It’s been a challenging centenary year for Disney, and the world’s largest and most prominent entertainment company is having to end it with an emotional “so long!” to its oldest friend, Mickey Mouse.
To be clear, it’s not the Mickey Mouse, iconic centerpiece of countless elementary school lunch bags, T-shirts and baseball caps, who is leaving the happiest place on earth when his copyright protection expires on 1 January.
Rather, it’s Mickey’s original Steamboat Willie persona, a rat-like figure with spindly legs created by Walt Disney for the groundbreaking 1928 movie of the same name, who is entering the public domain after 95 years in the Disney nest. His shipmate in the animated short, the earliest version of Minnie, is joining him.
The loss of exclusive rights to the historically important first draft of a character who went on to capture the hearts of millions worldwide will cut deep, as proven by the decades of legal maneuvers the company made to try to preserve them.
The episode is also reflective of the turbulent waters in which Disney currently finds itself, including a bruising culture war fight with Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, over LGBTQ+ rights, and strong financial headwinds from its loss-making streaming service Disney+, as well as a worrying series of movie flops.
“I always say any of us going past 100 years will usually have issues, but this whole original Mickey Mouse thing is something to think about as we look at Disney going into its second century with a good deal of troubles,” said Robert Thompson, a trustee professor of television, radio and film, and founding director of the Bleier center for television and popular culture at Syracuse University.
“Disney has a lot of things to worry about right now, and the expiration of Steamboat Willie’s Mickey Mouse probably shouldn’t be on the top of their list. The original Mickey isn’t the one we all think of and have on our T-shirts or pillowcases up in the attic someplace.
“Yet, symbolically of course, copyright is important to Disney and it has been very careful about their copyrights to the extent that laws have changed to protect them. This is the only place I know that some obscure high school in the middle of nowhere can put on The Lion King and the Disney copyright people show up.”
The company fought to preserve its ownership of Steamboat Mickey, further lengthening a track record of forceful copyright protection efforts including legal threats to three Florida daycare centers in 1989 that dared to brighten their walls with Disney characters.
Along with other companies seeking to protect intellectual property rights, it lobbied for the 1998 Copyright Extension Act that extended by 20 years, to 95, the shield for published works. Such was Disney’s congressional influence that it became known colloquially as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.
With lawmakers having shown no interest in a further extension, Steamboat Willie’s copyright expires on New Year’s Day. Disney will continue to market the movie and its characters, but it means others are also free to do so, as they see fit.
The video-gaming company Fumi has already released a gory trailer for a 2025 shoot-’em-up called Mouse that features a skinny-limbed rodent with characteristics similar to the original Mickey as a bloodthirsty gangster. The black-and-white backdrop, period music and atmosphere are strikingly redolent of animator Ub Iwerks’s 1928 classic.
The alarming precedent was set earlier this year following the expiration in January 2022 of Disney’s exclusive rights to Winnie-the-Pooh, which it had held since 1961. The once family-friendly, willy, nilly, silly old bear was transformed into a serial killer in the gratuitous and much-derided slasher movie Blood and Honey.
Pooh’s loyal sidekick, Tigger, sees his own copyright expire alongside Mickey Mouse in a few days’ time.
Disney, in a statement, makes clear it will remain vigilant.
“More modern versions of Mickey will remain unaffected by the expiration of the Steamboat Willie copyright, and Mickey will continue to play a leading role as a global ambassador for the Walt Disney Company in our storytelling, theme park attractions, and merchandise,” the statement said.
“We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright.”
Thompson, similarly, does not expect an avalanche of new Mickey Mouse material when the copyright lapses.
“People will be able to indiscriminately use that particular image, but it’s only the first Mickey, not the one that most people came to know,” he said.
“And for that matter, you know, rip-offs and pseudo rip-offs of Mickey Mouse have [already] been popping up all over the place.”
Thompson says Steamboat Willie – aside from being the pioneer of Disney animation studios – is almost a century old, far from the most recognizable of Disney assets, and arguably less vulnerable to manipulation.
“Disney has an incredibly deep inventory. It has a content bench that goes on forever, and it has Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel, it has ABC and ESPN, it just bought the rest of Hulu … when you look at what Disney controls, you would think it’s making all the money in America,” he said.
“And for a good portion of the 20th century, Disney was in many ways the guiding force of American childhood. They took a whole canon of fairytales that were centuries old and established what the definitive story was. If you read an old Cinderella story from way back, it’s all wrong, because it’s the Disney version we all know. Everything people know about Pocahontas comes from that movie with Colors of the Wind in it.
“So they’ve been around for a long time, and in the same category we used to call baseball and apple pie. Disney is distinctly an American idea as well as a company, and Steamboat Willie is kind of the symbolic prince of that cultural domination.
“But even if that copyright got changed tomorrow and they said you get another 100 years, there would still be a lot of the problems that Disney’s facing today.”