How Despicable Me’s beloved Minions beat Disney at the copyright game

Our deserted planet may be discovered by aliens in the near future. They might mistake our Minions as a hieroglyphic communication system. They are babbling companions. Despicable MeIts spinoffs are visible on Facebook’s mental health pages and Instagram announcements of a baby’s birth. They can also be found on landscaping trucks and the sides. They’re on party supply store balloon displays, bakery chalkboards, QAnon protest signs, and cannabis-dispensary window murals, where they all look higher than usual. From a Florida Keys trip, my roommate brought home Minion shot glasses in vaguely yellow brand. I do not need an article 20 years from now to warn me that drinking from them may be detrimental to my health — they’re clearly unlicensed merch.

Compare this ubiquity with the way Disney protects its trademarked characters. The Walt Disney Company sued three Florida day cares over murals depicting Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Disney demanded that they be removed. A little over ten years later, the Sonny Bono Act of the United States was approved. This extended several expired copyrights and prevented them from being made public. It was the first of its kind in America, and it’s colloquially known as “The Mickey Mouse Protection Act” due to its greatest benefactor — the company most known for fighting copyright expiration at any cost, and defending its brand regardless of public opinion.

Polygon Photo by Zack Kotzer

That attitude sure has raised eyebrows. Floridaans were unhappy with Florida’s daycare injunctions. Disney’s move was infamous enough to become the basis of a 2008 Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment where Krusty sandblasts unlicensed images of his face off the walls at Maggie’s day care and dies horribly as a result. That episode can be viewed on Disney Plus, ironically. Universal was quick to take down unlicensed Mickeys and replaced the murals by Hanna-Barbera characters such as Fred Flintstone. This was just ahead of the 1990 opening of Universal Studios Florida, where those Hanna-Barbera characters would serve as the park’s cartoon mascots.

But Universal Studios’ current cartoon mascots are far, far more ubiquitous than Fred. The studio has done far more by allowing creators to put the mascots up on signs and walls than it would have by pursuing copyright violators.

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 longer without seeing a picture of Mickey Mouse. How many times have you gone a week and not seen a Minion-related meme, social media sign, logo, or ad? They’re the dominating cartoon menaces in America by a yellow landslide.

And they’re almost certainly on the walls of a number of day care facilities. Universal Studios — parent company of Illumination, the animation studio that blessed us with Minions — did not put them there. The Minions aren’t public domain. But you wouldn’t know it by the many ways people have taken ownership of them. And Universal’s comparatively hands-off attitude toward Minion litigation has arguably paid off — by making them as recognizable and culturally front-and-center as Mickey, if not more so.

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The Minions are part of a proud lineage of well-loved babbling diminutive pop culture critters, from Gremlins to Rabbids to Warner’s Tasmanian Devil, in all his many incarnations. While Mickey Mouse may be brave and kind, Mickey Mouse and the Minions are much more prone to chaos. They are friendly, but they can also be chaotic. Unpredictably and uncontrollably they behave. They can knock over dominoes. The world at large loves these little stinkers because they’re walking, singing, giggling ids.

And that’s partly why they’re so deployable in any scenario. A version of Mickey Mouse dressed like the Joker or Austin Powers would feel odd, but that kind of transformational art is fully consistent with the Minions’ malleability, not to mention their personas. Minions are known to demand an open-ended approach to branding management to make room for their madness. The question beckons: Is that a more appropriate approach to phenomenon-making in the 21st century than Disney’s brand defense?

British courts were established in 1774. Donaldson v. BeckettThe modern copyright laws were thus established. The case — a conclusion to the 1700s’ “War of the Booksellers” between authors, publishers, bookstores, and bootleggers — decided that publishers hold the rights to a work for a maximum of 28 years. Many copyright laws that have been passed since then share similar characteristics, but with longer grace periods and different terms. A copyright holder, whether it’s the original creator or the publisher, can commercially sell something exclusively until it eventually enters the public domain. No estate can retroactively claim dominion of Greek philosophers or William Shakespeare.

While authors, publishers, and distributors still aren’t playing nice 300 years later, the contextual purpose for exercising intellectual property has changed greatly. Victor Hugo had no vision when he created entire theme parks around the world and multiple merchandising products. LEs Misérables. Brand owners don’t just want to control a story, they want to control every possible opportunity to leverage it into money and publicity.

Photo: Giorgos Georgiou/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Disney’s playbook has always been to rewrite public domain fairy tales into copyrighted versions, then mold an ecosystem where any other adaptation of the original story comes off as the bootleg. When Disney was able to lobby Washington to extend its copyrights on its trademarked characters in 1998, it was after the studio returned to the zeitgeist with a new generation of uber-popular rewrites of other people’s stories: The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the BeastAnd Aladdin.

Universal also has a similar past as a studio. Universal’s success was fueled by a series of horror adaptations from the 1930s through 1940s. Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man. While many stories in this collection are available in the open, Universal holds the rights to their own versions, which have become the most popular in the public imagination.

Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t green until Karoly Grosz painted him on publicity material. Universal will lash out at anybody who makes money from designs that are too closely related to their own. Hammer’s resurrected version of Frankenstein had different scars and shades, but there’s no question that most images of Frankenstein since James Whale’s 1931 movie look back to Universal’s flat-topped giant in some way, as if he were the progenitor in Herman Munster’s family tree. The tolerance for derivative versions isn’t meant to paint Universal as saintly or generous, but it does illustrate how beneficial it can be to let the public run wild with your creations.

The 1990s brought a new level of screeching countercultural feedback, resisting Disney’s family-focused return to dominance. Ron English and Adbusters were laser-focused in attempting to reclaim Mickey as an avatar of corporate greed and consumerism. The Magic Kingdom was not overthrown by their efforts, which suggests cultural capital also has hard and soft power. Think of Sparks performing satirical songs about Mickey Mouse in 1982 on their album. Angst in My PantsThen, a year later, he recorded an official Disney-licensed song about Minnie Mouse.

Culture-jamming has become a lost art, but only because it grew even bigger — and more sincere. Now, when people share their images of Minions, Shrek, or SpongeBob (curiously, three cartoon characters who all have had attractions at Universal Studios theme parks), it isn’t a criticism of those properties or the corporate structures they belong to but merely a form of self-expression. Nickelodeon has even produced its own toys line featuring the fan-canonized SpongeBobs. A Minions wedding band can be a great way to show how much you love someone, while Disney is busy with Etsy page lawsuits.

The world of intellectual property has never been more complicated than today. Disney has exhausted all fairy tales and now manages a growing collection of pop culture trademarks. Buying properties such as Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Muppets and other characters gives it more land to guard. Don’t expect Darth Vader to visit your birthday without a follow-up from Disney’s legal team.

The ownership of superheroes, Disney’s fastest growing frontier, has always been a contested issue, with Disney already on the defensive. The reclusive Steve Ditko did not want to be involved with his characters’ Hollywood goings-on, but his estate is now keenly interested in contesting the ownership of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. They are all strange.

As this happens, Minions spread to murals, memes and the web, still smellin’ like what they were squeezed out of. They’ll continue to belong to Universal Studios for many years. However, this seems to be functionally irrelevant in their situation. It would be very different, if it were the Minions that were in public domain. The Minions exist in no other place.

From tentpole entertainment to algorithmic feedback loops the Minions’ mere popularity has led to a bizarre life. Similar to Frankenstein gives Universal Studios permanent real estate on a chunk of the public consciousness, the unchecked spread of the Minions has vastly increased awareness of Illumination’s work, paving the way for Despicable Me and its spinoffs to steadily continue their advance in a world where the entire internet seems willing to handle Universal’s marketing efforts for free. It suggests that the money, clout, and nostalgia forged from ubiquity can outweigh — or at least significantly amplify — the dollars reeled in from toy sales alone. Maybe Universal has created a monster it cannot control, or maybe it just doesn’t want to. Either way, it’s mastered the process of profiting from that monster’s ever-expanding adventures.