How it started
As CINAR
After their meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1976, Micheline Charest and Ronald A. Weinberg organized an event for a women's film festival and worked at distributing foreign films to U.S. theatres. The couple moved to New York City and formed CINAR, a film and television distribution company.
In 1984, CINAR changed their focus from media distribution to production and moved operations to Montreal, Quebec, where they concentrated on family-oriented television programming, including The Little Lulu Show, A Miss Mallard Mystery, Animal Crackers, Emily of New Moon, Mona the Vampire, and The Wombles, as well as the English and French dubs of the Japanese series Adventures of the Little Koala, Ronin Warriors, The Adventures of Albert and Sidney, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Spanish television series The World of David the Gnome, and the English dub of Ultraseven. As a production company, CINAR was also involved in the work of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, A Bunch of Munsch, The Busy World of Richard Scarry, Madeline (specials 2 to 6), The Real Story of Happy Birthday to You, The Country Mouse and the City Mouse Adventures, Space Cases, and its most well-known works, Arthur, Zoboomafoo, and Caillou.
The firm became a public company in September 1993.
In October 1995, the company signed a Canadian home video distribution deal with Sony Wonder, itself a subdivision of Sony Music Entertainment. The deal, initially lasting five years, was renewed in October 2000.
In January 1996, the company formed CINAR Music, which would produce audio products based on its properties in the US and Canada. In Canada, those products would be released by Sony Wonder. On November 1, CINAR announced that they would purchase the programming library and animation unit of the London-based FilmFair from the Caspian Group for $10.5 million. After the deal closed, CINAR reopened FilmFair and utilized its acquired catalogue to launch a dedicated London-based European production and distribution studio - CINAR Europe in March 1997. The new subsidiary aimed to produce, with FilmFair, revival series based on existing properties including The Wombles and The Adventures of Paddington Bear, and bring the existing FilmFair catalogue to the world. Following CINAR's financial issues and the scandal, CINAR Europe was put up for sale in September 2001 but was closed in February 2002, leading to their European partners, like Alphanim, to find other studios to co-produce shows with.
From Wikipedia’s article on Cookie Jar Group, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2