Walt Disney's most profitable rodent has scurried out of the company's total control and into bloody new arenas.
Despite the corporate giant's desperate lobbying efforts to once again alter American copyright law to suit its purposes, Disney's Mickey Mouse entered into the public domain Monday along with various other notable characters and creative works, including "Mack the Knife," Charlie Chaplin's "The Circus," Buster Keaton' "The Cameraman," Agatha Christie's "The Mystery of the Blue Train," and Peter Pan.
The ratty-looking versions of the mouse seen in the 1928 animated short films "Steamboat Willie," "Plane Crazy," and "Gallopin' Gaucho" appear to be getting a similar treatment to that recently received by Winnie the Pooh — another beloved animated character re-imagined as a savage killer following his entry into the public domain in 2022.
Video game developer Nightmare Forge Games released a trailer Monday for its upcoming survival horror title Infestation 88, featuring a sickly-looking Mickey who hunts down player-controlled exterminators in a dark warehouse.
"In the year 1988, what was thought be an outbreak of vermin morphed into something far more sinister," reads the description of the game on Steam. "Prepare to face and eliminate a horrific entity, with each episode containing a distinct classic character or urban legend responsible for the infestation."
Infestation 88 - Official Reveal Traileryoutu.be
A trailer also dropped Monday for a live-action slasher film entitled "Mickey's Mouse Trap," featuring a menace wearing a Mickey mask stalking prospective victims and attacking an individual.
"A place for fun, a place for friends, a place for hunting. The mouse is out," the trailer telegraphs.
The plot of the film, directed by Jamie Bailey, is described thusly on IMDB: "It's Alex's 21st Birthday, but she's stuck at the amusement arcade on a late shift so her friends decide to surprise her, but a masked killer dressed as Mickey Mouse decides to play a game of his own with them which she must survive."
MICKEY'S MOUSE TRAP FILM TEASER TRAILER (2024) - FIRST EVER MICKEY MOUSE HORROR FILM!!!!youtu.be
The Hollywood Reporter indicated the film does not have a release date and that it's unclear if its producers have a distributor on board.
"We just wanted to have fun with it all. I mean it’s Steamboat Willie's Mickey Mouse murdering people," Bailey said in a statement. "It's ridiculous. We ran with it and had fun doing it and I think it shows."
Both horror adaptations specifically feature the likeness of the mouse debuted in the late 1920s since all more recent versions remain the strict intellectual property of Disney, including the sorcerer's apprentice seen in the 1940 film "Fantasia" as well as the rodent featured in dozens of animated films throughout the 1930s.
Kembrew McLeod, an intellectual property scholar at the University of Iowa, stressed to NPR that "[w]hat is going into the public domain is this particular appearance in this particular film."
"Ever since Mickey Mouse's first appearance in the 1928 short film Steamboat Willie, people have associated the character with Disney's stories, experiences, and authentic products," a Disney spokesman told the Associated Press over the weekend. "That will not change when the copyright in the Steamboat Willie film expires."
Whereas copyrights can lapse, "trademark law has no end," Harvard Law School professor Ruth Okediji told NPR.
While the "Steamboat Willie" mouse can be shared, copied, and repurposed, Disney's trademark on Mickey Mouse apparently precludes people from using the character in such a way that misleads consumers into thinking the work has the blessing of the House of Mouse.
Okediji warned that trademark law could be used to "effectively extend the life of a copyrighted work."
In the case of Mickey, Disney might intervene if adaptations could be argued to infringe on or dilute the corresponding trademark on account of how the mouse is used.
Daniel Mayeda from the UCLA School of Law similarly warned that adaptations could prove dicey, telling the Guardian in 2022, "You can use the Mickey Mouse character as it was originally created to create your own Mickey Mouse stories or stories with this character. But if you do so in a way that people will think of Disney – which is kind of likely because they have been investing in this character for so long – then in theory, Disney could say you violated my copyright."
Disney indicated in a statement that extra to protecting "[its] rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright," it would "safeguard against consumer confusion caused by unauthorized uses of Mickey and our other iconic characters."
Harvard Law Professor Rebecca Tushnet suggested in October that "people should be free to use the materials despite the existence of trademark rights, because trademark law shouldn't be able to stop you from doing what copyright law allows you to do and is set up to allow you to do. It's no accident that things go into the public domain."
However, Tushnet added that the "contours of that are as yet unclear, precisely because Congress lengthened the copyright term, and so we didn't get this problem until recently."
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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 came out 12 years ago, putting gamers in the shoes of elite Western commandos and an ex-Spetsnaz operator, all working desperately to prevent the onset of another world war. It was a fast-paced treat, resolving gloriously with a blood-soused ruffian lighting a cigar while his newly conquered foe dangled by the neck nearby.
It was met with rave reviews. It also set records at the time, selling over 6.5 million units in the U.S. and the U.K. within 24 hours of launch, netting Activision over $400 million. The money just kept pouring in from there.
In an effort to transfer lightning from one bottle to another and then slap a $70 price tag on it, developer Sledgehammer Games and Microsoft-owned publisher Activision swapped “3” out for Roman numerals, gave 14-year-old Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer maps a facelift, and offered a partial and anticlimactic retelling of how fictional Cpts. John “Soap” McTavish and John Price helped thwart the toxic schemes of the terroristic Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Makarov.
It appears the original and the most recent title in the brand recycle, Modern Warfare II (2022), may have set the bar too high in terms of story, sales — MWII cracked $1 billion within ten days of launch — and player expectations. So far, the reviews have mostly been damning or, at the very least, dismissive, and the sales are reportedly down 25%.
The game comprises a single-player campaign, a multiplayer mode, and an open-world zombie mode that is all but Warzone with fewer brain-dead variables. Each of these elements, if taken alone, would not be worth the hour it takes to download the game or the 200GB it hogs on your hard drive. However, as a whole, it’s a full meal of shooting fun.
The single-player campaign is a blast to play right up until it isn’t. Apart from a mind-numbingly dull shipyard mission, a sparsely populated nuclear reactor mission, and a glorified walking simulator ostensibly inserted as a reminder that Black Ops: Cold War could have been a whole lot worse, the levels are relatively punchy and well-designed.
Always two steps behind Makarov, a cartoonish villain dead set on black-flagging his way to radioactive Russian greatness, you have to bleed your way around civilian corpses and useless ally NPCs in hopes of exonerating an insurgent leader from a made-up country that might interest John Bolton.
The campaign alternates between rail shooter and open-world combat. Since you’re usually kept busy finding the whatsit in the latter, there’s little time to contemplate how much first-person shooters benefit stylistically from strict limits and atmospheric straightaways.
Sledgehammer teases the potential of moral choices and dialogue trees early in the game, but it’s a bug, not a feature. The next time you see dialogue options of any significance, you’ll be disarming a bomb that threatens to do you the kindness of wasting the cast of pixel-deep characters who’ve been sporadically grunting at you with British accents.
There’s been a lot of chatter about this game being a glorified DLC repackaged as a stand-alone game. It certainly seems that way, concluding on an offbeat with a laughably lousy eulogy for the four hours you killed trying to put a bullet in Makarov, followed by a slapdash post-credits scene. There is certainly no glorious finale and no cigar, just a setup for postmodern warfare between East and West.
In fairness, the hours preceding that final disappointment are not without their share of cheap thrills. Storming a Slavic terror financier’s stylish beach compound and raining down fury in the obligatory AC-130 gunship mission were both standouts.
The multiplayer is excellent, delivering face-warming hours of consistent fun with maps designed back before Bin Laden was fish food. Geriatrics’ muscle memory will guide them to victory while new players will discover that sometimes the old ways were indeed the best. Players are once again permitted to slide-cancel and can work their way up the ranks to level 55 with the help of a mini-map. Those who fast-stab their way to the top will find plenty of gear-unlocking challenges to keep them occupied until Activision begins substantiating the game with more DLC content.
Finally, the open-world zombie mode delivers some progressively challenging missions and a massive hellscape to execute them in. Like the open combat missions in the single-player, the terrain is relatively bland; however, there’s a lot more to explore in this mode.
While the Call of Duty franchise has dared to push some boundaries over the years (e.g., Call of Duty: Black Ops III succeeded as a provocative work of cyberpunk) and surprise gamers with the occasional plot twist, at the end of the day, COD is energy drinks, not fine wine; mushroom clouds, not blue-sky thinking; Michael Bay, not Tarkovsky.
Once a year, just ahead of Christmas, kids and adults with stress to transmute answer the call for some dumb fun. Modern Warfare III may underachieve on much, but on this — when factoring in all three game modes — it delivers.
A retro video game imagines a world in which those who identify as transgender or queer face conversion therapy, detention, and death, allowing players to slaughter the those who oppose radical leftist gender ideology while they escape.
"Terfenstein 3D is a short retro first-person shooter game about escaping a gender-fascist concentration camp. Unleash your pent-up fury upon the gender-critical tyrants with an arsenal of deadly weapons and tactics in cathartic bliss," a description of the game reads.
Some of the characters the player kills during the bloody game appear to be religious figures who are wearing crosses.
The game draws a parallel between the opponents of radical gender ideology and Nazi Germany.
"This game brings to light the very real transphobic violence many transgender people face for just existing. And draw a comparison between gender critics and nazi Germany," a description of the game states. "The game offers LGBTQAI+, transgender, and feminist themes of gender-critical people and what a post-war apocalyptic world would look like if gender fascists won. In this dystopian world, fascists have killed and imprisoned all transgender and queer people, subjecting them to harsh conversion therapy, imprisonment, and death. You play as an escapee fleeing their detention center, while you exact your revenge."
Sandra Moen, who developed the violent video game, apparently identifies as transgender.
"Want to play something better than #HogwartsLegacy? Wan to contribute to the trans community by supporting a trans game developer? AND KILL fascist TERF's? Try my game 'Terfenstein 3D,'" Moen tweeted, using the acronym that stands for "trans-exclusionary radical feminist."
"Hogwarts Legacy" is a video game based on the world created by J.K. Rowling in her popular "Harry Potter" books. But Rowling has earned the ire of radical leftist gender ideology proponents because of her positions on the issue.
She has expressed support for protecting women, girls, and women's spaces — she has also expressed concern about young women pursuing gender transition measures.
"I'm concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility," Rowling wrote in a 2020 essay.
"Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who've been abused by men," Rowling wrote. "So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he's a woman," she wrote, "then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth."
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