What if Lantern Entertainment was founded in 1928?/Lantern Home Entertainment/GoodTimes Entertainment

GoodTimes Entertainment, Ltd. was an home video brand of TWC Home Entertainment (now Lantern Home Entertainment) that originated in 1984 under the name of GoodTimes Home Video. Though it produced its own titles, the company was well-known due to its distribution of media from third parties and classics. The founders for the company were the brothers Kenneth, Joseph and Stanley Cayre (often referred to and credited simply as the "Cayre Brothers") of Salsoul Records. Its headquarters were in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The company had a distribution facility in Jersey City, New Jersey and a duplication facility in Bayonne, New Jersey.

History
GoodTimes has began by TWC with the distribution of copies of public domain titles. Though the company also produced and distributed many low-priced fitness videos, its most recognized line of products were the series of low-budget traditionally animated films from companies such as Jetlag Productions, Golden Films, and Blye Migicovsky Productions, as well as a selection of the now-public domain works of Burbank Films Australia.

Many of its home-video titles — such as Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Pinocchio, Sinbad, The Little Mermaid, The Three Musketeers and Thumbelina — were named similarly or identically to big-budget animated films from other studios (though their plots were sometimes very different), and GoodTimes would often release these films close to the theatrical/home-video releases of other studios. This was largely legal, as the stories on which the big-budget movies were based were folk tales that had long been in the public domain and the major studios had little room to claim exclusive rights to the stories or the main characters. The Walt Disney Company sued TWC Pictures because the videotape packaging closely resembled Disney's, allegedly creating the potential of confusing consumers into unintentionally purchasing a GoodTimes title, when they instead meant to purchase a film from Disney that was otherwise nearly identical in appearance.

As a result of the aforementioned lawsuit, TWC and GoodTimes suddenly found itself required by law to print its name atop all of its future VHS covers, in order to clearly demonstrate to the public at large that this was very much not the "blockbuster" title that they would be purchasing just then. Despite these changes, however, TWC and GoodTimes would still remain freely capable of producing precisely the same kinds of animated films which had created all the controversy here to begin with, often using "knockoff" cloned titles, characters and stories existing in the public domain such to exploit any renewed, fleeting popularity/marketing pushes by other studios, carried out for entirely different films.

In the 1990s they expanded the company into GT Publishing, a division of the company that published children's books under the Inchworm Press imprint.

Expanding from home video distribution, GoodTimes founded its spin-off, GT Interactive Software as a way to distribute video games. This company was sold to the French game publisher Infogrames in 1999.

TWC was also one of the companies that wanted to bring VeggieTales into the mass market under the GoodTimes brand, However, according to Phil Vischer, they wanted to remove all religious references; however, by 1997, Big Idea got another company to release VeggieTales in the mass market, known as Lyrick Studios, who released shows like Barney & Friends and Wishbone, which was later bought out by a UK studio owned by Mattel, HiT Entertainment, in 2001.

At different times, TWC contracted with Columbia Pictures, NBC, HBO, Worldvision Enterprises, Hanna-Barbera, Orion Pictures, Universal Studios and Paramount Pictures to release inexpensive tapes of many of their films and TV series. In addition, TWC released several compilations assembled from public domain films, movie trailers, earlier television programs and newsreels under the GoodTimes brand. Most of these were credited to Film Shows, Inc.

In July 2005, TWC folded GoodTimes into TWC Home Entertainment, following Weinstein acquisition of TWC in March 2005. Under new rules of Harvey and Bob, GoodTimes Entertainment's library were incorporated into The Weinstein Company.

In 2007, The Weinstein Company bought GT Media as a sucessor to TWC Pictures and GoodTimes Entertainment.