Once upon a time there was once a company that was so bold that it decided to blatantly  ripoff Disney’s vast library of classic films. So much so that Disney tried to sue them, and lost. And that company name was GoodTimes Entertainment. Here’s the wild and crazy story of GootTimes and their legacy of Disney knockoff movies.
GoodTimes Entertainment was founded in 1984 in Jersey City, New Jersey by the three Cayre brothers Kenneth, Joseph and Stanley. The company primarily released public domain films on VHS. But once the Disney Renaissance began the Cayre brothers decided to try and cash in on their popularity on Home Video.
GoodTimes produced and distributed a number of animated films based on the fairy tales that inspired many of Disney’s films. They outsourced the animation to companies such as Golden Films and Jetlag Productions. They began rolling out their lineup of films in 1992 and many of the early VHS covers somewhat resembled their big budgeted counterparts.
In 1993 Disney filed a lawsuit against GoodTimes Entertainment over the clear intent to confuse customers into buying their versions of the stories instead of Disney’s. But interestingly enough GoodTimes won the lawsuit on the basis that their films were based on stories that were in the public domain. 
The only thing that GoodTimes was required to do was to make it clear on the covers that they were from GoodTimes and not Disney so that customers can distinguish between the two. After the lawsuit future prints of their films were released with the more distinguishable covers. 
The company continued to make films based on not only Disney stories but also Don Bluth and even early Dreamworks ones. Despite this the company began to struggle in the late 90s, especially with the box office failure of their only theatrically released film Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Movie in 1998.Â
By the early 2000s the company was hemorrhaging money. Eventually GoodTimes finally closed its doors in 2005 and their assets were acquired by Gaiam. Today Gaiam releases a number of their films on DVD multi-packs you can get for a couple bucks.
To this day you will still find films that are either heavily inspired by Disney or just  straight up rip them off. But you can partially blame GoodTimes for that as their lawsuit with Disney opened the floodgates for other companies to make their own versions.
Pirates & Princesses (PNP) is an independent, opinionated fan-powered news blog that covers Disney and Universal Theme Parks, Themed Entertainment and related Pop Culture from a consumer's point of view. Opinions expressed by our contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of PNP, its editors, affiliates, sponsors or advertisers. PNP is an unofficial news source and has no connection to The Walt Disney Company, NBCUniversal or any other company that we may cover.