Over at Meh, a site that offers implausibly great bargains on overstocked and discontinued items that are perfectly good and didn’t find their original market, I wrote about Bambi. This might seem an odd connection! But the folks at Meh have quite active forums and asked me a few years ago and then again recently to write some provocative researched articles about quirky points of interest.

I’m restarting these articles with a serialized four-parter about Bambi, which has a complicated backstory. The book was written by the Austrian newspaper journalist, playwright, and novelist Felix Salten (not his original name) and its history ties in underpayment, the Alger Hiss trial, Nazis, Walt Disney, and alleged copyright misdeeds.

In the first part published today, I look at Bambi’s early publication history and reception, and how Walt Disney got his hands on the rights to make an animated movie. In the next three parts, I dig into the horrible Disney-lobbied extension to copyright in the U.S., how Disney forced itself to pay a lot more in rights to Salten’s heirs and assignees, and how Salten’s life ended in Switzerland.

The four parts focus on the subject at hand, but I could write additional essays about Salten’s relationship to Zionism, the conflict exhibited in Switzerland in turning back Jewish refugees during World War II and how Salten’s daughter Anna’s second husband (Veit Wyler) exhibited incredible courage in refusing to do so, and Wyler’s later significant involvement with Tibetan Buddhism. I tell you: this story never ends.

Part 2, published August 30, looks into the American system of copyright and how it was harmonized with the rest of the world in 1978—and then extended in 1998 to keep Disney’s intellectual property from the 1920s and 1930s locked up for two more decades. In the end, this likely cost Disney billions.

Part 3, published September 6, examines Salten’s heirs sold the rights to Bambi to Twin Books—which sued Disney, claiming it had violated the terms of a previous set of agreements. Disney unveiled a shocker: the mouse-logoed giant said Bambi had fallen out of copyright decades before! An appeals court differed.

Part 4, published September 13, digs into Salten’s politics and his life in exile starting in 1939. Salten was full of contradictions. While a Jewish journalist who supported press freedom and liberty, and an early Zionist who was a friend of Theodor Herzl’s, he was also an Austrian nationalist who didn’t immediately opposite the rise of a fascist party in his country—or the first mass book-burning in Germany. He died in exile, likely not long after seeing the Disney movie of his work.