Edward Bleier, visionary executive at dawn of cable
Edward Bleier, who brought Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, and other Looney Tunes characters to generations of Saturday morning TV viewers before becoming a prime mover in the rise of cable television and the transformation of Time Warner Cable into an industry giant, died Tuesday at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He turned 94 the day before.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Magda.
A former journalist who began his career in newspapers and radio, Mr. Bleier was an innovator who foresaw industrychanging technologies and the need for fresh content to serve the emerging cable television market. At ABC and later at Warner Bros. Television, he gained a reputation for imaginative but also practical strategic thinking that helped usher in a new television era.
From 1986 to 2000, he was president of a Warner Bros. division that developed basic cable networks such as Nickelodeon, MTV, and The Movie Channel. He was credited with achieving record-breaking sales of vintage movies and older television series, shown in reruns, annually surpassing the income those productions had earned when first released.
As far back as 1961, while at ABC, Mr. Bleier saw a future for vintage Looney Tunes cartoons, animated shorts made by Warner Bros. and shown in movie theaters in the 1930s and ’40s. He licensed them and then repackaged them as Saturday morning TV viewing for children. The move transformed Looney Tunes and similar cartoons into consistent profitmakers for ABC and Warner Bros.
Later, as president of Warner Bros. Animation, he created dozens of variations of Looney Tunes programming for cable and broadcast networks, along with movies and television specials featuring the cartoon characters.
“My instinct was always to look ahead, not back,” Mr. Bleier said in an interview for this obituary in 2015. “I saw radio coming on, so I moved from newspapers. I saw television coming on, and I couldn’t get in it fast enough.”
He joined ABC in the early 1950s and spent the next 14 years at the network. While he believed that the medium could be used for social good, he also understood that commercial television had to reach the largest possible audience and earn a profit.
“I perceived the media not in self-conscious terms of ‘do-good’ but as important in the social fabric,” he said. “You only had so many hours in the day, so I focused on those things that did good while doing well.”
Mr. Bleier was head of ABC’s daytime programming in 1964 when civil rights advocates, including Harry Belafonte, criticized an absence of Black actors in the network’s popular soap operas. ABC soon began integrating its daytime lineup.
“We knew that maybe 30 percent of the audience for the soaps were Black women,” he recalled, “so this worked not only socially but economically.”
Mr. Bleier’s biggest contributions came at Warner Bros. Answering a call from Steven Ross, a New York parking lot magnate who bought Warner Bros. studio in 1969, Mr. Bleier signed on to run the New York programming and sales office. As Ross built the company, Mr. Bleier became a trusted adviser, shaping the strategy for taking the company into cable television and new digital media.
He helped guide the company into partnerships with American Express and later Time Inc. In 1990, Warner Cable became Time Warner Cable. (It was acquired by Charter Communications in 2016, becoming the nation’s second-largest cable operator, after Comcast.) Until he retired from Time Warner in 2005, Mr. Bleier continued to explore new digital media markets, including one for on-demand content delivered through the internet. Even into his 80s, he continued to consult with the company.
“Ed was there at that birthing” of the cable industry, Leo Hindery, a media entrepreneur and former president and CEO of AT&T Broadband, said in an interview. “This is an industry of giant egos, but Ed had none. He was one of the true pioneers.”
Edward Bleier was born in New York City on Oct. 16, 1929, to Philip and Cecile (Richter) Bleier. His family lived in a small apartment off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx before moving to the Laurelton section of Queens, where he grew up. His father, a son of Viennese immigrants, trained as a lawyer but became an insurance broker. His mother, a homemaker, had immigrated from Belarus.
In 1947, he enrolled at Syracuse University as a radio major. There, he joined the campus radio station and worked on a program written by William Safire, a future Times columnist, with Dick Clark, the future pop music TV host, as the announcer.
Safire introduced Mr. Bleier to Magda Palacci, a French-language journalist who became bureau chief for Paris Match in New York. They married in 1973. She is his only survivor.