The Screen Gems name and logo were revived in 1999 and are currently used by the genre film unit of Sony Pictures. (a Partridge Family animated spinoff), which SPT owns the rights to due to the animated series' connection to their parent shows. Television (through then-parent Time Warner's 1996 purchase of Turner Broadcasting, which had bought Hanna-Barbera in 1990), with the exceptions of Jeannie (an animated spinoff of I Dream of Jeannie) and Partridge Family: 2200 A.D. Most of Hanna-Barbera's output produced during its partnership with Screen Gems is now owned and distributed by Warner Bros. Most shows produced under the Screen Gems banner (with a few exceptions noted below) were later distributed by Colex Enterprises (a joint venture of CPT and LBS Communications) from 1984 to 1988, but are now distributed by CPT's successor-in-interest, Sony Pictures Television. The Screen Gems name was retired in 1974 by Columbia, which then renamed its TV division as Columbia Pictures Television. Screen Gems also operated as a broadcasting company through ownership of several American TV stations, including KCPX-TV (now KTVX) in Salt Lake City, Utah (1959-75) and WVUE-TV in New Orleans (1965-77). Screen Gems (and successor Columbia Pictures Television) continued syndicating the pre-1967 Hanna-Barbera shows until the mid-1970s, when Taft H-B picked up the distribution rights those were passed to Taft H-B's successor company, Worldvision Enterprises, in 1979. Hanna-Barbera became independent of Screen Gems in 1967 when Taft Broadcasting bought the studio, which then began producing and syndicating (through its distribution unit, Taft H-B Program Sales) its own output. Other shows produced by Hanna-Barbera under Screen Gems during the 1960s, both for the networks and for syndication, included The Huckleberry Hound Show, Quick Draw McGraw, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, The Yogi Bear Show, Top Cat, Jonny Quest, Magilla Gorilla and Peter Potamus. The first animated series to air under the H-B/Screen Gems partnership was The Ruff & Reddy Show, which debuted on NBC on December 14, 1957. Screen Gems also formed a partnership with Hanna-Barbera Productions where Screen Gems provided working capital to the animation studio to produce its TV cartoons in exchange for the distribution rights. Screen Gems syndicated the Universal Horror film package as part of a larger overall catalog of 550 Universal films which Screen Gems had acquired TV distribution rights to in 1957 for a $20,000,000, ten-year lease until the distribution rights for those films reverted to MCA Television (whose parent company MCA had purchased Universal Studios and its then-parent, the American branch of Decca Records, in 1962) when the ten-year lease period ended in 1967. It became a prominent studio beginning with the Golden Age of Television in the 1950s as it produced shows like Father Knows Best, Dennis the Menace, Route 66, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie and The Partridge Family for the American networks, and it syndicated old Three Stooges theatrical shorts and Universal Studios horror films (under the title Shock for that syndicated package, made available to local TV stations for use in their locally-produced horror movie shows), leading to a revival in popularity for the Stooges and for Universal Horror (and the horror film genre in general) due to the new TV exposure. Screen Gems was subsequently revived by Columbia when it acquired Pioneer Telefilms, a company which specialized in the production of TV commercials, in 1948 and renamed and repurposed it to serve as Columbia's television production and distribution unit. The newly-renamed Screen Gems continued production of its animated shorts until Columbia closed the studio in 1946, although Screen Gems had produced enough output to allow continued new releases until 1949. Screen Gems had its pre-television origins in 1939 when Columbia Pictures purchased the Charles Mintz animation studio, which had been notable for producing animated theatrical short series such as Krazy Kat, The Fox and the Crow and Color Rhapsodies. 2 List of shows produced by Screen Gems.
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