Dan O’Neill & The Air Pirates: A Short Film

This is the untold story of Dan O’Neill and his underground comic collective “The Air Pirates“ which would take on the brass at Disney in a notorious decade-long legal battle over copyright infringement and freedom of speech. Dan O’Neill’s battle against Walt Disney Productions would be the longest legal copyright case in history. In 1970, Dan O’Neill founded the underground comics collective, The Air Pirates, to satirize Disney. The group included Bobby London, Shary Flenniken, Gary Hallgren, and Ted Richards. The original Air Pirates were a gang of Mickey Mouse antagonists from the 1930s. Dan O’Neill saw Mickey Mouse as a symbol of conformist hypocrisy in American culture, and therefore a ripe target for satire. Now in 2024, with the cartoon image of the Mouse reaching the public domain, Dan O’Neill finally has the last laugh as drawing a cartoon mouse will no longer be considered a federal crime.