DC Characters: A Legal Situation Question

[filmation batman fan]

When DC Comics characters appear in animation, they usually share hour shows with each other ie: The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure 1967 or the New Batman/Superman Adventures 1997.
However, there was one time when a DC character ran with non DC titles on Saturday morning TV. During the late 1970's, the 1977 Filmation series, the New Adventures of Batman series ran alongside Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle and the Super 7 series. I can't help but wonder how they were able to pull that off other than the fact that Filmation did nothing else DC related at that time. Batman usually runs alongside other DC Heroes, so I find it odd that we had the Batman/Tarzan Adventure Hour in 1977 and in 1980, we had Batman and the Super 7 on NBC, not to mention this Batman series was the closing segment of Tarzan and the Super 7 on CBS in 1978 & 1979. Because of these original arrangements, I like to watch the 1977 Batman with Tarzan & Super 7 episodes. Brings back memories.
Now keep in mind, I'm not talking about two individual shows in the same hour. I'm actually referring to an official variety show title. From what I can recall, we never had anything like the Superman/Lone Ranger Hour or anything else like that. DC characters tend to stick together in this sense.
I imagine doing something like that would be impossible today without legal issues. Anyone have any guesses or theories on how this was possibly done back then? I'm just curious.
Cheers.

[Earth 2 Chris]

Another one from that era that is out on DVD together is Scobby-Doo and Richie Rich. I guess HB retained the rights to the Richie Rich show from Harvey.

Chris

[ctc]

Hmmmm....

I suspect it's 'cos the bigger companies had a different attitude towards the rights to their characters back then. Even though the superheroes were popular, the amount of revenue Batman brought in for Warner was probably a small amount of their total revenue so they'd play it a lot looser with licensing him out. But by the late 80's when the Batman film made a LOT of money, most of the companies became absolutely Scrooge-like with their characters 'cos they didn't know who'd be the next big hit; and if it was one of theirs they wanted to ensure getting the biggest slice of the pie. One of the reasosn so many old cartoons hve been only slowly released on disk is 'cos the rights to damned near everything were bought up by big compnaies in the late 80's/early 90's... and then sat on as each waited to see what character would have the next big comeback.

Don C.

[Riffster]

it's like the whole battle between WB and Fox over the TV show rights, too bad it looks like those will never find themselves on dvd

[Adam West]

I don't think companies had a full understanding of the value their characters had back then.

I remember reading a story about Warren Buffet buying a bunch of Disney stock back in the 1970's or maybe early 1980's before Michael Eisner was around. He bought the stock because he realized that the characters like Snow White, etc. were worth a lot of money but the company was not being valued to include these intangible properties. I don't remember who the CEO before Eisner was (maybe Roy Disney) but Eisner quickly figured out what Buffet had already figured out and that's why even to this day, Disney will release their movies on DVD or some other platform every 7 years on a cycle. Anticipation builds as a new generation of kids and adults who become parents want to share the experience.