NOTE: This post is highly speculative, and may prove to be factually incorrect, and if I find out that it is, I’ll either edit it or remove it. This is not a research piece, only hypothetical conclusions that I’ve drawn from personal perceptions. 

Who doesn’t know who Lassie is? Even young kids today will be familiar with the famed border collie of classic television. But look around at your grandparents’ house for DVD’s or VHS’s, and you’ll find few to none. And the same goes for anybody else’s collection of physical media as well. There are no full seasons of Lassie for sale. But, being that the show ran for nineteen years, why on earth wouldn’t a company cash in on this gold mine? Well, let’s look at it.

Lassie ran from 1954 to 1973, airing a whopping 591 episodes. After Elizabeth Taylor’s earliest films with the heroic canine, the franchise became popular enough to garner support for this series, and, despite it’s very early start in television, all episodes have survived. It even influenced pop culture, as it’s where we get the cultural in-joke of “Timmy fell down the well”, though I’m not sure if that ever really happened in the show. So there must be tons of DVD’s available for it, right, the same way that “Gunsmoke” and “Little House on the Prairie” and “The Andy Griffith Show” and a bunch of other long-running shows have both individual seasons and whole-series collections? Well, you’d be wrong, because the rights-holders behind “Lassie” don’t want to go to the trouble, though why not boggles my mind.

So even though freakin “Barnaby Jones” even released its full (if not nightmarishly-rendered) series on DVD over forty years after it went on the air, the much-more-wildly-popular-and-enduring-and-also-culturally-significant “Lassie” can’t do it? But why? Who owns “Lassie”? Well, in the old days, it was Classic Media, LLC, which is a name you might recognise from some old VHS’s of some old kids show like “Casper the Friendly Ghost” or “The Lone Ranger”or “Rocky and Bullwinkle” or something. It had a light blue speech bubble which also formed a little boy’s head with a bowtie and a few wispy strands of hair. Well, that company was bought by Dreamworks and is now called Dreamworks Classics. Yes, the same Dreamworks that made the best 2D-animated films of all time until they decided to be a Disney copycat and haven’t made a good movie since. The same Dreamworks whose claim to fame is an intentional Disney ripoff called Shrek and a trilogy starring a kid whose aesthetic progresses the same way PewDiePie’s did. But that’s neither here nor there. Dreamworks owns “Lassie”, so why won’t they do anything about it?

My guess is that at least part of it is due to the high amount of royalties to pay out. Nineteen years is a long time with alot of cast members and guest stars and dog trainers involved. And if you think that last one is a joke, keep in mind that the original Lassie dog who acted alongside Liz Taylor, named Pal, was bred to have offspring that could also play Lassie, which has actually happened in every single appearance of Lassie ever made, whether show, movie, or commercial. To this day, the Pal line is maintained and bred by the same animal training group and is used for Lassie… whenever Lassie makes an appearance anymore. So they’d probably be wanting a bit of change for distribution. Not to mention Jon Provost, who played Timmy, by far the most famous of the Lassie characters, and is still widely recognised even now in old age. Shoot, even June Lockhart, who played Timmy’s mother, is still alive, and she had a crazily-high-profile career on television, which started with “Lassie”. There are alot of people who stand to make high royalties, and even though I’d argue that “Lassie” DVD and digital episode sales would be so high that royalties wouldn’t even be an issue, for some reason Dreamworks doesn’t want to even bother. You can find all 1,255 episodes of “Dark Shadows” on Amazon Prime but you can’t find less than half that amount of “Lassie”, which again, was far more popular and has endured much much longer in that popularity. It makes no sense.

But here’s the real kicker. You ready for this one? I’ve watched nine complete seasons of “Lassie”, and although I’ve been looking for the next chronological episode for literally years to no avail, you can find a pretty good amount of episodes on YouTube from throughout the show’s run on the wonderful channel Collie Lover, who’s been faithfully finding out when an episode he doesn’t have yet is airing on one of the classic TV networks, records them, takes the time to edit out commercials and add in title and episode number, and puts a huge amount of behind-the-scenes in the description, and he does it all for free, not just for the 70-year-old fanbase out there but mostly for his elderly mother. Very sweet, right? Well, it appears that Dreamworks found out about this channel, and it would have been expected that, as it goes on YouTube, the poor guy’s channel would’ve been removed. But instead, it appears (and I emphasize that very heavily, it seems like) they instead had Mr. Collie Lover actually monetize the videos and then allow them to collect the revenue. So if this nice guy wanted his old mother to see these episodes ever again, he had to essentially do free work for them, and meanwhile, the giant corporation pockets the YouTube ad profits. Obviously, it’s nothing compared to DVD sales, but hey, no royalties or rights to be paid, just all profit. Granted, Collie Lover hasn’t uploaded in over a year, probably due to the small amount of more popular episodes that get repeated on TV, but it’s still a pretty horrible thing to do.

So, you have three generations who grew up with “Lassie”: the boomers who saw it at the beginning, the X’ers who saw it at the end, and the Millennials who were shown it because of the 2005 movie or because their parents wanted them to experience it. But like I said at the beginning, everyone knows who Lassie is. The Zoomers would enjoy it to, I’d hazard to say. I enjoyed it for nine whole seasons, and I was ready for more… and I’m in my twenties. And Dreamworks is not some smaller rights-holder that could never afford to make a distribution deal. Obviously, I’m speaking out of my depth here, as I don’t work in television, and any explanation would be super-appreciated. In fact, I’d love to make a follow-up post explaining the real deal facts. But it certainly seems to me as if this is the case with how it stands now. Maybe if Dreamworks stopped making stuff like Shark Tale and thought about getting “Lassie” out to the culture it influenced so heavily, they’d be making the kind of cash they did after Prince of Egypt or The Road to El Dorado. You know, back when they made good content. At the very least, they could couple what they make nowadays with something like “Lassie” that we could all turn to and say, “well, at least Dreamworks is still worth some attention”.