The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War against the Counterculture by Bob Levin

From the Publisher

"During a time of unprecedented political and social upheaval in U.S. history, one of the fiercest battles was ignited by a comic book. Such is the legacy of the Air Pirates, a group of underground cartoonists who brought upon themselves the full wrath of the Disney entertainment empire at the apex of its cultural influence." "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 Old Bodkins became more and more provocative, until the Chronicle let him go. The lesson that O'Neill drew from the experience? That what America needed most 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 his syndicated newspaper strip. They lived communally in a San Francisco warehouse owned by Francis Ford Coppola and put out a comic book, Air Pirates Funnies, which featured Disney characters participating in very un-Disneylike behavior. This provoked a mammoth lawsuit for copyright and trademark infringement, Disney represented by one of San Francisco's top corporate law firms and the Pirates by the cream of the counterculture bar. The litigation raged for 10 years, from the trial court to the U.S. Supreme Court and back again - changing lives, setting legal precedent, and making clear the boundaries in a still-going cultural war.

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. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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