Can't wait to see Alan Moore's take on the character.
There's some weird stuff in this.
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Can't wait to see Alan Moore's take on the character.
There's some weird stuff in this.
You need to be a member of Captain Comics to add comments!
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I think this is only the second time I've seen it all the way through. I was glad to see that they acknowledged Ub Iwerks at the beginning. Later they pretended that Walt did everything.
I think that the original look of Mickey and Minnie, not just Steamboat Willie, became public domain. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Mickey's longer-eared look-alike, is even older. They just got him back. Is his copyright still in force?
Just guessing, but I think that while Disney has some specific rights (Epic Mickey and derived works; possibly some title or catchphrase such as "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit") Oswald himself and his early features are very much in the public domain.
I can't imagine that they are somehow better protected by copyright than Mickey.
Yes, I can confirm that Walt Disney's earlier works (such as Oswald) are in the public doman; it was mentioned on a news story about Micky's copyright.
I would like to take this opportunity to correct a factoid surrounding Micky Mouse for decades. As far back as high school I remember people presenting "trivia" that, in his very first cartoon, Mickey Mouse was known as "Steamboat Willie." This niggling bit of misinformation even wormed its way, in a quite unlikely fashion, into the Tom Hanks blockbuster Saving Private Ryan. "Willie" was the name of the steamboat, not the mouse. The clip linked above cleary identifies "Steamboat Willie" as "A Mickey Mouse Cartoon." The title was most likely taken from the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill. Thank you for letting me get that off my chest.
Wasn't Oswald a propriety of the Walter Lantz studios where Walt Disney worked before creating Mickey, though? Word has it that Walt created Mickey as a response of sorts for losing / being denied those property rights.
Oh, that sounds familiar.
I'm not sure if it was the Walter Lantz studios, but I know that Walt created Oswald as work-for-hire. I watched something that explained it all. When Walt was unhappy he joined his brother to open their own studio, hence Mickey.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, however, this is all tempered by the fact that Disney still has a trademark for Mickey Mouse, and subsequent appearances of Mickey, etc. are still under copyright. How this plays out will give us some insighth into what happens in ten years when Action Comics #1 falls into the public domain. I can only imagine the Zatara and Tex Thomson derivative works we'll see.
I wonder about the alternate reality where Disney's central symbol is Oswald the Rabbit, but don't let me go down that rabbit-hole. As I've said many times before, there's something sketchy about bunnies:
Can't wait to see Alan Moore's take on the character.
When the copyright on the earliest version of Winnie the Pooh expired, the horror movie Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) was filmed and released.
Summary:
After Christopher Robin abandons them for college, Pooh and Piglet embark on a bloody rampage as they search for a new source of food.
There is already talk of something similar for Mickey.
That didn't take long:
From the BBC: "Mickey Mouse Horror Film Unveiled as Copyright Ends"
There's a link to a trailer for this within the article.