Steamboat Willie (1928)
There has been much schadenfreude surrounding the entrance of Mickey Mouse, at least in the 1928 guise of Steamboat Willie, into the public domain, as the Walt Disney Company has long been infamous for litigation protecting their copyrights. When I painted a mural for a nonprofit children’s residential home in southern California in the late 1970s, and included two Disney characters, Mickey and Winnie-the-Pooh, we received a cease and desist letter from Disney’s lawyers demanding we remove the mural, which we did. Not long afterward, in Anaheim, there was a “Disney’s Market” owned by someone with that surname, who was forced to change the name of his store.
Other examples abound. The underground comic series Air Pirates Funnies in 1971 featured a satirical gang of Disney characters engaged in sexual and illegal activities, with Mickey himself depicted smuggling drugs on the cover of issue #1. These comics featured work by Dan O'Neill, Gary Hallgren, Bobby London and Ted Richards; Disney sued all involved. The cartoonists’ lawyers argued fair use and parody, and cited the protections of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. To raise money for their defense, they and other underground cartoonists sold original artwork—ironically often of Disney characters—at comic book conventions. Despite a $200,000+ award of damages and attorney's fees, and a restraining order in favor of the company, a defiant O’Neill continued to create Disney parodies. In 1978, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against the Air Pirates 3-0 for copyright infringement. O’Neill, et al. appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, to no avail. Unable to collect damages from an unrepentant O’Neill, Disney agreed to settle in 1980. Bold stances on the part of Disney, considering their very foundation is built on public domain folktales, Aesop’s Fables, Mother Goose and Brothers Grimm stories.
And while the news of Steamboat Willie’s entering the public domain was greeted overwhelmingly on social media with cheers, renowned creators of cartoon intellectual properties had a more nuanced rection:
“I get the reasons for the existence of PD laws in terms of cultural enrichment,” said cartoonist and former Disney illustrator Bill Morrison, “but I still don't know if that makes it right to just give something that my family owns to the public for anyone to have their way with it, profit from it, etc. It goes contrary to all other laws of property ownership, and I don't see the difference. If I own a building that becomes culturally significant, can the government just make it a public building after 95 years? Of course not. I’m just not convinced that our current Public Domain system is fair to creators, especially those who own their IP.”
The cartoonist Ty Templeton took a different view on his Facebook page. “The theory is that my family gets to exploit the idea for quite a while, but society as a whole is enriched by ideas that last. IPs very rarely keep a public's interest for the length of time a family owns it... but artists and creators get to play with characters like Scrooge, or Hamlet eventually because commenting on them is the same as commenting on culture. I fully believe my great grandkids didn't earn my characters and ideas, as much as I love them.”
The origin of Mickey Mouse calls into account the very notion of IP at its core. Ask any random member of the general public who created Mickey Mouse, and they will no doubt say “Walt Disney.” But it’s really not that simple.
Disney incorporated Laugh-O-Gram Films in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1922, at the age of 20. The prior year he was contracted by Universal Studios to animate a dozen cartoons, which he titled “Newman's Laugh-O-Grams.” Along with animator Ub Iwerks, one their first outings was “Little Red Riding Hood,” from the traditional and free-to-use folk tale; that film debuted the character Julius the Cat, bearer of a remarkable resemblance to Felix the Cat, the first fully realized animated animal character, created three years prior by Pat Sullivan & Otto Messmer. Julius’ similarities to Felix are profound, so much so that when the distributor for Felix cartoons, Margaret Winkler, had a falling out with Sullivan, she took to distributing Disney's 1923-27 "Alice Comedies," which paired a live-action little girl with the animated Julius; in this way, Winkler was able to replace Felix with, essentially, a clone.
Feline Follies (1919)
Alice's Egg Plant (1925)
At the behest of Winkler's spouse, Charles Mintz, Disney & Iwerks then created what would become a Mickey prototype in the guise of a rabbit. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit would debut in “Trolley Troubles,” in 1927.
Trolley Troubles (1927)
Yet Disney struggled financially, and his studio was not the paradigm of sanitary conditions, infested with mice - one of which Disney reportedly treated like a pet. For a 1925 publicity photo of Disney, the animator Hugh Harman had drawn cartoon mice surrounding Walt’s visage. Iwerks used this drawing as the basis for the studio’s next feature character, Mickey Mouse, in 1928. Unfortunately, the photo with this art has been lost to the sands of time.
Disney would find himself cut out of the rights to Oswald, which Mintz took to his own Winkler Pictures, which later became Screen Gems. Harman & Rudolf Ising, another old Laugh-O-Gram animator, left the Oswald series in 1929, and took their own character, Bosko (initially an 'out of the inkwell' character a la the Fleischer Studios), to Warner Bros. Along with Friz Freleng, who had also worked with Disney going back to the Alice films, they positioned Bosko as the first “Looney Tunes” character - and then, significantly, Foxy, a Mickey Mouse doppelgänger, as the first “Merrie Melodies” character. The Looney Tunes title was a takeoff on Disney's “Silly Symphonies.”
One More Time (1931)
Felix, Julius, Oswald, Bosko and Foxy have all had films enter the public domain, and now they are joined by Steamboat Willie. Why the star of that film, Mickey Mouse, was the one to ultimately survive, no doubt has more to do with Disney’s tenacious and litigious nature than the originality of the character, born into a copycat lineage.
Next up: Superman, in 2034.
