The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture [Hardcover]

Bob Levin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2003

They fought the Mouse and the Mouse (eventually) won—but it was a battle that left everyone bloodied... During a time of unprecedented political, social, and cultural upheaval in U.S. history, one of the fiercest battles was ignited by a comic book. In 1963, the San Francisco Chronicle made 21-year-old Dan O'Neill the youngest syndicated cartoonist in American newspaper history. As O'Neill delved deeper into the emerging counterculture, his strip, Odd Bodkins, became stranger and stranger and more and more provocative, until the papers in the syndicate dropped it and the Chronicle let him go. The lesson that O'Neill drew from this was that what America most needed was the destruction of Walt Disney. O'Neill assembled a band of rogue cartoonists called the Air Pirates (after a group of villains who had bedeviled Mickey Mouse in comic books and cartoons). They lived communally in a San Francisco warehouse owned by Francis Ford Coppola and put out a comic book, Air Pirates Funnies, that featured Disney characters participating in very un-Disneylike behavior, provoking a mammoth lawsuit for copyright and trademark infringements and hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. Disney was represented by one of San Francisco's top corporate law firms and the Pirates by the cream of the counterculture bar. The lawsuit raged for 10 years, from the trial court to the US Supreme Court and back again.

The novelist and essayist Bob Levin recounts this rollicking saga with humor, wit, intelligence, and skill, bringing alive the times, the issues, the absurdities, the personalities, the changes wrought within them and us all. Includes never-before seen art from the Air Pirates archives! Two excerpted chapters of this book in The Comics Journal in 2001 proved to be one of the magazine's most popular features in recent memory. Black-and-white illustrations throughout.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1971, a group of underground cartoonists known as the Air Pirates put out a comic book parody of Disney cartoons in which Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Bucky Bug and others get high, have sex and swear a blue streak. Extremely protective of its characters' reputations, Disney sued-and turned what would have been a blip on the countercultural radar screen into a First Amendment cause celebre. The result was a classic post-Vietnam kulturkampf pitting artistic license against corporate copyright, and San Francisco's bohemian debauchery against Disneyland's disciplined wholesomeness. Levin's charming and thoughtful account, complete with reproductions of some of the offending cartoons, meanders through the history of the comic book industry, the rise of Disney to domination in the cultural marketplace and the intricacies of copyright and First Amendment law around which the litigation revolved. His anecedotal, shaggy-dog style is perfect for sketching indelible portraits of the quirky, romantic, incorrigibly stoned denizens of San Francisco's underground comics scene, whose mission it was to smash every false idol of square America and whose sensibility lives on in alternative weeklies across the land. If they did, as Disney claimed, besmirch the innocence of a national icon, the Air Pirates are themselves emblems of a lost idealism, of a time when people believed that sex, drugs and revolutionary rhetoric could liberate society from the rule of corporate entertainment monoliths. B&w photos.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

The definitive history of this wonderful, mad (and, I believe, significant) episode in Amercan popular culture. -- Richard Milner, Senior Editor at Natural History magazine

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 270 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books; 1st Fantagraphics Books Ed edition (May 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156097530X
• ISBN-13: 978-1560975304
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,305,587 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars For comix fans and IP lawyers, July 14, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture (Hardcover)

First, the bad stuff: too partisan in places, including the all-too-common Sixties survivors' "weren't we just so wonderful?" meanderings, some barely-relvant personal stuff about the author's own life, some over-lawyerly writing in a few places, and an occasional assumption that you know about certain artists or individuals already. That aside, this is a very good book.
Disney took on the collective work of Dan O'Neill and the Air Pirates after they issued parodies of Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters. Or, as intellectual property (IP) lawyers say, "properties." Levin's work emphasizes the case, how it came about, how it moved through the courts, and what the disposition was. As a result, the reader gets a good idea of how IP cases work, and what was at stake. He discusses the notion of parody, infringement, and so on, pointing the oddities and contradictions in the statutory and case law. (But, hey, a case citation once in a while, counselor?) The publishers reproduce some of the offending material, letting the reader see what Disney saw. Levin also does not glorify O'Neill or the other Air Pirates, though he clearly supports their side, and says that getting the real story from O'Neill and his crew was not always easy. Finally, if this book causes a few more folks to seek out O'Neill's "Odds Bodkins", it will have done a great service. Like UG comics? Don't miss this. IP lawyer? A must read.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting topic...bad book, January 6, 2006

By 

Eric Laugel "it7276" (West Chester, Ohio United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture (Hardcover)

The topic of this book certainly sounded interesting, especially since I was taking a Media Laws course at the time I read it. However, this book was bogged down with too many problems for me to recommend it.

First of all, the book is full of small errors that make it seem like it was hastily thrown together and shoved onto the shelves. The author is listed as "Bob Levin" on the front cover, but as "Bob Levine" on the spine. A citation on the back page quotes an editor as calling the book "The definitive history of this wonderful, mad (and, I believe, signficant) episode in Amercan [sic] popular culture." And one of the illustrations and comics in the book are listed as being from 1971, even though Levin later says (correctly) that they were from the mid 90s.

Aside from these annoying but ultimately forgivable problems, the author just doesn't have a very fluid or gripping writing style. Some of his sentences so grossly overuse punctuation marks that they may discuss three different topics in a single sentence. I will admit that he does a passable job describing copyright laws, but that was just one part of this book. His footnotes also tend to be places for him to get in his two cents rather than truly informative additions. And he ultimately fails to make the characters endearing to the audience, which is frustrating since he admits in the book that each author is trying to sell a story or viewpoint to the reader. It may be more objective to paint the Air Pirates as nothing more than a bunch of stoned twenty-somethings following an even more-stoned thirty-something, but it sure didn't sell to me that we should be rooting for them.

The ending of the book also let me down. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say that after discussing a series of lawsuits brought against the Air Pirates, the story ends very abruptly, without describing the final decision in any great detail. This should have been the climax of the narrative, and it just fizzles out.

So while I appreciate Bob Levin pointing out this interesting case that has apparently gotten very little recognition, I wish that he would have discovered it, and then turned it over to a better author.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For anyone concerned with such issues as artistic freedom, September 13, 2003

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture (Hardcover)

Ably researched and written by Bob Levin (an experienced essayist for "The Comics Journal"), The Pirates And The Mouse: Disney's War Against The Counterculture is the intrinsically fascinating and little-known story of a group of rogue cartoonists led by Dan O'Neill (the youngest syndicated cartoonist in American newspaper history), who waged a countercultural war of pictures against the Disney Corporation by portraying Disney characters engaging in un-Disney like behavior. In response, Disney executives brought forth a massive lawsuit against these unapproved cartoonists for copyright infringement. The Pirates And The Mouse traces a complex and tangled personal, legal, and cultural saga ranging from O'Neill's bitterness against the censorship that cost him a job, to contemporary corporate politics, issues of intellectual property rights and social commentary, and more. The Pirates And The Mouse is a "must-read" for anyone concerned with such issues as artistic freedom, copyright law, as well as readers seeking to learn more about the oft-unspoken and somewhat darker side of the corporate Disney.