rights to Strawberry Shortcake and the
Care Bears. American Greetings agreed
to sell those rights outright to Cookie
Jar for $195 million, rather than continue to license them. But AG will still
have a finger in the pie, because it gets
a ten-year exclusive inbound license
for social expression products related
to the properties, plus a right of first
refusal when that expires.
As for the original Cookie Jar/DIC
deal, Gilhooly says it was a fairly
straightforward acquisition. “Since
DIC had recently gone public, all of
the skeletons in the closet got shaken
out then,” he notes.
Truth be told, DIC and Cookie Jar
knew quite a bit about each other
before their whirlwind courtship. Top
executives in both companies have
worked together in the past in various
iterations of Canadian media companies. Michael Hirsch, CEO of Cookie
Jar, in the 1970s founded Nelvana
Limited, the Canadian animation com-
pany that produced the Strawberry
Shortcake and Care Bears shows and
movies. Hirsch and Andy Heyward,
DIC’s chairman and CEO, an American, worked together on the original
Inspector Gadget series. Heyward will
be joining Cookie Jar with a five-year
contract to continue managing the
DIC properties.
In addition to the DIC brands, Cookie
Jar also get DIC’s one-third ownership
in KidsCo, a global children’s channel
held in partnership with NBC–
Universal and Canadian company Corus
Entertainment. Corus, for those still
keeping score, was the company to
which Hirsch sold Nelvana in 2000.
Michelle Ilczyszyn.
For DIC Holdings (Burbank,
California)
O’Melveny & Myers
(Los Angeles):
Sean Monroe (counsel), and Bob Hay-mer (entertainment/media); counsel James Mulholland and associate
Mohammed Senouci (London); David
Beddow (antitrust) and counsel Bilal
Sayyed (Washington, D.C.); counsel
Jochen Anweiler (competition, Brussels).
For American Greetings
(Cleveland)
In-house: Catherine Kilbane, senior
vice president, general counsel and
secretary; Josef Mandelbaum, CEO,
AG Intellectual Properties.
& Squire, Sanders & Dempsey
(Cleveland):
David Zagore (corporate); Thomas Kilbane and Damond Mace (litigation).
For Cookie Jar Group (Toronto)
In-house: Greg Gilhooly, general
counsel.
Sheppard Mullin Richter
Hampton (Los Angeles):
David Sands, Linda Michaelson,
Robert Darwell, and associate
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