Casper: A Spirited Beginning

Casper: A Spirited Beginning (1997)

It's a whole new scream!

Before he met and befriended the other ghouls at Applegate Manor, friendly ghost Casper meets young Chris Carson, a lonely kid who decides to teach Casper how to be a proper ghost.

Date of release
1997-09-09
TMDB
5.4 / 10 (345)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Adventure, Family, Comedy, Fantasy
Director
Sean McNamara
Collection
Casper Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

Casper: A Spirited Beginning is a 1997 American direct-to-video fantasy comedy film based on the Harvey Comics cartoon character Casper the Friendly Ghost. It serves as a prequel, though breaks continuity with the 1995 Universal/Amblin film Casper. The film stars Steve Guttenberg, Lori Loughlin, Rodney Dangerfield, Michael McKean, James Earl Jones and Pauly Shore, with supporting roles by Richard Moll, Sherman Hemsley, Brian Doyle-Murray, Edie McClurg and Ben Stein. The plot explores additional details surrounding the titular character's origins. 20th Century Fox had previously acquired film rights to the character from Universal.

Production

In May 1997, it was announced that Harvey Entertainment would be producing a direct-to-video film with Saban Entertainment and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. According to Jeff Montgomery, then Chairman of Harvey Entertainment, when Universal paid $750,000 to acquire the rights to a Casper film and any theatrical sequels they did not account for the direct-to-video market which at the time was dominated by pornography and low-budget action f…

While Universal planned their own sequel to the 1995 film Casper for a tentative 1999 release, Harvey Entertainment, which owned the rights to the IP, shopped the property around looking for other studios interested in producing projects based on the character.

Various insiders speculated that a Casper direct-to-video project could potential curtail development of Universal's theatrical sequel such as providing a more inexpensive counterpart already available to consumers or creating a product of poor quality that taints the brand.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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