Walt Disney and his character of Mickey Mouse is known by all American school kids. Baby boomers remember The Mickey Mouse Club in the Fifties, and later generations remember the revivals in the Seventies & Nineties. Disney Land in California, & then Disney World in Florida became vacation mainstays for Americans. After Disney's death, his company grew to become the largest media & entertainment corporation in the world.
All this based on the career of a wholesome cartoon mouse & his friends. However, during the era of the Sixties, underground comix artists stepped up to challenge Mickey Mouse. But Walt Disney & his company successfully fought back the challenge in court, sending the Air Pirates reeling off the legal battlefield. Then, something interesting happened years after this battle that gives the lie to Disney's legal arguments.
Dan O'Neill was a 21 year old college drop out when the San Francisco Chronicle hired him to draw a comic strip in 1964. The strip was Odd Bodkins, probably one of the most surreal comic strips ( aside from Krazy Kat) ever published by a newspaper. Several times the Chronicle tried to cancel the strip (which it owned), but readers' outraged letters kept forcing the editors to re-instate it. O'Neill decided to try & get the paper sued for copyright infringement, so he started to include Disney characters in his strip. He thought this would force the SF Chronicle to give him the copyright to Odd Bodkins. The Chronicle fired him & canceled the strip in 1970. In 1972, they gave Dan O'Neill the copyright to Odd Bodkins.
But by 1972, O'Neill was being sued by Walt Disney. He had become intrigued with using Disney characters in underground comix, & had recruited other artists who dubbed them selves the Air Pirates. From Wikipedia:
Founded by Dan O'Neill, the group also included Shary Flenniken, Bobby London, Gary Hallgren, and Ted Richards.
The collective shared a common interest in the styles of past masters of the comic strip: Flenniken emulated Clare Briggs' family comic strips in her Trots and Bonnie comics, London's strip Dirty Duck paid homage to the styles of E.C. Segar's Thimble Theater and George Herriman's Krazy Kat, Richards' Dopin' Dan was similar to Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey and Gary Hallgren had a great interest in Cliff Sterett's "Polly and Her Pals". The original Air Pirates were a gang of Mickey Mouse antagonists of the 1930s; O'Neill regarded Mickey Mouse as a symbol of conformist hypocrisy in American culture, and therefore a ripe target for satire.
By 1971, the group had published Air Pirates #1 & 2. O'Neill had always planned on getting sued by Disney. But the company was ignoring their efforts, it seemed. So the Air Pirates gave the son of a Disney board member copies of the books, and had him place them on the conference table before a board meeting. Shortly, Walt Disney Company sued the Air Pirates.
Apparently, Dan O'Neill expected to strike a blow for artistic freedom by facing down a corporate behemoth & establishing parody as a recognized exemption to copyright. This didn't happen. Even the liberal judges of the Ninth Federal Circuit didn't think fair use covered cute cartoon critters doing drugs & having sex. Judge Wollenberg in the California District Court issued a preliminary injunction against the Air Pirates in 1972. The Air Pirates then published The Tortoise and The Hare. Disney went back to court, got a $200,000 preliminary judgement and another restraining order. Ten thousand copies of the just published book were seized. In 1978, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 3-0 to uphold the verdict, & then in 1979, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal.
O'Neill kept fighting, saying "Doing something stupid once is just plain stupid. Doing something stupid twice is a philosophy." In 1979,
he published a short strip called Communiqué #1 from the M.L.F.(Mouse Liberation Front) in CoEvolution Quarterly #21, a magazine. Disney went to court & demanded O'Neill be found in contempt of court & prosecuted criminally, along with Stewart Brand, the publisher of the magazine. Later that year, he organized several MLF art shows with the works of sympathetic artists, & went to the Disney studios to deliver personally The M.L.F. Communiqué #2 . Finally, in 1980, Disney realizing it would never recover the $190,000 in damages, and with a legal bill of $2 million, settled with Dan O'Neill. It dismissed the lawsuit, & O'Neill agreed to never draw a Disney creation again.
So what does The Lion King have to do with the tale of the Air Pirates? It looks like Disney ripped off the story & characters from a previous work by Japanese cartoonist Osamu Tezuka, the originator of Astro Boy & of Jungle Taitei (Jungle Emperor),or as it is known in English, Kimba the White Lion. The comic or manga was first published in Japan from 1950 to 1954. It was broadcast as a TV series in 1966, the first one in color in Japan. A full length animated film called Jungle Emperor Leo was released in 1997. The story line of The Lion King & Kimba the White Lion differ, but it is obvious the characters have been taken from Tezuma's manga. For more on this comparison, go here. Maybe I should contact Dan O'Neill. The company that hounded him for using their copyrighted characters has now done the same thing. Only, it looks like Disney will get away with this.
Dan O'Neill has a website here.
Images of Air Pirate Funnies can be found here.
You can read a more detailed story on the Air Pirates Vs. Disney at Reason magazine online.
I just Googled "Air Pirates Funnies" & you can buy a copy of no. 1 for $120 on Amazon.com.
From the Wikipedia article, it is apparent Osamu Tozuku did hundreds of comics & lots of TV shows. I'm not familiar with his work, not even Astro Boy.