Stephen Slesinger

In 1930, Slesinger acquired sole and exclusive US and Canadian merchandising, television, recording and other trade rights to Winnie-the-Pooh from A. A. Milne,[3] and developed Winnie-the-Pooh commercializations for more than 30 years, creating the first Pooh doll, record, board game, puzzle, US radio broadcast (NBC), animation, and motion picture film. In the 1950s, after Slesinger's death, his widow, Shirley Slesinger Lasswell, took over the business and launched her own nationwide licensing campaigns. In 1961 and 1983, Stephen Slesinger, Inc. licensed certain of its Pooh rights to the Walt Disney Company.

In 1933, Slesinger acquired the merchandising rights to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan character and produced a series of Big Little Books, games, premiums, toys, treasure maps and other products. Slesinger's marketing and media strategy for Tarzan became the blueprint for success in character merchandising, including the campaigns Superman. Slesinger's The New Adventures of Tarzan "Pop-Up" (Blue Ribbon Press, 1935) book, which he also illustrated, was chosen by Albert Tillman as one of the 100 best pop-up books ever published and featured on the cover of Tillman's historical survey, Pop-Up! Pop-Up! (Whalestooth, 1998).

Slesinger purchased the rights to the Ozark Ike comic strip from creator Rufus A. ("Ray") Gotto. In 1936, it became his first comic strip in syndication. Other personalities and characters curated by Slesinger with innovative media and merchandise campaigns include Tom Mix, Zane Grey's King of the Royal Mounted, Alley Oop, Captain Easy, Wash Tubbs, Polly the Powers Model, Charlie Chan, Buck Rogers and Og, Son of Fire, Blondie and Dagwood (for television), as well as all Newspaper Enterprise Association comic strips. For these and many others, he produced comic books, children's books and created the art and stories for hundreds of Big Little Books distributed by Western Printing and Lithograph, from the 1930s through the 1950s.[4]

Working with artist Fred Harman, who came from Pagosa Springs, Colorado, Slesinger launched the popular comic strip Red Ryder. The strip's artistic style evolved from Harman's 1937 comic strip, Bronc Peeler. The two worked on the project for a year before Red Ryder was launched in 1938.

Between 1938 and 1967, the long-running Red Ryder comic strip was also a un comic book, the subject of 12 chapter films, 26 motion pictures and numerous merchandising and promotional tie-ins, including the Red Ryder Daisy Carbine Air Rifle, which holds the longest continuing license in the history of the licensing industry and was depicted in the film A Christmas Story (1983).

In 1937 Slesinger licensed Zane Grey's byline and created King of the Royal Mounted, the adventures of a Canadian Mountie who always got his man. King appeared in newspaper strips, comics, Little Big Books and other ancillary items. Grey's son Romer and Slesinger collaborated on many of the stories, and the artwork was produced by Allen Dean and Charles Flanders in Slesinger's New York studio. A movie serial was produced in 1942.

In 1951, Slesinger acquired rights to make a Blondie television series with Arthur Lake as Dagwood Bumstead and his real-life wife Patricia "Pat" Lake starring as Blondie. at the request of Randolph Hearst who cared for her as if she was his daughter.[5] Pat Lake nee:Patricia Van Cleeve Lake an American socialite, actress and radio comedian, was also Marion Daviesnice. Slesinger was completing the pilot episode at the time of his death on December 17, 1953. Amid the shock and confusion of his unexpected passing, the reels of the Slesinger's Blondie pilot mysteriously disappeared.

Among Slesinger's many honors was a 1953 proclamation by the County of Los Angeles which singled him out as a "nationally known humanitarian" whose works "are read by more than 25 million youngsters and adults" and who "has devoted much of his personal time and energy toward helping underprivileged children throughout the nation" and whose "interest in underprivileged children stems from the magnificent work done by his mother, Augusta Slesinger, who served as a psychoanalyst and social worker… for 40 years". The proclamation ends with Slesinger being "complimented for continuing to help in the program of making better citizens out of the youth of the land." The 75th Anniversary of Slesinger's outdoor youth programs was celebrated in 2015.