Mouse wars.

AuthorMiller, Ron
PositionLetters - Letter to the Editor

As an author and artist I was appalled by Dan O'Neill's disingenuous rationalizations for plagiarizing Disney ("Disney's War Against the Counterculture," December). His arguments seem to be: If someone creates something that is immensely popular, they abdicate their rights to it; if someone creates something that has a special resonance for O'Neill, they abdicate their rights to it; and if a corporation he deems too large owns something, they abdicate their rights to it. The bottom line is that O'Neill was trading on someone else's creativity and originality--if not the Disney company, then the artists and writers who work for it. Would Air Pirates have been as successful if he had not used names and characters that were already well-known and popular?

The whole issue sounds very David-and-Goliathish, the struggling independent comic artist vs. the Disney behemoth, but how would the entire matter look if O'Neill had decided to trade upon the efforts of, say, Charles Schulz, Mort Walker, or Hank Ketchum, issuing his own versions of Peanuts, Beetle Bailey, or Dennis the Menace under those same titles? Whatever legal rights he may or may not have had, or believes he had, O'Neill certainly didn't have the moral right to do what he did.

Ron Miller

King George, VA

In 1972 I was asked to submit a sworn deposition in the Air Pirates case. "In order to communicate an irreverence toward the Walt Disney characters," I stated, "the original form must be imitated to provide the most effective vehicle of reaching the consciousness of the audience and hopefully causing them to question the one-dimensional infallibility of Disney's fairy-tale world. For any government to imply otherwise would be to foster brainwashing. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, a city official in charge of a campaign to exterminate rats said that public support for the program was adversely affected by the popularity of Mickey Mouse among children. It is in the highest tradition of a free society to encourage the testing of conflicting ideas in an open marketplace; the comic books in question, therefore, are classic examples of artistic responsibility in action."

In 1967 I published as a centerfold in The Realist and distributed as a poster The Disneyland Memorial Orgy by Mad artist Wally Wood. The Disney Corporation considered a lawsuit but realized that I functioned financially on a proverbial shoestring, and besides, why bother causing themselves further public...

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