>>10174219That's not even the craziest the lawsuits got.
>GROTH: Lawsuits ... people were suing you?>EASTMAN: Yeah, seemed like everybody was.>G: For what?>E: Anything! Buffalo Bob from the Howdy Doody show filed a five million dollar suit because he said we stole “Cowabunga” from him. He used to say it in the Clarabell the Cow segment, I guess — I’ve never seen a Howdy Doody show, to be honest — but I guess he used to come out and say, “Cowabunga!” Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon used it through all the big beach blanket bingo movies as a surfer term, and I think Bart Simpson — which I hear he also sued Matt Groening for stealing “Cowabunga” ... It was what our lawyers called strike suits, basically they come in and they say, “We have grounds for a case, and we’re suing you for five million dollars, but after a couple months of due diligence and sorting it out, they’d say, “Look, we’ll settle for fifty thousand dollars.”We had a lot of people saying they created the Turtles. One guy said that God told him about the Turtles, and he didn’t act on it fast enough, and we did, so now he’s suing us. There was a guy.. that Pete actually helped out...In one instance, he created this thing called Presidents in Outer Space that Pete drew for him. He had George Washington in a space suit — that looked like a Turtle to him! So I guess if you put a guy in a space suit, like an Apollo space suit, next to a Turtle, to him there was enough likeness that he said Pete stole the idea of the Turtles from him...Then there was Fred Wolf, the animation company, that we worked with, hired by Playmates, a work-for-hire animation studio, that basically said they created everything about the Turtles that made them such a big phenomenon. So they sued for half the royalties that we’d made in the entire history of the property.
