Masters of the Universe: Ownership in Question?

Mattel owns the rights to the Masters of the Universe toys, characters, and setting, right? We know that there were some Filmation rights wrapped up around the Masters of the Universe cartoon of the eighties (see this 2009 thread at he-man.org), and we know that the 1987 movie rights are not with Mattel (see Wikipedia), but I cannot remember a time when there was any question that Mattel owned everything else regarding the Masters of the Universe.

In fact, back in 2011 it was reported that Mattel won a court case vs Don Glut, securing the rights to the mini-comics, further demonstrating their ownership of the Masters of the Universe brand.

Or so we thought.

In a thread at actionfigureinsider.com we are told that Mattel doesn’t own the rights to Masters of the Universe. Scott Neitlich, former brand manager at Mattel, tells us:

“And for the record, Mattel does not own MOTU. Universal does. So this was not a case of supporting owned IP. Like DC or CARS we paid royalties etc…”

Okay, this throws everything surrounding ownership of Masters of the Universe into question. Universal owns Masters of the Universe? Maybe. But then again, maybe not.

Emiliano Santalucia steps in with a response:

“I’ve been putting together packaging for some MOTU products not later than a few weeks ago, and the legal line I put there still says: ‘MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE and associated trademarks are owned and used under license from Mattel, Inc. © 2016 Mattel, Inc. All Right Reserved. Under license to Classic Media.'”

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Wow. This level of behind-the-scenes discussion surrounding Mattel surprises me. But we’re far from through, because Neitlich responded:

“Mattel has first rights/options to toys and games and the right to say “copyright Mattel” on toy product until 2023. After that all rights including entertainment and all consumer product (including toys) rights revert fully to Universal. With the exception of live action motu rights which are with Sony until 2019.”

Honestly, by this point of reading the thread my head was swimming. I cannot even begin to understand what is happening here, but it appears that through some bizarre series of events the claim is that Mattel licenses Masters of the Universe and still gets to claim ownership . . . until 2023. What? How does any of this even work?

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Wanna further confuse the subject? Well, it is this next statement that sent me to start chasing down trademark ownership. Neitlich throws everything into question with the claim that Mattel sold the rights to Masters of the Universe in the nineties, even going so far as to bring Hallmark into the chain of ownership.

The Hallmark claim was where I just had to start digging into the situation, my first step the He-Man ornament at the official Hallmark website. The legel text on the Hallmark page states:

“MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE and associated trademarks are owned by and used under license from Mattel, Inc. © 2016 Mattel, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Under license to Classic Media.”

There’s that “Under license to Classic Media statement again, an exact match for the wording that Santalucia posted. And the rest of the legal block is very similar (minor wording tweak, but nothing that would make me question whether or not Mattel owns the trademarks and copyrights).

My next step was a search at the United States Patent and Trademark Office for “Masters of the Universe”. What did I find? A total of 20 entries, eight of which are classified as dead. And looking closely at all twenty entries we find that Mattel is listed as “Owner” on 16 of the entries.

The trademark ownership at the USPTO, combined with the Hallmark legal line and Santalucia’s posted legal language, certainly makes it appear that Mattel owns the trademark rights to Masters of the Universe. And the copyrights, if we look at the two legal lines, are also owned by Mattel.

All that this entire thread does is leave a question that we’ll have to live with until Mattel weighs in:

Who owns the rights to Masters of the Universe?

Well, maybe this he-man.org thread can help us better understand the situation. The discussion continues, and Neitlich states that:

“After 2023, Universal gets it all which means Hasbro (or anyone) can bid to make He-Man toys.”

I’ll be over here scratching my head and trying to follow this if you need me. I am so confused right now.


11 thoughts on “Masters of the Universe: Ownership in Question?

    1. @Linneman – I am assuming some NDAs expired or . . . well, I don’t know what to think. It’s kinda staggering how many reveals are in those two threads.

  1. I’m no expert in these things but the “Mattel has first rights/options to toys and games and the right to say “copyright Mattel” on toy product until 2023″ line doesn’t ring true to me.

    If this was the case then that would mean that Mattel themselves would be able to produce Toys and claim ownership of the MOTU brand within that scope, but I can not believe that this would then allow them to sub licence any aspects of the MOTU brand to any other company.

    They wouldn’t be able to licence classic media to release dvds, or anyone else to release books and have it say say that Mattel owns the IP. Those kinds of products don’t fall within the scope of Toys & Games. We’ll assume he just miss spoke and he should have included “media” as well?

    Even if he did, to my knowledge they certainly wouldn’t be able to migrate the toy licence to Super 7 as that is the exact same argument that is being used to say that Mattel aren’t allowed to simply pass the torch to Super 7 for the Thundercats Classics and they would have to renegotiate their own deal with WB in order to get the rights.
    If this was the case then surely Super 7 would have had to have approached Universal in order to get the license to produce the toys.

    This might be a case of look at messenger and make a judgement on whether their word can be trusted in the face of contrary information. Having said that I’m no lawyer and I suppose a lot of this would have to depend on the wording of this supposed,mysterious, unproven agreement between Mattel and Universal. I think Occam’s razor applies here.

    1. @Jii Dee – “They wouldn’t be able to licence classic media to release dvds, or anyone else to release books and have it say say that Mattel owns the IP.”

      This is what throws me more than anything else. If someone else owned those rights I would expect the legal language to specify a different owner. The “Under license to Classic Media.” makes me think Mattel owns the rights and Classic Media holds the license, not the other way around.

      It is certainly an entertaining peek behind the curtain. I hope someone steps up from Mattel with a definitive answer.

  2. Filmation’s animation library and assets were sold to Hallmark in 1995. It sounds like Filmation held onto rights involving He-Man.

    In 2004, Hallmark sold the Filmation library to a company called Entertainment Rights.

    That company would become known as Classic Media in 2009.

    In 2012, DreamWorks Animation bought Classic Media.

    Which brings us to April, 2016 when Universal bought DreamWorks Animation.

  3. Classics Media is a property acquisition firm, so it seems likely they have some sort of interest in Masters from this. Whether it is an ongoing transfer of rights or something else is anyone’s guess though.

  4. Some clarifications at the best of my knowledge:

    Hallmark is not anymore part of the game:
    They were before because they bought the Filmation library from L’Oreal (who bought Filmation and closed it), but eventually they sold everything to Entertainment Rights, that later became Classic Media and that was absorbed by Dreamworks Animation.
    Recently Dreamworks Animation has been bought by NBCUNiversal.

    Regardless of MOTU toy rights, this is how Filmation shows and entertainments rights arrived where they are right now.
    This is known history, at least on that there is no controversy, even Scott Neitlich would confirm that 😉
    Hallmark has nothing to do with MOTU anymore, other then being a licensee for the Christmas ornaments.

    The controversy is now about what rights were sold to Hallmark in the nineties.

    We know Lou Scheimer had a very good contract, retaining ownership of many of the characters created in animation (Orko toy having Filmation copyright)
    Even more so with She-Ra that was co-created with Filmation.

    We know at one point Mattel sold some rights to Hallmark during nineties (this is not new news). The general knowledge was that they only sold entertainment rights, not full ownership of the brand.

    We know Mattel had to license MOTU entertainment rights from Hallmark in order to produce the 2002 show (which was new entertainment, so fitting what we knew before). But that was not public knowledge.

    We know Mattel entered in a relationship with Classic Media in 2010 I believe, where they obtained rights to all characters to be produced as toys and Classic Media acted as licensing agent for the brands, that’s why all licenses are currently handled by Classic Media/Dreamworks, but they still report the legal line stating Mattel owns Masters of the Universe.
    And Mattel still approves every MOTU product.

    So the question remains: did Mattel also sold full ownership of MOTU retaining only first right to toys?
    That doesn’t match what happened in 2006, when Mattel passed on toys and still no other companies were allowed to do them

    I hope this helps clarifying what we know and what is being questioned 🙂

  5. Scott has proven he barely knows anything about marketing,–I am certainly not going to take his word on legal issues re: a company he worked for more than 3 years ago.

    1. @Melmoth666 – I just hope that someone at Mattel takes notice and issues a statement. It would be nice to find out if the 2023 comment has any meaning at all.

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