The film was first dubbed and released in English in the United Kingdom by Target International in 1979, but it was not until the success of Hanna-Barbera's "The Smurfs" cartoon that "Flute" began to gain widespread attention: in the early 1980s, Stuart R. Ross, head of First Performance Pictures Corporation, and also the North American rightsholder to the Smurfs characters themselves, acquired the American rights to the film for US$1,000,000. In doing so, he sold those rights to Tribune Entertainment (television), Vestron Video (home video), and Atlantic Releasing (theatrical).