Mickey Mouse Has Been Public Domain for a Day and We've Already Got 3 Gory Slasher Projects About Him
It's not every day that one of the most iconic images in the world sees its copyright lapse and thereby becomes free for everyone to use to their heart's content. But it happened to Mickey Mouse at the start of the New Year. The quite literal face of the most well known entertainment brand in the history of the world is now ours to do with as we please.
And us being humans in the year 2024, what we please is to watch this preternaturally cheerful, anthropomorphic mouse turn homicidal maniac. Mickey might be the universally recognized symbol of childlike wonder, but Disney is still a soulless, greedy international conglomerate. So people want the sheer joy of watching the little rodent they built their kingdom upon splatter the walls red with the blood of innocents:
On the one hand, this is awful. I can't imagine what it's like to be raising a toddler with an emotional connection to Mickey and Minnie Mouse, has their smiling faces staring out at them all day from t-shirts, backpacks, lamps and toothbrushes, watches their shows on Disney Channel, and has autographs they waited two hours for on a 95 degree day in the Magic Kingdom, only to have them witness a guy in a Mickey mask slice the throats of teenagers in an arcade. Because you won't be able to keep them from seeing it forever. And the therapy will cost almost as much as that week you spent at the Disney Resorts Yacht & Beach Club.
But on the other hand, Mickey sucks. Unpopular opinion perhaps, but when has he ever really made a kid laugh? Growing up I was a Looney Tunes kid all the way. Bugs Bunny had a billion times more to offer a reclusive kid who spent as much time as possible in the warm glow of the Electric Babysitter. When I had kids of my own, they couldn't have cared less about Disney Channel when Nickelodeon was one button away. And shows like Spongebob or Fairly Oddparents captured the same kinetic energy and sarcastic wiseassery of my Warner Brothers cartoons, just without the dated references. Cool kids who understand the difference between bland, corporate nothingness and actual kids comedy won't even be phased by this new, ultraviolent Mickey.
On the other, other hand, Disney is getting what they deserve with this. Because something that is widely known but not often talked about is how they rigged the whole legal system in order to hang onto this copyright as long as they did. While at the same time, making it possible for them to take other people's intellectual property and make it their own. For free.
From Duke Law School:
Disney pushed for the law that extended the copyright term to 95 years, which became referred to derisively as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act.” This extension has been criticized by scholars as being economically regressive and having a devastating effect on our ability to digitize, archive, and gain access to our cultural heritage. It locked up not just famous works, but a vast swath of our culture, including material that is commercially unavailable. Even though calling it the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” may overstate Disney’s actual role in the legislative process – the measure passed because of a much broader lobbying effort – Disney was certainly a prominent supporter, and the Mouse was sometimes a figurehead.
On the other hand, Disney itself is a talented and successful practitioner of building upon the public domain. In fact, the public domain is Disney’s bread and butter. Frozen was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. The Lion King draws from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Biblical stories, and possibly an epic poem about the founder of the Mali Empire. Fantasia's “The Sorcerer's Apprentice” comes from a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and in other segments the Fantasia film showcases public domain classical music. Alice in Wonderland, Snow White,The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, and Pinocchio came from stories by Lewis Carroll, The Brothers Grimm, Victor Hugo, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Anderson, and Carlo Collodi.
The public domain includes not only works over which copyright has expired or never existed, but also uncopyrightable aspects of contemporary works—such as ideas, stock elements, and unoriginal material. The Mickey character itself is based on such public domain fodder. His personality and antics drew from silent film stars such as Charlie Chaplin.
Before we go any further, let me correct one thing in this. Saying The Lion King is taken from Shakespeare is giving it way too much credit. It's a direct, character-by-character ripoff of a shitty Anime show that only weird kids in my neighbor liked called Kimba the White Lion. Right down to the main characters names. The fact their uncle killed their father with the help of his hyena henchmen. The title character even has an eccentric baboon Witch Doctor and a sniffy little parrot working for him:
So whatever else you might think of Bloodthirsty Slasher in a Cheap Mickey Mask, you can't argue Disney hasn't had this coming for a while now. And a badly thrown together slasher flick in an arcade (and what a cliche that's become lately), is just the beginning. The perfectly rendered animation parodies can't be far behind. The internet is about to be flooded with Steamboat Willie as a Nazi, a racist, a serial killer, a child snatcher, a wife beater and doing porn. Mark my words. It's inevitable. At least until it plays itself out and a new beloved piece of someone's childhood becomes public domain. Now more than ever, the internet is dark and full of terrors.