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Official Films was a home movie distributor founded by Leslie Winik in 1939 to produce educational shorts. Soon, after buying the Keystone Chaplin library, they found themselves in the home movie business. They obtained several dozen Van Beuren cartoons.
Official retitled the Van Beuren cartoons and changed the name of Cubby Bear to "Brownie Bear". The human Tom and Jerry characters were renamed "Dick and Larry" to avoid confusion with the cat and mouse Tom and Jerry from MGM.
In addition to cartoons, Official also offered a number of sports films, newsreels, and specialties including a souvenir film of the 1939 New York World's Fair and "The Broadway Handicap," a home-movie-board-game combination with a horse-racing theme.
During the 1940s, Official was acquired by Robert R. Young's Pathe Industries; through which it obtained home movie rights to the Young-owned Producers Releasing Corporation's westerns and B-pictures. Official also purchased the backlog of the Soundies Distributing Corporation of America, releasing numerous short musicals; both singly and in compilation reels.
In the late 1940s, the company licensed a number of short subjects from Columbia Pictures; including Krazy Kat and Scrappy cartoons, Community Sing musicals, and comedy shorts starring Buster Keaton, Charley Chase, and others. The Columbia shorts were available through the 1950s, along with some comedy shorts originally released by E.W. Hammons' Educational Pictures.
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