“It’s possible that when Gordon first saw the movie he had believed that DreamWorks stole something from him-that he came up with the original idea for a kung fu fighting panda,” McGaunn said. In May 2017, the 51-year-old was sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to pay more than $3 million in restitution. Gordon was found guilty on numerous counts of perjury and wire fraud. “The jury didn’t buy it for a second,” McGaunn said. He also claimed that DreamWorks and Disney had copied other characters from his work. Instead, he claimed, Disney-like DreamWorks-had copied his drawings and based characters in The Lion King on his work. #Panfu panda com trialGordon was ultimately charged with perjury and wire fraud.Īt his criminal trial in 2016, Gordon maintained he had not traced his drawings from the coloring book. Gordon dropped his copyright infringement lawsuit, but he was by no means done with the legal system-he was now the subject of a criminal case for the crimes he had committed. “The coloring book discovery was the smoking gun in the civil case,” McGaunn said. Those sketches, which he claimed to have drawn in 19, were copied from the coloring book, which was not published until 1996. The truth came to light when DreamWorks learned that Gordon had traced some of his panda drawings from a Disney The Lion King coloring book. Ultimately, in addition to fabricating and backdating sketches that supported his suit, it was discovered that Gordon intentionally deleted relevant evidence on his computer that he was required to produce, and he lied during court-ordered depositions. “He was using the legal system to try and extort over $12 million from DreamWorks,” McGaunn said. Gordon later filed the copyright infringement suit against DreamWorks, and during the course of that lengthy civil litigation, he perjured himself and provided falsified documents to the court. He proceeded to revise his “Panda Power” drawings and story, and renamed it “Kung Fu Panda Power.” He had previously created drawings and a story about pandas-which he called “Panda Power”-that bore little resemblance to the movie characters. Investigators learned that months before the release of Kung Fu Panda, Gordon saw a trailer for the movie. “We later showed that those drawings had been falsified and backdated as part of Gordon’s elaborate ruse,” McGaunn said. “The box office has done as well as the ‘Matrix,’ ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean.Gordon produced drawings that appeared to validate his claims, and his attorneys were convinced he had a strong case. “It is the most successful animation movie in our cinema history,” said Li Jiqing, general manager at Wangfujing Cinema in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. One reason for the delay was the sensitivities involved in a region that is still in mourning.īut after the film opened there last week, theater operators said their houses were packed. The release of the film was postponed in Sichuan Province, the country’s largest panda-breeding center and the site of a devastating earthquake that killed over 69,000 people last month. Chinese audiences have praised the quality of the film’s animation and its colorful and clever depiction of various aspects of ancient Chinese culture, architecture and scenery. Dreamworks Animation and Paramount Picturesīut on June 21 the film opened to huge crowds in Beijing, Shanghai and other big cities. Po, a panda turned kung fu master, is a box-office hit in China.
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