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Seymour Reit Joe Oriolo: The Friendly Ghost

Casper the Friendly Ghost was created in the late 1930s by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo as the basis for a children's storybook. Oriolo sold the rights to the book to Paramount Pictures for $175 before it was published. The first Casper cartoon was released in 1945. In it, Casper is a ghost child who wants to make friends with humans and animals but scares them away until he meets two children. Later Casper cartoons from the 1950s followed a similar formula where Casper would try to find friends but scare others until helping a child or person, gaining their acceptance. The Casper series was popular but later criticized for its repetitive story structure.

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492 views1 page

Seymour Reit Joe Oriolo: The Friendly Ghost

Casper the Friendly Ghost was created in the late 1930s by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo as the basis for a children's storybook. Oriolo sold the rights to the book to Paramount Pictures for $175 before it was published. The first Casper cartoon was released in 1945. In it, Casper is a ghost child who wants to make friends with humans and animals but scares them away until he meets two children. Later Casper cartoons from the 1950s followed a similar formula where Casper would try to find friends but scare others until helping a child or person, gaining their acceptance. The Casper series was popular but later criticized for its repetitive story structure.

Uploaded by

Rengie Galo
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Casper was created in the late 1930s by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo, the former devising the

idea for the character and the latter providing illustrations.[8] Initially intended as the basis for a
1939 children's storybook, there was at first little interest in their idea. When Reit was away on
military service during World War II before the book was released, Oriolo sold the rights to the
book to Paramount Pictures' Famous Studios animation division for a total of $175. This one-
time payment was all that he received, missing out on a share of the revenue earned from the
films, comic books and merchandising to come.[9]

The Friendly Ghost, the first Noveltoon to feature Casper, was released by Paramount in 1945
with a few differences from the book. In the cartoon adaptation, Casper is a cute ghost-child with
a New York accent who inhabits a haunted house along with a community of adult ghosts who
delight in scaring the living. Casper, however, is a nonconformist among ghosts: he would prefer
to make friends with people. He packs up his belongings and goes out into the world, hoping to
find friends. However, the animals that he meets (a rooster, a mole, a cat, a mouse named
Herman, and a group of hens) take one horrified look at him, scream: "A ghost!" and run off in
the other direction. Distraught, Casper unsuccessfully attempts to commit suicide (apparently
forgetting that he is already dead) by lying down on a railway track before an oncoming train,
before he meets two children named Bonnie and Johnny who become his friends. The children's
mother, apparently widowed and impoverished, at first is frightened of Casper, but later
welcomes him into the family after he unintentionally frightens off a greedy landlord, who,
unwilling to own a "haunted" house, tears up the mortgage and gives her the house outright. The
short ends with the mother kissing Bonnie, Johnny, and Casper as she sends them off to school,
with Casper wearing clothing as if he were a living child.

Casper appeared in two more subsequent cartoons, There's Good Boos To-Night and A Haunting
We Will Go. There's Good Boos To-Night differs wildly from later Casper cartoons: although the
theme of Casper trying to find a friend and failing in these attempts before succeeding also
occurs in later cartoons, the tone of this short turns remarkably dark when a hunter and his dogs
appear, chasing the little fox cub named Ferdie that Casper has befriended. Although Casper
scares the hunter and dogs away, Casper discovers Ferdie dead after a harrowing chase scene.
Happily, however, Ferdie returns as a ghost to join his friend Casper in the afterlife.

These were later adapted into Noveltoons before Paramount started a Casper the Friendly Ghost
series in 1950, and ran the theatrical releases until summer 1959. Although having much success,
the series was later criticized by animation historians and viewers,[citation needed] mainly due to the
story of each entry of the series as being largely the same: Casper (now slightly thinner than the
pudgy figure that appeared in the earlier cartoons) escapes from the afterlife of a regular ghost
because he finds that scaring people can be tiresome year after year, tries to find friends but
inadvertently scares almost everyone, and finally finds a (cute little) friend, whom he saves from
some sort of fate, leading to his acceptance by those initially scared of him. In 1955, composer
Winston Sharples composed an instrumental theme for Casper's cartoons.

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