I noticed over the years how Hallmark vitually just sits on this amazing license. Like a greedy king with a beautiful canary. Nobody ever gets to see it or hear because it is his. Sometimes he lets others lease it out and they do a terrible job promoting it. So the king locks it away from all the fans and potential fans.

Look at Strawberry Shortcake, Care Bears My Little Pony...they are successful. Rainbow can be with the right people. So how would one go about buying the rights? Also at what cost? They make nothing on Rainbow Brite but licensing fees! Also what merchandise? I hardly see anything these days.

I've read about Hallmark slowly closing stores and losing profit from the Internet too. So how much would it be?" Is it a realistic amount? I almost wonder if kick starter could allow for this lol. Hallmark could be raking in the millions with a proper launch and just in store items like resin figures or even cards for gods sakes!

Thoughts?

There is a lot to consider when licensing. This website has a lot of information about it: http://www.media-freaks.com/articles/ch ... ey-and-bob

If you want to license "Rainbow" you can go to http://www.hallmark.com/online/rainbow- ... nsing.aspx and ask them directly.

Currently Hallmark has the character license and is trying to license her out to other companies. They go to licensing trade shows every year and try to spark interest in her. The most recent Licensing Expo was just last week. I'm not sure if there were any interested parties or not.

In 2004 it was Toyplay, in 2008 it was "United Media" (Now Peanuts World Wide), but currently there isn't a licensee.

Back in the 1980's she had Warner Brothers and Disney backing her.

Hallmark owns other companies as well and do try to spend their own money promoting her. The Stickers by Stickeroni in 2009 were Hallmark. The Coloring pages by Crayola were Hallmark. (Crayola is one of Hallmarks subsidiaries http://corporate.hallmark.com/Company/H ... bsidiaries ) the new Christmas ornament is also Hallmark.

What Hallmark is looking for is someone to take some of the financial burden and help make products too, but there aren't any buyers.
The first article I linked to has a more in depth description of what the license process looks like.

Hope that helps answer the question.

So next time one of us wins the lottery, we'll start a toy company + animation studio and do it up right!

Thanks for the excellent info, Watercolor!

adk, but i was just thinking now would be the prefect time for someone to relaunch her! with the sucess of MLP strawberry shortcake , MH and others it seems rainbow would fit right in!


i was sad the last rainbow toys didn't do very well. i think that if they had more backing they could have done better..

i want an articulated rainbow doll darn it

Oh goodness...we've discussed this so many times now. There's so much Hallmark could do with Rainbow and they don't. Stickers and a few other things are fine and good but they haven't put in too much effort to give anything quality. Personally we think they need to make a new good quality cartoon. And not like that reboot they had in 2010..they could have done a better job with that.

It would cost in the millions for the license of something of this sort. I think that Hallmark is doing the right thing by closing the box. The remakes of the original toys cheapened the characters. The only goodness that came out of the newer lines was the fact that Nite Sprite was finally made. I got him because I was glad that he existed as a toy, but was disappointed that he had not been made in the right shade of blue or with his moon antennae.

I wish they would come out & make all the characters like the originals that weren't released. If they did two versions of Stormy they would make TONS, then the plush horses for t.p. moonglo & even Krys & his horse. maybe some other sprite characters that weren't made. If they stuck with the old look & characters that were never released they would do so well.

It may be a longshot but perhaps a Kickstarter campaign, or other such fund-raising? May have to wait until Hallmark is desperate enough to let her go for a song, but I've seen some of these online drives pull in some startling amounts of money.

I wish they would release everything again cause I believe it would work with the children. When I was little she was my hero, saving the world by putting color in the world, riding on a rainbow on a unicorn. She opened up my imagination and still to this day whenever I see anything Rainbow, I immediately think of Rainbow Brite.

MoonGlow218, it's not my intention to belittle your fandom since I think that it's wonderful, but I must point out to you that Starlite is a horse, not a unicorn.