Stephen Slesinger (December 25, 1901 – December 17, 1953) was an American radio, television and film producer, and creator of comic strip characters. From 1923 to 1953, he created, produced, published, developed, licensed or represented several popular literary characters of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.
Biography
Stephen Slesinger was born on December 25, 1901, in New York City; He was a third generation New Yorker of Hungarian and Russian ancestry. His father, Anthony, was a dress manufacturer. His mother, Augusta (née Singer), was a children's social worker, the Director of the Seward Guidance Bureau, and a published researcher for The NY Dept. of Education, for 40 years. Later she became the executive secretary of Jewish Big Sisters and a noted psychoanalyst. She was also one of the founders of The New School for Social Research. Slesinger studied at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School from September 1914 until June 1919 and later attended Columbia University. His younger sister was the author and screenwriter Tess Slesinger.
Media
In 1927, Slesinger set up shop in New York City as a literary agent, and went on to represent, among others, Newbery Medal-winning writers Hendrik Willem van Loon (who won the first Newbery Medal in 1922), Western authors Zane Grey and Rex Beach, Will James and journalist Andy Rooney. Slesinger acquired the rights to popularize illustrations, texts, characters and personalities in other media.
Always interested in new media, Slesinger took out patents for television presentations of comic strips, and experimented with broadcasting Winnie the Pooh as the first Sunday morning TV cartoon in the mid-1940s. An April 23, 1946 New York Times article, "'Telecomic' Films Shown: Exhibition Held in Connection with Publishers' Meeting", described Slesinger's demonstration of film versions of the Sunday comics, including Dick Tracy, Otto the King and "a synoptic version of a popular children's book". "No attempt to televise the film, which was in color, was made, but Slesinger, president of the group sponsoring the demonstration, said that experiments had been carried on through that medium successfully on the West Coast since 1944."
Winnie-the-Pooh
In 1930, Slesinger acquired sole and exclusive U.S. and Canadian merchandising, television, recording and other trade rights to Winnie-the-Pooh from A. A. Milne, and developed Winnie-the-Pooh commercializations for more than 30 years, creating the first Pooh doll, record, board game, puzzle, U.S. radio broadcast (NBC), animation, and motion picture film. In the 1950s, after Slesinger's death, his widow, Shirley Slesinger Lasswell, took over the business and launched her own nationwide licensing campaigns. In 1961 and 1983, Stephen Slesinger, Inc. licensed certain of its Pooh rights to the Walt Disney Company.
Premiums and products
In 1933, Slesinger acquired the merchandising rights to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan character and produced a series of Big Little Books, games, premiums, toys, treasure maps and other products. Slesinger's marketing and media strategy for Tarzan became the blueprint for success in character merchandising, including the campaigns Superman. Slesinger's The New Adventures of Tarzan "Pop-Up" (Blue Ribbon Press, 1935) book, which he also illustrated, was chosen by Albert Tillman as one of the 100 best pop-up books ever published and featured on the cover of Tillman's historical survey, Pop-Up! Pop-Up! (Whalestooth, 1998).
Slesinger purchased the rights to the Ozark Ike comic strip from creator Rufus A. ("Ray") Gotto. In 1936, it became his first comic strip in syndication. Other personalities and characters curated by Slesinger with innovative media and merchandise campaigns include Tom Mix, Zane Grey's King of the Royal Mounted, Alley Oop, Captain Easy, Wash Tubbs, Polly the Powers Model, Charlie Chan, Buck Rogers and Og, Son of Fire, Blondie and Dagwood (for television), as well as all Newspaper Enterprise Association comic strips. For these and many others, he produced comic books, children's books and created the art and stories for hundreds of Big Little Books distributed by Western Printing and Lithograph, from the 1930s through the 1950s.
Original characters
In the late 1930s, Slesinger began developing original characters, which he then hired artists to bring to life. Most prominent among these are Red Ryder and King of the Royal Mounted, which became Slesinger's most popular characters, syndicated internationally in newspaper comic strips and also generating books, radio shows, motion pictures and numerous ancillary commercial products.