Trivia / Marsupilami

• Banned Episode: "Romancing the Clone", from the Disney cartoon (featured in Raw Toonage) was banned due to allegations of sexually-inappropriate humor.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Some Toon Disney promos for the Disney series referred to him as a leopard or "jungle cat".
• Disowned Adaptation: André Franquin was not happy with Disney's take on Marsupilami, not only for it being an In Name Only adaptation of his comics but for the various behind the scenes issues and near lack of promotion they gave to their adaptation of the character, which prompted a $10,000,000 lawsuit against Disney that he actually succeeded in winning. The resulting judgement and loss of the rights by Disney are likely why both this show and Raw Toonage have disappeared into obscurity, not even appearing on Disney+ (though Bonkers is on Disney+).
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Bad uploads of VHS to rips are the only way to watch this show now thanks to the lawsuit.
• Kids' Meal Toy: Pizza Hut sold a yo-yo, jump rope, and sports ball in 1994.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The opening theme song from the Disney animated series was blocked from YouTube due to a copyright claim by Warner Music Group (WMG). The issue was the theme song was on the long out of print CD WMG created in 1999 called ToonTunes.
• Troubled Production: The series was a victim of internal politics at Disney.
  • For starters, when the company got the license from André Franquin, its future with original IP was far from certain despite the recent success of The Little Mermaid, so it seemed like a beneficial deal for both parties.
  • However, Disney committed numerous acts of Loophole Abuse regarding the contract, such as convincing Franquin to accept a "roll-out strategy" that consisted of making shorts for Raw Toonage (which also included Bonkers, which itself had a turbulent production), then debuting a half-hour series the following year, itself made up of both old and new Marsupilami shorts, with a middle segment alternating between shorts starring The Little Mermaid character Sebastian and Bill Kopp's Shnookums and Meat. Problem was, the contract demanded a series with full half-hour stories, a demand this series clearly didn't meet. To say nothing of the fact that Disney's version barely qualified as an adaptation, using only a heavily modified version of the title character and nothing else.
  • What's worse, by the time production started, the Disney Renaissance was in full swing, and lucrative homegrown properties like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin made the idea of promoting an outside property seem redundant to Disney. Marketing responsibility was handed over to lower-rung executives, who screwed it up to the point that the only merchandise that came out for the property came out between the end of Raw Toonage and the beginning of the standalone Marsupilami series, a decision even one of Disney's own experts thought was insane. On top of that, the show had to air on a network (meaning that The Disney Afternoon, successful as it was at the time, wouldn't suffice) - and Disney never even so much as attempted to sell half-hour Marsupilami episodes to networks, only airing the shorts series on CBS as a replacement for Raw Toonage, which Disney cancelled after 12 episodes.
  • The series ended after 13 episodes, and Disney had the contract nullified - without the necessary 180-day notice. This was the final straw, and Franquin successfully sued Disney over their mishandling of the property. From there, the series faded into obscurity, with the only thing coming out of it post-cancellation being a spin-off of the Shnookums and Meat segments into its own, similarly short-lived series for The Disney Afternoon.

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