Rule one, you don’t mess with the Mouse. The Mouse has lawyers like you wouldn’t believe. It’s amazing to watch a certain politician, who is none too bright apparently, think he’s going to outsmart a company that has on at least one occasion gotten an entire US legal protection rewritten to be more to their liking. Most of us remember any number of Disney lawsuits against daycares whose owners decorated the walls with bootleg Disney characters and got sued. There was an Odyssey of the Mind team I knew in high school that had a blue genie as part of their sketch, and we watched them with great interest waiting for the cease and desist letter.

Now, to a certain extent, it makes sense. Disney’s intellectual property is pretty much all they’ve got. Oh, to be strictly fair, the parks have some great rides that you wouldn’t be able to find other places and that are far too expensive to copy in the average suburban back yard. But when Walt said it all started with a mouse, he might just as well have meant the merchandising as well. Dolls and watches and even slates, from the days when children brought their own slates to school with them. Nearly a century old, Disney merchandising started with the Mouse, too.

What’s more, the merchandising literally paid the studio’s bills through a lot of lean years. Maybe people didn’t want to pay to see The Three Caballeros, but they sure wanted to pay to have a Mickey Mouse wristwatch. And if Sleeping Beauty was, if technically, a financial failure, it seems likely that the studio sold enough story books and dolls and what have you to make up for it. The money would be there to pay for Walt’s next big gamble and to keep the lights on in the studio. Keeping the studio’s merchandise desirable means limiting the low-quality bootleg stuff, too, and of course every bootleg item someone else sells is one legitimate one you don’t.

So it’s no wonder that the studio has some of the best lawyers in the entertainment industry. Apparently not the best; legend has it that Disney’s lawyers spend some of their first days working for the company trying to break Pat Robertson’s 700 Club contract. Presumably the only way the state of Florida’s going to beat Disney is by finding and hiring those lawyers. And it wouldn’t surprise me if they were retired and/or dead by now. But Disney’s known for a long time that their brand is only as good as their lawyers and they’ve kept it by paying attention to their representation.

I am not all on the side of the Mouse, goodness knows. At very least it would’ve been nice if they’d developed a deal with a lot of those daycares. They couldn’t just let them use the characters; if they didn’t defend Mickey, they’d lose him, and that’s just a fact of law. But a nominal licensing fee, or something along those lines, instead of Big Scary Law Firm, would have been a better way to go. On the other hand, it does make it all the funnier to think about anyone believing they had the slightest chance of beating Disney when it comes to the court.

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