Why Wasn't Blue Beetle on Justice League Unlimited?

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundredth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false.

As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.

NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!

COMIC LEGEND:

Justice League Unlimited was legally prohibited from using Blue Beetle on the series.

STATUS:

Apparently False

For the 800th installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, I figured I'd do a special edition, so this time around, it's a double-sized edition. In honor of my series of daily polls I've been doing this year (click here to vote on the ones that are still open), I let people vote on whether they wanted me to do six legends about DC characters or six legends about Marvel characters, and in both instances, I would deal with at least one legend that people had been asking me to do for over a decade. The winner of the poll was DC, and so I kick off with a legend that I've been getting since I started doing Comic Book Legends Revealed way back in 2005 (some of the specific requests to this that I have in my files came from 2006, 2007, 2008 and more. It was a very popular request back in the day) and that request is, "What was up with Blue Beetle and Justice League Unlimited?"

In case you're somehow unfamiliar with it, Justice League Unlimited was a sequel/revamp of the Justice League cartoon series that ran from 2004-2006 that worked under the idea of taking the original Justice League concept and expanding the group membership dramatically (one could say to an almost "unlimited" degree)...

The series introduced a whole pile of new characters to the League, a bunch of whom never really got a chance to get a spotlight on the series as they were SO many new additions (although there were a number of new Leaguers who DID get spotlights and became fan favorites, like a new approach to the Question) and yet, in the midst of all of these various characters, a notable character who was absent was the Blue Beetle....

The Blue Beetle, as you may or may not know, was originally a Fox Comics character during the Golden Age and after Fox went out of business, the company sold the Beetle to Charlton Comics and when Charlton Comics got out of the superhero comics business, Charlton sold their superhero characters to DC (DC's Executive Editor, Dick Giordano, had been an editor at Charlton, so it was almost like a present for him).

The problem with sales like this is that, you might be shocked to know this, but comic book companies were never the greatest record keepers and as a result, a number of these sales over the years have been a bit suspect. Part of that is the informality of it all. You see, people who were doing comic books when comic books were booming were definitely paying attention to their rights, but people who were doing comic books in the late 1940s, when superheroes started going out of fashion, were paying a lot less attention and then when comic book companies went out of business, they REALLY weren't paying attention to their paperwork. So when they made sales, it was often this sort of generic "Here, you have all of our characters" deal. So you would get things like Charlton selling DC the character of Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt when Charlton did not actually have the rights to Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt, to sell!

Therefore, when Blue Beetle was not appearing in the Justice League Unlimited cartoon, it was only natural to assume that there was a similar problem with DC legally using the character in their cartoons, even though, interestingly enough, Blue Beetle appeared in the comic book tie-in to the Justice League Unlimited series....

However, no one really knew for certain that there was a legal problem, as it was just sort of a guess based on the fact that the character wasn't used in the cartoons.

My pal, John Trumbull, was discussing Justice League Unlimited and the lack of Blue Beetle on the show a few years back when Justice League Unlimited director and longtime DC Animated Universe artist, Dan Riba, stopped by to talk about the situation:

Blue Beetle had a...complicated legal issue. Charlton's claim to the character were a little iffy. So DC needed to tighten things before letting anyone adapt him. The comics were deemed okay as they were pretty under the radar...but a TV show or a toy was too high profile for something that might require some kind of payout. But they did the legal legwork and either paid off any heirs or found there were none and Charlton's claim to the character was legally binding.

I am willing to defer to Dan on this one, so I think it is fair enough to say that DC wasn't sure if they were legally covered, but they were, in fact, covered, so the reason why Blue Beetle wasn't on the show wasn't because it was actually prohibited, but rather because they weren't sure that it WASN'T prohibited (and by the time they realized it was okay, the show had ended).

Thanks to John and Dan for the information!