995, Jim Coane met Marjorie Kalins, senior VP of programming and production at Children's Television Workshop, and showed her the idea for the series. Kalins, loving the idea, brought the series to Children's Television Workshop, who agreed to a partnership with the Columbia TriStar Television Group. Kalins helped him and Columbia TriStar Television obtain a grant from the Department of Education and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The grant proposal was written by Wesley Eure. As Columbia TriStar was the TV division of two major Hollywood film studios, which in turn are owned by the Sony division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, "Dragon Tales" became one of the few PBS Kids and Sprout programs to be co-produced by a Big Six major American studio's TV subsidiary. The other PBS shows made by a major Hollywood studio were "Bill Nye the Science Guy" (made by Walt Disney Television) and "Curious George" (produced by Universal Television) In 2002, C-T was renamed to Sony Pictures Television, a company that would co-produce the third season of the program.