Look, if you haven’t gotten into the Cartoon Network mini-series Over The Garden Wall, you’re seriously missing out. There’s a reason why it won multiple awards — including the Emmy Award of Outstanding Animated Program — in 2015 for its amazing setting of mood, world-building and generally being a masterful modern folktale.
Two local cosplayers loved it so much that they had a photo shoot dressed up as the show’s two protagonists Wirt and Greg. Heng Rae and Shevon L. Wang Yao looked proper legit in their get-up — so good that the Cartoon Network Facebook page decided to use them as models in their Halloween costume contest campaign.
The thing is, both the cosplayers and the photographer Julian Choo had not given permission to the network to use the image. Though Choo was indeed credited, his photo was not licensed as a public domain work — and thus Cartoon Network didn’t have the right to use it in a marketing campaign.
It doesn’t help that they cropped out the watermark and didn’t credit the names of the cosplayers as well.
The cosplayers didn’t seem too angered over being used as the faces of a costume contest — but they’d still like to be credited, thank you very much. Their friends and fellow cosplayers tried to get the attention of Cartoon Network, but it doesn’t seem to do much.
Nonetheless, thousands of Over The Garden Wall fans around the world are absolutely loving the costumes, so at least that’s a small consolation. But it’d be a whole lot better in the first place if Cartoon Network had sought out permission from the rights owners before using their image in a marketing campaign.
