EVEN the Supreme Court knows their names.
The actors who played Norm and Cliff on “Cheers” have gone all the way to the nation’s highest court to keep robotic likeness of themselves out of airport bars.
George Wendt and John Ratzenberger – who played beer guzzling bar fixtures (Norm and Cliff) on the hit NBC show – are locked in a legal battle for the rights to their characters.
The court will have to decide if Paramount, the studio that produced the show, invented Cliff and Norm or if the two actors’ 11-year-stint on “Cheers” gave them ownership. The trouble started in 1993 when Paramount opened a chain of “Cheers”-themed bars at airports across the country.
Part of the motif were a pair of talkative robots designed to look and sound like Cliff – the goofy, know-it-all Boston postal worker – and Norm, the popular accountant/house-painter who habitually occupied the corner stool at the bar.
When the actors declined to allow their likenesses to be used, the robots’ names were suddenly changed to Bob and Hank so Wendt and Ratzenberger sued.
“This is a huge issue for Hollywood,” one of the actors’ lawyer, Dale Kinsella, said.”If a studio acquires the right to license an actor’s image cloaked in the outfit of the character, then Warner Bros. could use Harrison Ford’s face to sell cigarettes or beer as long as he was dressed as Indiana Jones,” he said.
Paramount says the actors were hired to perform in roles that it created and do not have legal rights to those characters.
The court is expected to present a landmark ruling in the next few days.
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