If aliens discover our desert planet sometime in the future, they might mistake the Minions for a hieroglyphic language our species used to communicate. The chatty companions of My favorite evil and its derivatives can be seen on Facebook’s mental health pages, in Instagram posts announcing the birth of a baby, and on the sides of landscaping trucks. They’re on party supply store balloon windows, bakery blackboards, QAnon protest signs, and cannabis dispensary window murals, where they all seem taller than usual. My roommate brought home vaguely yellow Minion shot glasses from a trip to the Florida Keys. I don’t need an article 20 years from now to warn me that drinking from them could be harmful to my health – they are clearly unlicensed products.
Contrast this ubiquity with the aggressiveness with which Disney handles its trademark characters. In 1989, The Walt Disney Company took down three Florida daycare centers for their murals featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and other Disney characters. Disney demanded its removal. Nearly 10 years later, US courts passed the Sonny Bono Act, an extension of several expired copyrights, preventing them from becoming public domain. It was the first of its kind in America, and is colloquially known as “The Mickey Mouse Protection Act” due to its biggest benefactor – the company best known for fighting copyright expiration at any cost and defending its brand regardless of public opinion.
Certainly this attitude ruffled the feathers. Daycare injunctions were unpopular with Florida residents. The Disney move was infamous enough to become the basis of a 2008 segment of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, where Krusty hurls unlicensed footage of his face onto the walls of Maggie’s daycare and dies horribly as a result (Ironically, you can now watch this episode on Disney Plus.) After Disney took down the unlicensed Mickeys, Universal jumped at the chance to replace the murals with Hanna-Barbera characters like Fred Flintstone. This was right before Universal Studios Florida opened in 1990, where Hanna-Barbera characters would serve as the park’s cartoon mascots.
But Universal Studios’ current cartoon mascots are much, much more ubiquitous than Fred. And allowing creators to place these mascots on walls, signs, and standalone products has undoubtedly done the studio far more good than going after copyright violators ever would have.
Mickey Mouse, created in 1928, is America’s preeminent cartoon hero — at least on paper, traditionally. But it’s easy to go a day or a week or more without seeing a picture of Mickey Mouse. When was the last time you went a week without seeing a Minion reference, a social media meme or ad or sign or logo? They are the dominant cartoon threats in America by a yellow landslide.
And they are almost certainly on the walls of many day care centers. Universal Studios — parent company of Illumination, the animation studio that blessed us with Minions — didn’t put them there. Minions are not in the public domain. But you wouldn’t know that from the many ways people have appropriated them. And Universal’s comparatively nonchalant attitude towards the Minions’ litigation has undoubtedly paid off – making them as recognizable and culturally front-and-center as Mickey, if not more so.
The Minions are part of a proud lineage of diminutive pop culture critters, from the Gremlins to the Rabbids and Warner’s Tasmanian Devil in all their many incarnations. Where Mickey Mouse is generally well-meaning and courageous, the Minions and their energetic, childlike brethren are drawn into anarchy. As friendly as they are, they create chaos. They behave unpredictably, uncontrollably. They live to knock down dominoes. The world at large loves these little stinkers because they are walking and singing and laughing.
And that’s partly why they’re so deployable in any setting. A version of Mickey Mouse dressed as the Joker or Austin Powers would look odd, but this type of transformational art is entirely consistent with the Minions’ malleability, not to mention their personalities. Minions canonically demand a laissez-faire approach to brand management to make room for their chaos. The question begs attention: is this a more appropriate approach to creating phenomena in the 21st century than defending the Disney brand?
In 1774, the British courts resolved Donaldson v. Beckett , putting modern copyright law in motion. The case – a conclusion to the 1700s “Booksellers’ War” between authors, publishers, bookstores and smugglers – ruled that publishers own the rights to a work for a maximum of 28 years. Most copyright laws since that decision share many similar characteristics, albeit with different and often longer grace periods. A copyright holder, whether the original creator or publisher, can commercially sell something exclusively until it eventually enters the public domain. This ensures that no property can retroactively have dominion over Greek philosophers or William Shakespeare.
Although authors, publishers and distributors are still not doing well 300 years later, the contextual purpose of exercising intellectual property has changed a lot. Victor Hugo did not have the vision to create entire theme parks and merchandising lines around The Wagered maples . Brand owners don’t just want to control a story, they want to control every possible opportunity to leverage that in money and advertising.
Disney’s playbook has always been to rewrite public domain fairy tales into copyrighted versions and then shape an ecosystem where any other adaptation of the original story comes out as a bootleg. When Disney managed to put pressure on Washington to extend its copyright on its trademarked characters in 1998, it was after the studio returned to the zeitgeist with a new breed of super-popular rewrites of other people’s stories:The Little Mermaid , A Beautiful and the Beast , e Aladdin .
And Universal has a similar history as a studio. It began its success with a series of adaptations of classic horror stories from the 1930s and 1940s: dracula , Frankenstein , The werewolf , The invisible man . Many of these stories are in the public domain, but Universal retains the rights to its own iterations, which have become the canonized versions in the public imagination.
Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t green until Karoly Grosz painted it in advertising material. Universal can throw a saber at anyone trying to cash in on a design that comes too close to its own. Hammer’s resurrected version of Frankenstein had different scars and shadows, but there’s no doubt that most Frankenstein images since James Whale’s 1931 film resemble Universal’s flat-topped giant in some way, as if he were the parent in Herman Munster’s family tree. The tolerance for derivative versions is not intended to paint Universal as saintly or generous, but it does illustrate how beneficial it can be to let the public run wild with their creations.
The 1990s brought a new level of raucous countercultural feedback, resisting Disney’s return to family dominance. Culture-jammers, Ron English and Adbusters were focused on reclaiming Mickey as a kind of surrogate mascot for consumerism and corporate malevolence. Their efforts have done nothing to bring down the Magic Kingdom, suggesting that even cultural capital has its own forms of soft and hard power. (Think of the band Sparks recording a satirical song about Mickey Mouse on their 1982 album Angst in My Pants and then recording an official, licensed song about Minnie Mouse for Disney a year later.)
Culture jamming has become a lost art, but only because it has grown even more – and more sincere. Now when people share their Minions images, Shrek or SpongeBob SquarePants (interestingly, three cartoon characters that have had attractions at Universal Studios theme parks), is not a critique of these properties or the corporate structures they belong to, but merely a form of self-expression. Nickelodeon even sold its own line of fan-canonized SpongeBob toys. While Disney is busy processing Etsy pages, you can show someone just how deep your love runs with a Minions wedding ring.
Intellectual property has never been as strange as it is today. Disney, having run out of fairy tales, now acts as a growing portfolio of active pop culture trademarks: Buying properties like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Muppets just gives the company more territory to zealously protect. Don’t expect Darth Vader to visit his birthday without a follow-up from Disney’s legal team.
Superhero ownership, Disney’s fastest-growing frontier, has always been a contested issue, with Disney already on the defensive.
Recluse Steve Ditko didn’t want to get involved with his characters’ happenings in Hollywood, but his estate is now very interested in contesting the ownership of Spider-Man and Dr. Weird . Eclipsing them all is the three-circle silhouette of Mickey Mouse himself, coming soon for another round of trademark extension, this time with conservative culture warriors eager to deny it.
And as all this is happening, the Minions continue to spread through murals, memes and the internet in general, still smelling like the tube they were squeezed out of. They will continue to belong to Universal Studios for many years to come. But in their case this seems functionally irrelevant. How would it be different if Minions were in the public domain? There’s nowhere the Minions aren’t.
Between sustaining entertainment and algorithmic feedback loops, the Minions’ sheer popularity has taken on a perverse life of its own. Like this Frankenstein gives Universal Studios permanent real estate in a piece of public consciousness, the uncontrolled spread of the Minions has greatly increased awareness of Illumination’s work, paving the way for My favorite evil and its derivatives continue to advance in a world where the entire internet seems willing to deal with Universal’s marketing efforts for free.
This all suggests that the money, clout and nostalgia wrought by ubiquity could surpass – or at least significantly amplify – the dollars made from selling toys alone. Maybe Universal created a monster they can’t control, or maybe they just don’t want to. Either way, he’s mastered the process of cashing in on this monster’s ever-expanding adventures.
This article is a translation of the writing by Zack Kotzer to the website Polygon.
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