Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-30737420-20160121220026/@comment-61022-20160126174341

Yeah, Marvel's history with the Micronauts has all sorts of bizarre rights issues.

First and foremost, it was actually an imported toyline from Japan called Microman. In the 1970s and 1980s it was not uncommon for American toy manufacturers to import and rebrand toys made in Japan. All of the big companies did it. You look at a lot of the cool toys from the 80s (particularly if they were sci-fi themed) chances are they probably originated in Japan.

Anyway, Mego, the company best known for the Mego dolls (which included ones based on Marvel and DC comic book characters) licensed Microman for release in North America. They rebranded it the Micronauts and began pumping the toys out in 1977.

In 1979, they licensed the property to Marvel Comics. Unlike later licensed properties that Marvel produced comic books for (and most specifically the G.I. Joe and Transformers comics Marvel was commissioned to do for Hasbro), Mego didn't apply any creative restrictions. Because at the time. The entire franchise was constructed around the imagination of Bill Mantlo, who pretty well created the backstory for everyone from scratch. The other thing Mantlo did was create a vast majority of characters that were not part of the toyline. Articus Rann, Marionette, Bug... Mego went out of business in 1982 but Marvel still maintained publishing rights until 1986, per the original contract. Since the series so incredibly popular, Marvel ran with it until the license ran out.

Something unique happened here, on top of all the original characters that Marvel created for the initial series run, Mego wasn't pumping out new toys for five full years. The vast majority of all the Micronauts material that are in the comic books are Marvel owned properties as a result.

That's why you'll still see Bug, or Rann, or Marionette popping up here and there. That's because Marvel still owns the rights to all those characters, and therefor can still use them. Meanwhile other characters (such as Biotron, Baron Karza and Acroyear) don't appear anymore -- or if they have, they have been drastically changed and renamed. It's a bit of legal work around that Marvel has had to do with other properties such as ROM, Master of Kung-Fu (which featured Fu-Manchu) and Godzilla. In the case of ROM, they have ROM appear -- but out of armor -- and usually referred to as "The greatest of the Spaceknights" or something else to that effect. With Godzilla, the iconic monster was mutated into a different form by Dr. Demonicus and is never mentioned by name whenever it appears.

Getting back to the Micronauts for a second... This is where it gets tricky. Marvel basically can't republish any of the Micronauts stuff unless they get the rights back. That's because the comics have the Micronauts logo and feature characters that aren't owned by Marvel.

However they can occasionally mention the Micronauts stuff. References are either vague or specific depending on what they are referencing. I am quite sure that anything that references the Micronauts comic when the series was being published by Marvel is still okay to mention. Hence why reprints still contain mentions and (sometimes) flashback panels of events that happened in Micronauts, without issue (same thing with ROM). But anything AFTER they lost the rights, they have to make vague references or outright renaming the team (They have since been called the Microns) or renaming the characters etc.

The only time you'll see licensed characters being referenced by their actual names is in the Marvel handbooks. Probably because it's an encyclopedia and therefor protected by certain Fair Use laws. Usually they can't provide reproductions of the certain characters in these handbooks but they can be mentioned by name.

Since Marvel lost the rights to the Micronauts there have been two previous attempts at reviving the franchise in comics, both by Image and Devil's Due. Both failed miserably. Likewise have attempts to revive the toyline. I suspect this movie probably won't be well received, but you never know, J.J Abrams is involved in someway.

However, I think the reason the Micronauts keep on failing as a franchise is because anyone who remembers it, remembers the Marvel comic book. Which is so deeply woven into the Marvel universe that for there to be anything that long time fans would enjoy, would be if Marvel gets the franchising rights back. Sadly, Micronauts are -- sorry to say -- such a niche and somewhat obscure toy franchise. Not nearly as popular as other Japanese imports (Transformers, Robotech, Voltron etc.) that have seen constant success and many popular revivals.