Exiled From Continuity / Legal Reasons

Elements Exiled from Continuity for legal reasons. This is when copyright shenanigans and Screwed by the Lawyers kick in.

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Anime and Manga

• Gundam Build Fighters suffered an unusual version of this. Due to various legal agreements with Japanese TV networks, none of the Gundam shows that had aired on MBS or TBS within the past five years could be represented in Build Fighters, which covered Mobile Suit Gundam 00's second season and movie as well as AGE itself. Reportedly, the contract on 00 Second Season ended one day before the final episode of Build Fighters aired, which allowed the staff to include Yuuki/Meijin turning his damaged Amazing Gundam Exia into a "Repair" version. As of the sequel Gundam Build Fighters Try, all licensing issues seem to be resolved, as references to AGE (namely Kei Karima using the Vagan Gear SID and a Gundam Spiegel wielding AGE-1 Spallow's combat knife) have begun to crop up.
• The Mewtwo featured in Pokémon: The First Movie is owned by the estate of the movie's screenwriter, Takeshi Shudō (despite The Pokémon Company owning the concept of Mewtwo). This is why the much-maligned Pokémon: Genesect and the Legend Awakened created a different, if very similar Mewtwo, and why the first movie's CGI remake required the permission of Shudo's estate. This appears to have softened with the appearance of the original Mewtwo in an episode of Pokémon Journeys: The Series.
• One-Punch Man featured an one-shot antagonist called Goddess Glasses that appeared only on ONE's webcomic due to her design being "borrowed" from another mangaka back then when ONE was still unemployed. Both Murata's manga and the anime replaced her with a similar character called Do-S.

Comic Books

• The estates of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, original creators of Superman, won a court ruling that the concept of Superboy belonged to them. This is believed to have led to the death of one character, the Modern Age clone Superboy, and the renaming of another. Even the Legion of Super Heroes (2006) cartoon, which was based on the concept of Superboy, instead has a teenage "young Superman" as its star. And the DVD of the '60s Filmation Superman cartoons had the Superboy shorts deleted. A later ruling determined that Kon-El (the '90s clone Superboy) is different enough from the original Superboy ("our" Superman as a teenager) to be used with impunity. Even more, it's since been ruled that Superboy is now owned by DC Comics instead. However, there was the problem of Superman, which started this mess and what many people think is the main reason for the New 52. Since then, it's been ruled that DC owns Superman and his concepts flat out.
• Tales of the Jedi makes much of the legendary adventures of ancient Jedi Nomi Sunrider, who ends the series as a master in a rare art and head of the Jedi Order. Many comments are made about how her daughter Vima has the air of destiny to her and will grow up to be a great Jedi herself, and the final story arc has her taking her first steps in her training... and then nothing else was written about them ever again, because Jeep had an optional roof accessory called "the Sunrider" and Lucasfilm had to abandon any further mentions of the Sunriders to avoid a legal battle.

Film — Animated

• The LEGO Movie was not able to use Indiana Jones and R2-D2 as main characters in the film because Lucasfilm was being purchased by Disney at the time, and they would have no interest in licensing out their characters to their biggest competitors (though they were able to sneak in a cameo from Han Solo, Lando Calrissian, Chewbacca, C-3PO, and the Millennium Falcon before the deal was finalized). They were also unable to secure Disney's permission to use Darth Vader for The LEGO Batman Movie as a prisoner of the Phantom Zone, instead confirming via Word of God that he escaped, and made fun of the issue in The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part by mentioning how Marvel wasn't responding to Bricksburg's calls for help.
• Disney was unable to reuse Bowser from the Super Mario Bros. franchise in the Wreck-It Ralph sequel Ralph Breaks the Internet, whilst once again omitting Mario from the feature after having previously cut him from Wreck-it Ralph, after the Super Mario Bros. franchise's movie rights were acquired by Universal Studios almost a year before its release. To make up for their absence, an Easter Egg was added to where the background of Spamley's shack has yellow question mark blocks hidden in a stash full of game items. It should be noted that Nintendo did give Disney permission to use Mario in Wreck-it Ralph, but the filmmakers didn't know where to fit him without turning the whole movie into a full-blown Mario adaptation. On the flip side, Sonic and Dr. Eggman, both of whom appeared in the previous film and whose movie rights were tied up with Paramount, were allowed to appear in Ralph Breaks the Internet at Paramount's blessing.

Film — Live-Action

• The SPECTRE fracas in James Bond movies is a good non-comics example, and probably the most notorious case in live-action films. The villainous terrorist organization debuted in Thunderball, a book written by Ian Fleming based on a unproduced Bond screenplay he worked on with several other people. One of said people, Kevin McClory, brought him to court in a complicated brouhaha. When Thunderball was adapted in 1965, McClory was credited as executive producer alongside regular Bond production company EON's executive producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli. Eventually, the case was settled with McClory owning the film rights to SPECTRE and the right to remake Thunderball, which prevented SPECTRE from appearing in The Spy Who Loved Me. The pre-title sequence of For Your Eyes Only shows Bond dropping a suspicious-looking bald man into a smoke stack as a way of saying that the series didn't need SPECTRE. McClory in turn exercised his Thunderball remake rights to partner with producer Jack Schwartzman to produce the "unofficial" Bond film Never Say Never Again (with Sean Connery returning as Bond), released in 1983, the same year as the official film Octopussy. Later during the Pierce Brosnan era, Sony Pictures attempted to use the combination of the rights to the first Bond novel Casino Royale, which had been held by predecessor Columbia Pictures since the infamous 1967 farce version (explaining why it hadn't been adapted as part of the official series previously) along with McClory's rights, and which Sony had agreed to license (and which he absurdly claimed made him the franchise's real owner) to launch a competing Bond series of their own. As a response MGM bought out Shire's distribution rights to Never Say Never Again, giving them ownership that film, but not SPECTRE. However, that competing series never got off the ground as Sony gave up any Bond rights they had (including ownership of the 1967 movie) to MGM in exchange for some residual rights that MGM held to Spider-Man, thereby allowing Sony to have that film free-and-clear. This is what allowed the first Daniel Craig film to be the 2006 adaptation of ''Casino Royale'' (and ironically, Sony had become a part owner of MGM by that time, so they co-produced the film), but McClory's retained rights forced EON into using the Expy organization Quantum. This legal battle finally ended on November 15, 2013, when MGM and EON's parent company Danjaq, LLC (the owners of the film franchise) acquired the rights and interests of the estate of Kevin McClory, who died in 2006, consolidating completely all screen rights to all franchise elements. Subsequently, the title of the next Bond movie ended up being...Spectre, with the film revealing that SPECTRE was the true power behind Quantum.
• The prequel film Oz the Great and Powerful pays homage to many aspects of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz due to its widespread popularity. However, Oz: The Great and Powerful is owned by Disney, The Wizard of Oz was made by MGM but is now owned by Warner Bros. due to a complicated distributor change, and the original novel is in the public domain, so Disney could not use elements that originated in the 1939 movie like the Ruby Slippers (they were silver in the book), the swirl of the Yellow Brick Road, and even the Wicked Witch of the West's green skin tone (they got around the last one by making it a slightly different shade of green). This was also the reason why Return to Oz, Disney's surprisingly dark "sequel" to the 1939 film, emphasized characters and concepts from L. Frank Baum's Oz books as opposed to the 1939 film. Baum's public domain characters who aid Dorothy in Return, such as Tik-Tok and Belina the Chicken, ended up alienating moviegoers who were otherwise familiar with the characters in the 1939 film, who either didn't appear or were "turned into stone" throughout most of the film. The Scarecrow does appear later in the movie,^note the Lion and Tin Man make brief crowd appearances after the climax of the film as do Dorothy's ruby slippers,^note which Disney had to pay MGM to use in the film but the reduced emphasis of many of the characters that appeared in The Wizard of Oz, along with the film's nightmarish tone, caused Return to Oz to flop and be mostly forgotten among the wave of fantasy films of the 1980s.

Franchises

• In The Transformers, the Jetfire toy was a licensed repaint of the Bandai VF-1S Valkyrie, and in the comics and the cartoon, the character was to resemble the action figure for obvious reasons. However, difficulties with one of the entities involved with Macross/Robotech (It's not clear whether it was Big West, Tatsunoko Production or Harmony Gold who put their foot down, though it's heavily implied to be the latter of the three) made it obvious to Hasbro, Sunbow and Toei Animation (who had already animated the model in the corresponding toy commercial) that the character could not be used without a major hassle. Instead, the cartoon featured "Skyfire"... and the comic books used Skyfire but called him Jetfire. Thanks to the multiversal nature of Transformers fiction, none of this is a problem—Skyfire and Jetfire are considered Alternate Universe counterparts who happen to be unusually divergent, and modern depictions tend to feature a "Jetfire" who combines elements of both—but it's still weird. Also, due to this, modern toys that are ostensibly based on G1 Jetfire usually either use the cartoon's Skyfire design, or a Valkyrie-style look that nonetheless changes enough details to be legally distinct. This is also why the original G1 Jetfire toy is unlikely to ever be officially reissued by Hasbro or Takara. Following a legal ruling that Harmony Gold can no longer sue Hasbro, a super-deformed version of the original Jetfire toy design was released as a Funko Pop! in 2020. Harmony Gold would eventually return the favor and issue fellow licensee Kitzconcept to release a Valkyrie in Jetfire's colors under the name of "God of Flame" in their Macross toyline in 2022.
  • Also, because of Hasbro having the U.S. license to the Valkyrie mould at the time, Matchbox was unable to make a transforming Veritech fighter toy for their Robotech action figure line. They eventually wound up releasing one that was permanently stuck in its plane mode, skirting the issue.
  • Another character based on a Bandai figure who suffered from this was Whirl, originally Louise Oberon's transforming Oberon Gazzette helicopter from the anime series Special Armored Battalion Dorvack. It is believed that fear of similar legal trouble is why Whirl never appeared in the cartoon or The Transformers (Marvel) (though he did pop up in a few issues of the U.K. comic). Roadbuster, based on Masato Mugen's Mugen Calibur jeep fell under the same issues. Both characters would eventually be featured in the IDW comics and get toys for the franchise's "Thrilling 30" toy line.
  • The Deluxe Insecticons and the Deluxe Vehicles didn't appear in either the cartoon or the comic (though they did appear in the UK comic... despite not being sold in the UK). Like with Jetfire and Whirl, their toys were licensed from another company - in this case Bandai, who were the main competitor of Takara (whom Hasbro collaborated with for Transformers) in Japan. Since including them would mean advertising a competitor's product, they were left out.
  • Similarly, issues over the ownership of Death's Head and Circuit Breaker; Marvel ramrodded both into non-Transformers appearances (Circuit Breaker appeared in cameo in Secret Wars II and Death's Head in an editorial cartoon) before they "officially debuted" in their respective Transformers comics to ensure that they own the two characters and not Hasbro, meaning that their issues can't be reprinted by IDW Comics. Which in the case of Death's Head means that none of his UK stories ("Galvatron: Wanted Dead or Alive" and "The Legacy of Unicron") can be published in the United States (though both stories did see release via comic shops via importing of the UK published trade paperbacks). Circuit Breaker's situation is more complicated, as the first three TPBs had to replace her early appearances with text summaries, though apparently IDW was FINALLY able to strike some sort of deal with Marvel to reprint #72-80 in full come the release of volume #5 of their reprint series.
• Whoniverse:
  • Big Finish could not use Grace in Big Finish Doctor Who audios because the character is partly owned by Universal. (They could get her actress to voice different characters.)
    • Nor could BBC Books when they started the Eighth Doctor Adventures, which led to a prologue to Vampire Science that hastily established the Eighth Doctor knew another female doctor in San Francisco.
    • Interestingly, the Doctor Who Magazine comic was able to get away with using Grace twice (in "The Fallen" and "The Glorious Dead").
    • And she appears in a 50th anniversary comic book series from IDW, Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time.
  • Doctor Who: The new series nearly wasn't able to use the Daleks due to difficult negotiations with the estate of Terry Nation, their creator. Although the estate and The BBC were eventually able to come to an agreement, the exact details are unknown. However, it was widely believed that part of the agreement was that the Daleks had to have at least one obligatory appearance in any given season of the new series, even if just a cameo appearance as was the case with "The Waters of Mars" in the 2009 specials and "The Wedding of River Song" in Series 6. However, former showrunner Steven Moffat debunked this not long before leaving the show, and it has been claimed that the Daleks' almost Once a Season appearances are simply due to their popularity with those working on the show and in the fandom.

Live-Action TV

• The embargo on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel crossovers is a good example of this. When Buffy moved to UPN, Angel remained on The WB, and until the networks came to agreement a season later, no crossovers could be done. This made things extremely difficult when Buffy wanted to meet and talk to Angel after her resurrection. Neither series could use the other network's character, so the meeting had to take place between Sunnydale and L.A. Additionally, by the time the Buffy tie-in novels set in season 3 were being released, Wesley had already left for Angel and that series had the rights to him. None of the season 3 set novels feature Wesley at all, only the episode novelizations do.
• Due to the way the TV rights for the Hannibal Lecter franchise have been split between several different parties (including MGM and the Dino De Laurentiis Company), the characters from The Silence of the Lambs, most notably Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill, were barred from appearing in Hannibal. Likewise, Clarice could use characters created for Silence of the Lambs, but not Dr. Lecter himself or anyone else from the other novels.
• Similarly, the character of Harry Bosch could not be used in Netflix's adaptation of The Lincoln Lawyer due to being the subject of his own series at Amazon. His role in the plot was instead given to a Suspiciously Similar Substitute named Cisco.
• Because Amazon doesn't own the rights to adapt any material from The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth series, and Tolkien's collected Letters, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power cannot show or use characters or places that are part of said agreement, only those which are part of the Appendices of the Lord of the Rings.
  J.D. Payne: We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit. And that is it. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, or any of those other books.

Puppet Shows

• In the years since the death of Jim Henson, the rights to his various Muppet characters have been divided up among several different companies (key amongst them is Disney's buyout of The Muppets, including the word "Muppet", and the Sesame Street Muppets being granted to Sesame Workshop), which affects modern productions featuring the characters. For example, Kermit the Frog doesn't appear much on Sesame Street any more, and the characters from Fraggle Rock are no longer allowed to be identified as Muppets (Sesame Workshop has a deal with Disney that allows them to continue to refer to their characters as Muppets).
  • There are occasional exceptions to this for special occasions where the rightsholders make agreements, for example during the Sesame Street 50th anniversary special.

Tabletop Games

• Way back when, FASA had obtained a license to use a number of mecha from three anime shows — Crusher Joe, Fang of the Sun Dougram and — yep, you guessed it — Super Dimension Fortress Macross for use in their BattleDroids wargame. Never heard of Battledroids? That's because George Lucas threatened a lawsuit over the word "Droid". So, the game became BattleTech. Then, in 1994, Harmony Gold complained and threatened a lawsuit over use of the Macross mecha in the game. The problem was that FASA had rights to the miniatures that originally came with the game, which were based on the aforementioned designs. But because of the way they were licensed, FASA did not necessarily have rights to the artwork, which Harmony Gold took them to task over. The battlemechs based on those designs continued to be used (The Warhammer and Marauder are some of the most famous 3025-era battlemechs), but not depicted in images, being dubbed the "Unseen".
  • In 2012, Catalyst Game Labs (the game's current publisher) gained the rights to use the artwork for much of the Unseen... except for Macross based designs, which Harmony Gold still retains control over. This deal promptly fell through, and which point Catalyst said "screw it, we're done dealing with this shit" and in 2013 it was announce that they were simply going to retcon the appearance of everything in the game who'd original used artwork that was created by anyone who was not FASA, FanPro, or Catalyst Game Labs. They then set about creating new artwork for the Unseens that, while evocative of the old appearances, was created in-house and different enough that it was legally clear.
  • Another attempt to bypass problems with the Unseen was the Technical Readout: Project Phoenix, which published updated, original artwork for the designs, using the art style for current-era Battlemechs. The different look is explained in-universe as a simple retooling of production lines to match current Inner Sphere tech standards, letting the new Reseen mechs exist alongside the original Unseen designs in the background and still allowing Reseen designs to be used in the art.
• In Deadlands, the town of Gomorra was extensively featured in the spinoff game Deadlands: Doomtown. Unfortunately, all IP for the spinoff game wound up being transferred to AEG and because Gomorra was so heavily tied to the game, any reference to the town became a copyright gray area. Realizing they couldn't write about the town any more, future Deadlands RPG supplements from Pinnacle explained that there was "the Gomorra Incident" resulting in the town getting blown sky high with nothing left to tell a story about and nobody left to explain what happened.
• In the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 metaseries, Games Workshop ran into some issues with the fifth god of chaos, Malal. Rather than fight John Wagner and Alan Grant for his rights, however, they just dropped Malal entirely and stuck to "the Big Four". Malal has since crept back in as "Malice", who is either a rogue Daemon Prince or a minor deity in the Chaos pantheon depending on which Fan Wank you subscribe to.

Theme Parks

• Disney Theme Parks:
  • Because of a perpetual licensing agreement Marvel Comics made with Universal Studios in 1994, Disney, Marvel's parent company since 2010, is not allowed to build anything Marvel-related, be it attractions or character experiences, in Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando or the Tokyo Disney Resort in Japan (though they are allowed to preview Marvel films or sell Marvel merchandise, albeit without the "Marvel" branding) due to Universal having parks and Marvel attractions in both regions. This meant that while a monorail train themed after The Avengers was allowed to travel between the parking lot and the Magic Kingdom gate, it couldn't go to Epcot since it would entail actually entering the park. Averted with Disney's other resorts, in which they are free to build Marvel attractions whenever they please^note In California, the Universal deal originally extended to their Hollywood park as well, but after the disastrous Spider Man Rocks and a licensing dispute between Marvel and Universal, the Hollywood rights reverted to Marvel in 2008, just a year before Disney acquired the company.
  • Kingdom Hearts is entirely absent from the parks. While Disney owns the rights to all Kingdom Hearts characters, they're still not included for a few reasons: a good number of people wouldn't know who the characters are, the few that do know probably wouldn't care, and Disney doesn't want to run afoul of any licensing issues that might come up with Square Enix. Sora could be seen in the parks back when the first game came out, but the costume left much to be desired. The Mitsukoshi store at Epcot's Japan pavilion carries some Kingdom Hearts merchandise, but that's about it. As the series became more mainstream, however, Mickey, Donald, and Goofy's Kingdom Hearts outfits started appearing at meet-and-greets during the late 2010s, and it's become more common to hear Utada Hikaru songs as ambiance.
• Ironically, Universal themselves got into a similar mess after acquiring DreamWorks Animation in 2016. Since DreamWorks and The Rudolph Company licensed the 1964 likeness of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to SeaWorld (which extends to other parks owned by Sea World such as Busch Gardens and Sesame Place. Even non-Sea World owned parks such as Silver Dollar City and Dollywood also uses their likeness) months before Universal purchased the studio, Universal is unable to use the character or its related elements in their Orlando or Hollywood parks, where SeaWorld also has a presence. They can build Rudolph experiences in Japan and Singapore, of course, provided that they receive blessings from The Rudolph Company. Additionally, Universal also cannot use the characters in markets where DreamWorks has pre-acquisition licensing agreements in place, such as Australia, Dubai, Russia and China. On a side note, Madagascar characters would've also been banned from the Orlando and Hollywood parks as well... had SeaWorld chosen to renew its licensing agreement in late 2015.

Video Games

• Characters that appeared in DIC Entertainment-produced cartoons based on video games, such as Spryte, Oogtar, Scratch, Grounder, and Coconuts^note Though Grounder and Coconuts are based on existing designs from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 onward, with the former being red in the games save one teal one in the Updated Re-release meant as a Shout-Out. Also, Scratch is loosely based off the enemy named Clucker. , Sally Acorn and the other Freedom Fighters, and even Captain N are believed to be banned from appearing in their video game source material due to messy rights issues with the characters (though in the case of Captain N, he wasn't created by Nintendo nor appears in any Nintendo video games whatsoever). This is possibly the reason why they don't appear or get referenced at all in the Super Smash Bros. series. The only official game appearances the Freedom Fighters and Scratch, Grounder and Coconuts ever made were Sonic Spinball and Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, as both were essentially Merchandise-Driven fare for the TV shows and developed in the United States.
  • In the case of the Freedom Fighters and other Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) characters, this is significantly more vague. The Archie Sonic comics were heavily based on the cartoon, and long outlived its progenitor, with the cartoon's characters actually surviving the Soft Reboot caused by unrelated legal issues. While they didn't transition over to the IDW Sonic comics, all indications are that it's less a legal issue and more to do with Sega's own mandates for who is allowed to appear.
    • Speaking of those unrelated legal issues, basically every Sonic comics character created by comic writers who aren't Ian Flynn prior to the move to IDW is permanently persona non-grata as far as Sega is concerned, because writer Ken Penders won the rights to the characters he created by default because Archie failed to prove his contract was work for hire due to not having the original contract.^note Though as explained on Creator Killer, Penders started the whole mess out of pettiness and his reputation was utterly destroyed in the process. This was the cause of the original continuity resulting in a major case of Aborted Arc and the continuity getting the aforementioned Soft Reboot.
    • It is generally believed that Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood being rarely acknowledged by Sega nowadays is a result of this, as many of its plot elements were seemingly inspired by those in the Archie Comics storylines, which was not lost on Penders. While Sega does own everything within Chronicles, the legal lawsuit that Ken filed for stealing concepts in the game (despite Sega winning the lawsuit), plus the game being poorly received and developer BioWare being bought by Electronic Arts make it an easy choice for them to just ignore.
• When Rare was working with Nintendo, originally they planned on making the Donkey Kong, Banjo-Kazooie, and Conker IPs take place in the same universe. This is most apparent with Diddy Kong Racing, where Diddy Kong, Banjo, and Conker appeared together, and the manual alluding to off-screen adventures explaining how they knew each other. However when Rare was bought out by Microsoft, they were forced to drop this idea, resulting in the Donkey Kong and other Nintendo series no longer referencing any other Rare series. This notably impacted the aforementioned Diddy Kong Racing; when it was remade for the Nintendo DS, Banjo and Conker were replaced with Tiny Kong and Dixie Kong respectively, while the original Nintendo 64 version never got a re-release. The only exception is when Banjo & Kazooie became playable characters in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in 2019, but even then that game has characters from all different companies.
  • Speaking of Smash Bros., the GoldenEye (1997) universe which is the basis for the Motion-Sensor Bomb and Cloaking Device items from Super Smash Bros. Melee has been dropped following Microsoft's acquisition of Rare, not to mention that GoldenEye is based on a film series anyway (''Melee'' even has their Trophies' source games labeled "TOP SECRET"). The Motion-Sensor Bomb is redesigned and branded as an original creation in subsequent games.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Disney lost the license to Tarzan after the release of the first game, preventing Deep Jungle from returning to the series ever since. In spite of this, Square Enix was able to produce a HD remaster for the original game and retain Deep Jungle, which would be otherwise impossible without cutting the world out (this is accomplished by crediting Tarzan to Edgar Rice Burroughs' estate). And since some items relating to the controversial world have appeared in coded, it's possible that it's a sign saying that the trope could be averted one day.
  • Enforced in the games themselves to a certain degree; Disney has strict rules about how the franchises interact. The characters from Disney's earliest works, such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pete, etc., are the ones that have the most flexibility from Disney to be utilized, which is why these characters have more plot important roles (with Pete being Maleficent's henchman and the rest of them being allies of Sora and the other heroes). This flexibility also applies to Fantasia (connected to the early cartoons via Mickey's appearance in the film), with Yen Sid being the Big Good of the series. This leads to both The Stations of the Canon (in that the plots of the levels loosely follow the movies they're based on) and an Alien Non-Interference Clause (in that the natives of each world can't be told about other worlds). The rule of thumb seems to be that if you're tied to a particular movie, you're Locked Out of the Loop, though some characters get a bit of leeway in this, including the summons mechanics utilizing various Disney heroes, Maleficent being one of the primary antagonists who often interacts with various Disney worlds, Merlin and Fairy Godmother being mentor figures throughout the series, Ariel being told of it by Ursula, Triton figuring it out (and evidently aware of the Keyblade War) and The Beast being a partner during Hollow Bastion in Kingdom Hearts I, Cloud, Zack and Auron being plot-critical in the Colosseum stages in 1, Birth By Sleep, and 2, the TRON level being Hollow Bastion's operating system in Kingdom Hearts II, Ursula attacking the Destiny Islands in the prologue of 3D, Remy being present in Twilight Town in Kingdom Hearts III as well as being host of a cooking minigame, and both Woody and Buzz Lightyear learning of the other worlds in III. Disney's own strict rules reached their highest point in Kingdom Hearts III when it limited how the games could portray the worlds and characters of Tangled and Frozen.
• The King of Fighters XIV introduced the SNK pachinko characters Mui Mui and Love Heart to the series as part of Team Another World with Nakoruru from Samurai Shodown. While both characters were later featured in SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy, they failed to return for The King of Fighters XV (with Nakoruru instead recruiting Haohmaru and Darli Dagger to form Team Samurai), and were also left out of XIV's official manga adaptation and some KOF mobile games. It's believed that the two are currently in a state of legal limbo due to SNK having sold off its pachinko assets after the release of XIV. Adding some potential fuel to this theory is the fact that the official backstory for Team Samurai doesn't mention either character by name, instead only alluding to a pair of unnamed friends of Nakoruru who were sent back to their home dimensions after the end of the last tournament. Despite this, both of them are at the very least acknowledged on SNK's official site.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Want to see the characters that only appear in The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games appear in future games in the series from Nintendo? Dream on. The games are property of Philips, not Nintendo, and the characters that were created strictly for the games (such as Gwonam from Link: The Faces of Evil and Duke Onkled from Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon) are Philips' property. Of course, the games themselves are considered nonexistent by Nintendo, so the chances of anything pertaining to the CD-i games appearing in Nintendo's official canon, even if the legal problems weren't in play, are slim.
  • Another casualty is King Harkinian, who appears in both the animated series and the CD-i games, but not in any of the Nintendo games. The legal status of said character is unknown since he's in a legal tangle with Philips, Nintendo, and DHX Media (successors to DIC Entertainment, the studio who made the animated series), so he is believed to be forbidden from appearing in any Zelda games.
  • Also affected by this is the Super Smash Bros. series, as none of the characters from the CD-i games or King Harkinian make any appearances in that series, nor are there any trophies, spirits, stickers or chronicles pertaining to either of them.
• A complicated case in Puyo Puyo; after Compile's bankruptcy, Sega owns the rights to Puyo Puyo and seemingly any character that has appeared in those games, but D4 Enterprise owns Madou Monogatari, Puyo Puyo's parent RPG series. This leads to the situation where Sega can make Puyo Puyo games and use the characters Compile initially created for those games, but cannot directly reference Madou Monogatari. For example, the character Witch alludes to her grandmother Wish in the Sega games, but never name drops her due to the copyright situation. Meanwhile D4 Enterprise basically holds the Madou Monogatari name and presumably the few exclusive characters from the games, but cannot use the characters from the Puyo Puyo franchise without negotiating with Sega. Sega has gotten around this by the use of soft reboots of the franchise, with Compile's characters being transported into other worlds via excuse plots, while D4 Enterprise and Compile Heart created thinly-veiled Expies of the Madou Monogatari characters in a parallel universe when making Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God.
• Star Trek Online has this imposed on the game. Because Paramount owns the rights to the movies, they can't use anything from the J.J. Abrams films with the sole exception of mentioning what happened to Spock (as that happened in the Prime universe). To circumvent that, they've created a number of ships based on the Narada (they did originally identify them as Narada-class — presumably, the fact that technically the Narada was from the Prime Universe made it borderline legally allowable) and the U.S.S. Vengeance in theme, but not in look. As well, they also can't use the Kzinti and, as such, created the Suspiciously Similar Substitute Ferasan. The whole problem with the J.J. Abrams films was ultimately solved in time for the third expansion, Agents of Yesterday, which allowed players to hop into the "Kelvin Timeline", buddy up with the character 0718 and even get to fly that universe's Constitution-class. It was also ultimately revealed that Paramount had no problems with this — it was Bad Robot Cryptic had to deal with.
• Star Wars:
  • Knights of the Old Republic was originally going to include Vima Sunrider from the Tales of the Jedi comic series as a companion character, but legal issues with other companies had since developed over the name "Sunrider" and so Bastila Shan, a new character, was created to replace her. Oddly enough, her mother Nomi Sunrider is still mentioned once in the first game, but the creators said it was an oversight.
  • BioWare ran into this again with Star Wars: The Old Republic. The Noeticon (a holocron recorded from several Jedi Masters) had an entry from Nomi Sunrider... but, the rights were an issue. So, they cleverly dodged it by having the character called Nomi Da-Boda, which used the name of a descendant seen in the comics, and was handwaved as being her maiden name.
  • And now that The Old Republic has been relegated to Star Wars Legends (and is the only part of that continuity still in production due to a Grandfather Clause), this makes a trifecta for BioWare.
• Thanks to the complex status of Strider Hiryu, which requires the OK from both Capcom and manga studio Moto Kikaku to be used, he was beyond the grasp of U.S. Gold when they decided to create their own sequel to the original. Instead of bothering with that, they simply swapped the sprite's uniform white, named him "Hinjo" and called it a day. This was also the reason he was dropped from the roster in Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Fortunately, thanks to all the fan support he received, Capcom decided to work things out and he was finally included in Ultimate.
• Video games based on Tolkien's Legendarium have long faced similar restrictions from two opposite directions, because the licenses to adapt original literature works and Peter Jackson's movies were sold to separate studios. On one side were the games unable to use any of the designs, original lines or likeness of actors from the movies (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Hobbit (2003), The Lord of the Rings: War of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings Online). On the other side were the games unable to include anything from the books that wasn't explicitly referenced on-screen in the movies (The Two Towers, The Return of the King, The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, The Battle for Middle-earth). And of course nobody at all has the rights to The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, placing events and characters exclusive to those books permanently off-limits.
  • Eventually, some studios were able to obtain both licenses, allowing for the games The Battle for Middle-Earth II (and its expansion pack) and War in the North to combine the likeness of actors and design choices with various elements that were Adapted Out from the movies. The general consensus is that (quality of the gameplay notwithstanding) this allows for a much more coherent Middle-Earth experience.
• In Pac-Man Museum +, aside of not including the Ms. Pac-Man arcade game, every appearance of Ms. Pac-Man in the older games is replaced with a new character called Pac-Mom. This is presumably due to a series of lawsuits involving the game's original developer GCC and At Games, who GCC sold their stake in Ms. Pac-Man to. This is also true of the 2022 Pac-Man World remake.

Websites

• The official Marvel Universe Wiki has a policy forbidding the creation of articles whose content is licensed to Marvel or is no longer owned by Marvel. This means any article based off The Transformers (Marvel), Tiny Toon Adventures, Hanna-Barbera or their Star Wars comics (old and new) are forbidden. This could be either due to the Wiki being focused on characters explicitly in the Marvel Universe and created by Marvel, or due to fears of legal issues from the parent companies or artists of said licensed material. This is not the case with Wikia's Marvel Comics Database, which is not owned by Marvel.

Western Animation

• El Chavo Animado opted to adapt La Chilindrina out and gave her lines to other characters because her actress, Maria Antonieta de las Nieves, has the rights of the character and there was a dispute beween her and Chespirito over the rights of the character.
• When Disney bought the rights to Doug in 1995, this included all the merchandising rights for the show. As such, Nickelodeon is not allowed to use any of the Doug characters in '90s Nick-related merchandise (however, Nick still owns the broadcasting and video rights for the original version of the show). To make up for it, Disney released a few Doug t-shirts in the late 2000s around the time Nick started releasing their '90s Nick related merchandise at stores such as Hot Topic and Spencers, but haven't ever since (granted, it's very rare for Disney to release any merchandise based off of their older television shows, and when they do it's normally only shows from the first few years of The Disney Afternoon).
• Don't expect to see Hasbro-co-owned Discovery Family airing the Dungeons & Dragons (1983) and Transformers: Robots in Disguise cartoons anytime soon since Disney holds the rights to both of them^note Which they got by complete accident; they were part of the Saban Productions library that Disney bought when they acquired the Fox Family channel in 2001, even though Disney had no interest in it.. Hasbro isn't even interested in buying the rights to both, either.
• When Felix the Cat series got acquired by DreamWorks Animation in 2014, rights to the character of Poindexter stayed with Don Oriolo. Because of this, Poindexter has disappeared from the franchise with Felix the Cat Saves Christmas being his last appearance. He doesn't appear in 2023 graphic novel and he has been replaced by his uncle, The Professor in 2024 re-release of NES and Game Boy versions.
• Since the mid-2000s, Nickelodeon rarely acknowledges KaBlam! and leaves the show's characters out of all '90s Nick-related merchandise. This is due to Nickelodeon losing ownership of the show's one-shot shorts (mainly rejected Nicktoon pilots) which had their rights reverted back to their original creators, as well as the music rights for the music video segments (Nick still owns the show's "regular" segments, such as Life With Loopy and Prometheus and Bob). Thus making it difficult for Nick to ever air the show again or release it on DVD without having to make major edits to episodes to remove segments and music they can no longer use. As such, Nick tends to leave the show out of most of their promotional material, most likely as not to overpromote a series they legally can't do too much with anymore. While they finally began to acknowledge the series more around 2016, such as airing the show on NickSplat now and again, featuring fanart during breaks when the show does air, and showing a Loopy cosplayer's photo during Halloween 2016, the fact that they only have a very limited amount of episodes they can air without major edits makes the possibility of any merchandise extremely slim. That being the case, the entire series is available uncut on Paramount+.
• Looney Tunes:
  • Foxy and Roxy the Foxes, who were a blatant attempt at ripping off Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, were barred from appearing again after their three appearances in the Merrie Melodies series, due to Walt Disney ordering then-co director of the series, Rudy Ising, to stop using the character under the threat of a lawsuit. The characters would only resurface decades later in an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, and even then they had to be completely redesigned so they didn't resemble Mickey or Minnie.
  • According to one of the Looney Tunes comic artists, celebrity caricatures are OK with them unless noted otherwise, even for ones long forgotten such as Edna Mae Oliver, but there is one egregious exception—anything caricaturing actor Peter Lorre, who was a fairly common sight in the older Looney Tunes. When the artist attempted to have him appear in the Mad Scientist role he played in Hair-Raising Hare for a story, it was shot down due to legal issues with Lorre's estate, who have said they will no longer authorize using caricatures of him in that context. So the scientist from Water, Water Every Hare was added to substitute for him. Despite this, he reappeared in The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries and Looney Tunes: Back in Action.
  • The Gremlin from Falling Hare is not allowed to make appearances in modern Looney Tunes works due to a legal snafu regarding him. Apparently, the character is public domain due to him appearing in a wartime cartoon produced for the government, but the Gremlin Fine Arts Gallery took advantage of this and claimed a trademark on the characters name and likeness, meaning Warner Bros. would have to pay royalties to them to use their own character. ^note Which is odd given that said character once appeared in an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, and thus technically appeared in a current copyrighted WB work. At least until 2020, where the Gremlin appeared in Looney Tunes Cartoons.
• Lauren Faust ran into this problem during the creation of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Turns out Hasbro lost the rights to nearly all of the 1980's My Little Pony character names (save for Applejack, Spike, and a few ponies whose names were reused for G3), so most of the main cast of the current cartoon ended up being Suspiciously Similar Substitutes of the originals with the G3 ponies' names. This seems to have improved as Tirek and Scorpan appear in the series, as has The Smooze and Grogar. Additionally, a girl who bears a very strong resemblance to Megan appears in the Equestria Girls special Rollercoaster of Friendship.
• For many years, there was an embargo of Wonder Woman-related characters due to an obscure clause in the licensing agreements that forbade their use in any project wherein they were not featured in a "starring" role. This has meant that the second Wonder Girl, Donna Troy, was initially not able to appear in DC's Young Justice (2010). Prior to this, Donna had been barred from appearing in Teen Titans (2003) and Wonder Woman was the only Justice League cast member not to appear on Static Shock. The Wonder Woman (and, by extension, Donna Troy and Cassie Sandsmark) embargo was eventually cleared up. Since then, Wonder Woman has appeared in Batman: The Brave and the Bold, the Cassie Sandsmark version of Wonder Girl joined Young Justice in Season 2 (and the Donna Troy version of Wonder Girl appeared in Season 3), and Donna Troy was featured in the Super Best Friends Forever shorts, and has a cameo in the Teen Titans Go! miniseries "Super Summer Hero Camp".
  • Greg Weisman also confirmed in an interview for Young Justice that similar embargos affected use of Ted Kord/Blue Beetle II and Darkseid in season 1. Other New Gods could still show up, even those like DeSaad who worked directly with Darkseid, but his presence was hinted in the background as "unspeakable". These were similarly cleared up by season 2, with Darkseid showing up in the season finale as the partner of Vandal Savage, while Ted Kord turned out to be a Posthumous Character murdered between seasons 1 and 2.

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