It’s Mickey, but not as you’ve ever seen him before.
A trailer for a slasher film, featuring a masked killer dressed as Mickey Mouse, was released on 1 January, the day that Disney’s copyright on the earliest versions of the cartoon character expired in the US.
“We wanted the polar opposite of what exists,” the movie’s producer said.
A new Mickey-inspired horror game, showing the rodent covered with blood stains, also dropped on the same day.
Steamboat Willie, a 1928 short film featuring early non-speaking versions of Mickey and Minnie, entered the public domain in the US on New Year’s Day.
It means cartoonists, novelists and filmmakers can now rework and use the earliest versions of Mickey and Minnie.
People will look back on this era and say, “just because they could have doesn’t mean they should have.”
This feels like a backlash to the insane length of copyright terms.
Just because Disney could lobby to make copyright law insanely long doesn’t mean they should have. It wouldn’t have been s big event if Disney didn’t make it one.
I’m not talking about copyright law, and if you read a tiny bit further down, you would see that I talked multiple times about the problem with modern copyright law and Disney’s part in it.
Shitty copyright law doesn’t mean we have to have shitty movies and shitty video games.