Cover Story Customs Unraveled Almost everyone has welcomed new government reforms that slash tariff rates, simplify customs procedures and prepare the country for wider integration into the global economy. While on paper the reforms will cost the government LE 3 billion, analysts predict the new rates could actually be a boon to the government by unbinding business. Looming Concerns If the textile sector is any indication, the new government will have to prove its customs reforms look as good in practice as they do on paper CUSTOMS UNRAVELED Almost everyone has welcomed new government reforms that slash tariff rates, simplify customs procedures and prepare the country for wider integration into the global economy. While on paper the reforms will cost the government LE 3 billion, analysts predict the new rates could actually be a boon to the government by unbinding business. Dalia Mohamed Ibrahim, vice-president of Nahdet Misr for Publishing and Printing, seated, and Amal Farrah, editor-in-chief of Mickey. Winnie the Pooh is a newmember of Nahdet Misr’s Disney lineup. An artist makes adjustments for Arab audiences Story editors translate culture, too, using familiar Arabic jokes. Story editors translate culture, too, using familiar Arabic jokes. PhotoShop during the layout process. PhotoShop during the layout process.

By Vivian Salama

I recently attended a dinner party with some Cairene friends. Naela, an NGO director, was moving to Sweden with her family, and we had all gathered to bid her farewell. As the evening progressed, Naela casually mentioned how she wished there were a way to get her favorite Arabic comic book, Mickey (or Meekee, as it’s pronounced) while abroad. Suddenly, talk of politics and society took a radical turn as everyone around the table discovered a shared love of the magazine.

Hours later, guests were still overcome by teary-eyed laughter as they reminisced about their favorite weekly adventures of Mickey, Batoot (Donald Duck) and Bondock (Goofy).

Having grown up in the United States, I can sing along to old songs from the Mickey Mouse Club and even name the original Mouseketeers. I’ve seen Mickey’s debut film, the 1928 black-and-white Steamboat Willy, more times than I can count, but what I witnessed that night was unlike anything I have ever seen in America, the birthplace of Mickey Mouse and friends.

However popular the Disney characters are in the United States, they occupy a unique position in Egypt’s collective memory: Mickey is one of the few childhood memories common to virtually all Egyptians living today. Tastes in music, movies, art and politics have changed over the years, but Mickey remains largely unchanged, retaining the same nationwide allure as it had when it was first introduced more than 40 years ago.

The characters’ international appeal is equally strong: Last October, Mickey and friends topped Forbes magazine’s list of top grossing cartoon characters worldwide, earning Disney some $5.8 billion per year. (See sidebar.) It’s no wonder: with three theme parks, more than 100 feature films, hundreds of books, thousands of magazines and a face recognizable to virtually anyone, anywhere, the Mickey Mouse franchise shows no signs of dimming.

Still, Mickey has suffered through a few rough spells during his sojourn in Egypt, most recently in early 2003 when, without warning, the weekly pastime of tens of thousands of readers came to an abrupt end. Disney had decided not to renew its Arab-world licensing agreement with Egyptian publisher Dar Al-Hilal, citing quality issues and a lack of “creative plans” to take the franchise forward.

A friend was gone, and no one knew when or if he would make a comeback. Fans didn’t take the news sitting down. Disney was bombarded by letters from readers throughout the region demanding the return of their favorite characters.

In January 2004, after a nine-month hiatus, the Egyptian publishing house Nahdet Misr launched a new, revamped Mickey under license from Disney. The new magazine looks a bit different than it did when it first hit the local markets in the 1950s. For starters, the flimsy newsprint paper on which it was printed has been given a pricey facelift with glossy, smear- and odor-free pages. Each Nahdet Misr issue runs approximately 20% longer than the old Dar Al-Hilal standard and artists use bolder, more advanced methods of illustration, much of it computer-aided. What’s more, Mickey and friends have abandoned their old, colloquial Egyptian conversations in favor of Modern Standard Arabic dialogue.

Fans also need deeper pockets to indulge their weekly habit. The new version costs LE 2.50 on newsstands, up from LE 1.50. (Mickey Gaib and Super Mickey, special monthly editions, now cost LE 3.50.)

Readers seem to appreciate the new Mickey: The magazine has not only retained its place as the Arab world’s top-selling children’s title, but its circulation nearly tripled in its first year with Nahdet Misr.

With Mickey having graced the silver screen 15 times by 1930, a company by the name of King Features Syndicate still a powerhouse in its field offered Walt Disney a deal to star Mickey Mouse and his supporting characters in their first nationally syndicated comic strip in the United States. Disney was happy to oblige, and on January 13th, 1930 the comic collaboration of artists Ub Iwerks, Win Smith and, of course, creator and company founder Walt Disney himself, debuted in American newspapers.

The first to roll out was an adaptation of Mickey’s 1928 silent film, Plane Crazy. Minnie Mouse soon joined the strip’s cast, and more comics and characters would follow, including the “Silly Symphony” Sunday page and the Donald Duck newspaper strip.

The Mickey strip was a hit and later crossed oceans and conquered language barriers as the mouse and his supporting cast made their international debut in England in the Mickey Mouse Weekly, which ran from 1936 to 1959. The tabloid-sized magazine reprinted strips from the American edition leavened with story lines developed to suit British humor.

In France, publisher Paul Winkler launched Le Journal de Mickey in 1934. The magazine included both reprinted Disney material and third-party comics. It wasn’t until 1950, when the Belgian edition of Mickey launched, that France published its first art using authentic Disney characters.

The Second World War slowed the franchise’s international expansion even as it saw Mickey grow in importance to North American audiences looking for escapist humor in the midst of the world’s most destructive conflict. Disney cartoons debuted in Italy in 1937, but production there and elsewhere in Europe didn’t take off until the post-war period: Political and military realities prevented Disney from promoting the characters in countries occupied by invading Nazi German armies.

After the war’s end, Mickey Mouse and friends spread through Europe like wildfire in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Local publishers often rewrote stories in local dialects, peppering the strips with inside jokes famliar to most natives.

Still, Mickey’s popularity had yet to reach its peak, and the only versions available in the Arab world were foreign-language imports.

In the late 1950s, Egypt was deep in the thrall of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arab and Arab socialist ideals. As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, the region’s cultural life flourished as a golden era of Arab film packed throngs into cinemas; the sentimental lyrics of Abdel Halim Hafez and Om Kalthoum graced the airwaves; and Naguib Mahfouz released his classic Children of Our Quarter following a seven-year hiatus.

All the while, Disney decided to conquer uncharted territories. Having already won over the hearts of readers in more than two dozen countries, Disney executives approached the Cairo-based publishing house Dar Al-Hilal in 1959 hoping to launch an Arabic version of Mickey comics.

By that year, Sinbad, Egypt’s first locally published children’s magazine, which launched in 1952, was in troubled waters, leaving the market largely wide open except for Dar Al-Hilal’s own Egyptian comic book series Samir, which first hit the stands in 1956. Nadia Nashaat, then editor-in-chief of Samir, negotiated a deal with Disney that won Dar Al-Hilal the rights to publish a translated version of Mickey Mouse comics in a regular magazine format.

“Dar Al-Hilal was a reputable company at that time,” says Dr. Shahira Khalil, currently the editor-in-chief of Samir magazine. “The magazines published by Dar Al-Hilal at that time were very successful, so there was no problem at all to have the copyright for Mickey here.”

“Mickey magazine was the first publication in the region to approach children and maintained its position during the previous period because it kept on developing its ideas to cope with the fast pace of the recent history, noting that Disney characters[appeal to] allgenerations,” explains Hisham Zahid, director of publications at Disney Middle East. “The most important factor is the great support these publications get from Disney itself as the strongest family entertainment company in the world.”

The Mickey craze quickly caught on. Readers identified with these American-conceived characters, whose names were Arabized for greater appeal. Donald Duck became Batoot; Goofy was called Bondock; Uncle Scrooge renamed Amm Dahab, to name a few.

“The Arabization of Mickey should be done very properly, in an intelligent way,” says Khalil. “It must be done in a comedic way that is appealing to children. For Goofy’s name to be Bondock, this is an appealing name for Egyptian children.”

At a time when Egyptians knew little of television and nothing of video games or satellite broadcasts, reading was a leading source of entertainment for the country’s youth. Mickey also provided a cultural and emotional connection to the Western world that so many young people longed for.

It was, in a way, one of the early hints of the spread of globalization then called “Coca-Cola capitalism” in the Arab world.

For years, Dar Al-Hilal had a lock on the local market, with Samir and Mickey (which soon gave Samir a run for its money on newsstands) the only two children’s magazines available in the market.

“The form was great, the printing house was great. The colors were bold. It was very good,” says Khalil.

By the 1990s, even as the number of competitors grew, Mickey remained the top-selling selling children’s magazine in the Arab world. Dar Al-Hilal had by then increased the franchise’s newsstand entries, licensing the rights to produce the monthly supplements Super Mickey (with extra comics and stories) and Mickey Gaib (Pocket Mickey), literally a pocket-sized version of the book.

As the decade drew to a close, Dar Al-Hilal claims to have been printing 70,000 to 80,000 copies a week with a 70% sell-though rate. The 30% returned from newsstands at the end of the week, company officials say, were bundled with books or distributed as repackaged loss leaders.

At LE 1.50 per copy and assuming no discounting and a 70% sell-though rate, Mickey alone was worth LE 3.8 million to LE 4.4 million a year in copy sales alone big business by the standards of Egyptian publishing in general, and stunning for a niche publication.

“It was a profitable magazine,” says Khalil. “There were a lot of advertisements coming. It wasn’t a big profit, but it was a successful magazine. It wasn’t successful because it was profiting, it was successful because we were providing a service to children.”

Dar Al-Hilal was in a comfortable position. Too comfortable, perhaps.

As with any multinational whose profits rest largely on the exploitation of intellectual property, Disney is driven by two concerns: Maintaining quality and finding new ways to leverage a brand’s value through spin-off and ancillary products.

“What they are concerned with is their image, their quality, because Disney considers that they provide a product with very good quality,” explains Dalia Mohamed Ibrahim, vice-president of Nahdet Misr for Publishing and Printing. “This is part of their mission: quality, not just of the material itself, but of the printed format.”

When it came time to renew its contract with Disney in early 2003, Dar Al-Hilal was secure in the belief that its 44-year-long track record made the process little more than a formality.

The international cartoon giant’s unilateral decision to terminate talks came as a shock to the state-owned publishing house.

“The contract was renewed [with Disney] many times,” Khalil says. “It was flowing without problem, it was about mutual cooperation. Then, there was a problem.”

As Zahid, Disney’s Middle East publishing director, explains it, “quality was one of the issues, an important one” behind the company’s decision to break off negotiations with Dar Al-Hilal. “But the major reason was [that we were interested in] finding ambitious strategies and plans to develop the product, which Dar Al-Hilal did not offer. Also, we felt that the private sector has more ambitious ideas, so we decided to move our cooperation in Egypt from the public sector to the private sector.”

To the disappointment of Mickey readers across the Arab World, the magazine disappeared from newsstands for nine months, with no word on when (or whether) it might return.

“People were very upset,” says Amal Farrah, editor-in-chief of Mickey at Nahdet Misr. “Mickey is one of the magazines people were brought up on. It’s not a magazine for children, but something that appeals to all walks of life.”

While Mickey was off newsstands, “we were looking for a reliable partner to work with,” Zahid says. “We wanted not only to keep but to enhance the image and reputation of Mickey in Egypt, to keep it alive in people’s minds.”

Several Arab publishing houses soon learned of Disney’s search for a partner with the resources and creative vision to take Mickey to the next level and made bids for the rights. Nahdet Misr was one of them. Ibrahim, the company’s vice-president, had just 21 days to design a marketing plan creative enough (but sufficiently rooted in reality) to impress Disney executives and bring home the deal.

In the end, the numbers Ibrahim brought to the table spoke volumes at Disney. Where the average children’s magazine spends no more than LE 50,000 or so a year on marketing activities, Nahdet Misr submitted a bid that included a proposal for a campaign worth at least LE 1 million, all of it backed up by a solid three-year business plan.

“We [designed] a very, very solid marketing campaign,” Ibrahim says. “We did the marketing campaign, we conducted marketing research, we got children’s ideas, what they like, what characters they like.”

The effort paid off as Nahdet Misr beat out four other major publishing houses for rights to distribute in roughly half the territory Dar Al-Hilal previously covered, Disney choosing to split its regional territory in two. Nahdet Misr now has rights to North Africa and the Levant, while the United Arab Emirates’ Arabian Establishment publishing house has the contract for the Gulf region.

“What attracted us to Nahdet Misr was the company’s commitment to its work and its ambitious plans for the future, as well as its invaluable past experience in the market,” Zahid explains. “The company was chosen mainly due to its managers’ ambitions; they impressed us.”

Even with a price hike that saw Mickey jump to LE 2.50 a copy, Nahdet Misr executives say they don’t expect to make a fortune out of the franchise any time soon.

“When we made our offer to Disney, we were not expecting to make money,” says Ibrahim. “We got Dar Al-Hilal’s sales [base] and we started building from there. By increasing the quality of the paper and the magazine, we set a very thin profit margin very, very thin.”

Instead, she and others at Dar Al-Hilal suggest, Mickey is equal parts long-term development project and labor of love.

Still, both sides had something to smile about as Mickey celebrated the one-year anniversary of its return to the local market last month.

“The results were amazing,” Zahid says. “We scored record numbers that Mickey magazine never managed before during its long presence in Egypt. We achieved with Nahdet Misr three times the sales we used to have with Dar Al-Hilal.”

Remember Dar Al-Hilal’s claim to have printed 60,000 to 70,000 copies a week, selling 70% of them? Not so fast, say Disney insiders, who suggest Dar Al-Hilal’s sales figures were somewhat lower: 25,000 or so a week when school was in session, and rarely breaking 50,000 in summer months, when sales typically peak. A source at a publishing house that bid against Nahdet Misr confirms the range, saying Dar Al-Hilal probably averaged “under 35,000 copies a week.”

Under the terms of its licensing agreement, Dar Al-Hilal was required to provide audited circulation figures, as Nahdet Misr does now.

The first issue of the new Mickey sold 75,000 copies in its first five days on newsstands in January 2004 despite the price hike. According to Disney, the magazine now sells 60,000 to 70,000 copies a week. (The company stopped short of disclosing sales numbers for the monthly supplements Super Mickey and Mickey Gaib.)

Ibrahim suggests the magazine’s total readership probably stands between 240,000 and 350,000 readers a week, with each copy being read by 4-5 people.

At least one of those readers is in a high place: First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, the Arab world’s leading advocate of literacy and children’s programs, jumped on the Mickey bandwagon, writing the editorial introduction to Nahdet Misr’s first issue.

So how well is Nahdet Misr making out with Mickey? At 60,000 copies a week at LE 2.50 per copy (assuming no discounting), the company is pulling in LE 7.8 million in gross revenues a year on newsstands alone before distribution costs are factored in. (Most distribution companies, the largest being the state-run Al-Ahram Distribution Co., take 40% of the sticker price off the top.)

The company declined to talk about advertising sales and profit margins, but printers surveyed in Cairo estimate it costs LE 1.25 per copy to print the magazine, without factoring in staff, overhead and distribution costs or royalties to Disney.

Publishing royalties account for some $100 million of Disney’s revenues each year, and while the Middle East accounts for just 1% of that total, Egypt alone accounts for 30% (or $300,000) of it, according to figures disclosed by the company.

“Comics are not yet a big part of Egyptian culture,” says Farrah. “We don’t have a significant role in the world of comics. Mickey is starting to round out that picture. And thank God, our translation makes the souls of the characters like our people.”

Production on Mickey starts each month when Nahdet Misr re-ceives its package of comics from Disney; editors then break story lines down by each issue from there.

Once the comics and story lines are selected, the illustrators get to work. Artists touch up the Disney illustrations, sometimes removing elements that may not be culturally appropriate for Arab readers.

Next comes dialogue work. “We empty the speech balloons, ink in the translations, adapting them with lightly humored Arabic,” says Farrah. Nahdet Misr actually hires comedians to add a little ‘funny’ to scenarios provided by Disney.

All the while, other departments work on the six extra pages of Mickey that originate in Egypt, including fan mail, additional illustrations, songs (often written by Editor-in-Chief Farrah herself) and advertisements.

As editor-in-chief, Farrah must put a final stamp of approval on the magazine before it is shipped off to Nahdet Misr’s printing plant in Sixth of October City.

“How to choose the material, how to simplify it with Disney, we take the text and we translate it. It’s not an easy task,” says Khalil, an expert in the field of children’s media. “Making the characters, the way Batoot jumps up and down, gets upset and hits things, for example, this is the art.”

Better yet, it’s art for promotional projects outside the magazine that could yet expand Nahdet Misr’s profit margins, because when it comes to spin-off merchandise, Mickey Mouse and friends are experts. Disney cannot quote an exact figure earned by character spin-offs, simply because the business is far too broad to keep track of.

“Disney does different things in every line of business,” Zahid explains. “For this reason it is very difficult to keep track.”

If, for instance, a product or character owned by Disney should be used, the rights come from its specific department whether it is a consumer product, publishing or home entertainment, for example. Then you have movies, which originate from three major studios: Disney Pictures; Buena Vista and Miramax. This does not include VHS or DVDs, which come out of Disney’s sister company, Buena Vista Home Entertainment.

Finally, consumer products are managed by Disney Consumer Products and publishing by Disney Publishing Worldwide. It’s a lot to keep track of, Disney executives admit, which is why their departments maintain a separate but equal system for tracking profits.

Nahdet Misr markets a handful of merchandise spin-offs on the local market, largely as free gifts with the magazine, not as new lines of business or profit centers. Since launching a year ago, the publisher has offered 17 gifts bundled with cellophane to the magazine, ranging from CDs to puzzle pieces (which readers must collect over a number of consecutive weeks), to games.

“If you sort it out, in the last year we gave away 16 or 17 gifts,” Ibrahim says. “It costs. Take the CD, for example, which cost LE 1.15 to stamp, and you send it for free with the magazine for LE 2.50, without even the material inside. So, all of this is a cost.”

Still, executives at Nahdet Misr do not want to view Mickey as a profit-maker, even now, despite its tremendous success. Instead, Ibrahim says, they’re currently focused on growing the brand itself.

“We are building for the future; we do not expect any profits and actually, it is not making a profit,” she says. “Publishing is a mission. There must be somebody understanding, who focuses on things and leads the market and leads the people to knowledge smoothly and to get them to understand.”

Nahdet Misr has also added Disney’s Winnie the Pooh to its lineup with Winnie, which joins the company’s 250 periodical and book titles. Among the other highlights are the local rights to the Harry Potter franchise as well as the Batman and Superman comics.

The company is even going a step further. Negotiations are underway with Disney to launch a Mickey website in Arabic so that those who cannot access the magazine can still enjoy its splendor, even if it does eat into newsstand sales a bit.

“We are considering this a marketing campaign. When you set this on the internet, I’m not going to put a fee for the people to enter,” Ibrahim explains. “We are going to support this with general information, games; they are going to make it a whole entertainment site on the internet.”

Everyone is familiar with the lengths to which Batoot will go to woo his love, Zeezee (Daisy). In a recent edition of Mickey, Batoot was determined to take his sweetheart out for a nice day at the park. Unfortunately, the winter weather proved an obstacle, so a resolute Batoot did what any duck in love would do: He went to the big man in the sky to negotiate weather conditions.

Disney and Nahdet Misr felt the scenario was innocent enough, but some critics in Egypt disagreed. Nahdet Misr was bombarded with letters insisting that weather is an act of God something out of the hands of Batoot or anyone else.

“A lot of people write letters criticizing, for example, religious issues,” Farrah explains. “So we receive letters saying ‘Haram!’ But we speak with the people [and] say ‘It’s a comic, it’s make-believe.’”

It’s a fine line to walk. Mickey’s begins in the imagination of Disney illustrators and writers, most of them based in the United States. But with the magazine distributed in more than 30 countries, individual publishers are bound to come across issues that don’t necessarily fit the value system of their societies.

“We have artists who touch-up the illustrations,” admits Farrah. “There are some things that we will remove, such as a bottle of alcohol, for example, things that don’t fit with our society. The retouch artist fixes it up.”

Dar Al-Hilal’s Khalil, who now edits Mickey’s competitor Samir, says the problem with Mickey as it now stands goes far beyond cultural differences.

“I am upset because these are not our characters. What’s the second step? We should have our own characters, we as Egyptians and we should make Egyptian magazines,” she says. “Sorry, but with Mickey we are copying others’ mentalities, others’ creations. Of course it’s an amazing creation, and we have to learn from it. But what’s going on after that?”

Khalil says Disney has accomplished something far beyond the abilities of any individual company in Egypt for a simple reason: “In Egypt, there isn’t a big company like Disney to finance [a new character]. It needs film, it needs t-shirts, it needs good promotion. We still need more help,” she says.

And then there’s the question of imagination: Not every adult has the talent necessary to write for an audience of kids.

“How to write, edit a dialogue for children, it’s an art,” Khalil insists. “How to talk to children through a magazine is not an easy task. Not anyone can write for children, not anyone can draw for them, not everyone can simplify the material you’re giving them or understand their mentality. There is a special technique for punctuation, for editing.”

When Mickey first graced newsstands in Egypt in 1959, the magazine was black and white, on flimsy newsprint paper. Occasionally, artists would spice it up by adding two-tone color, splashing a bit of red or blue on the page. Illustrations, magazine quality and dialogue language have since evolved.

Naturally, there were a few raised eyebrows when Nahdet Misr took over. Some griped about the price hike (though the boost in newsstand sales has shown those gripes were fleeting), but most who had problems had them with the content.

Characters who once communicated in colloquial Egyptian Arabic now speak a more refined, Modern Standard Arabic. The intention, according to Farrah, was to broaden its appeal across the Arab world, and not just in Egypt.

Ibrahim adds that by using Modern Standard Arabic instead of colloquial, Mickey serves as both a source of entertainment and as an educational tool.

“We are making a lot of events, festivals, talking with mothers, explaining how important the magazine is and how this can help their children play and have fun and also learn,” she explains.

Other readers complained the stories are not consistent with the old ones published by Dar Al-Hilal. Past issues, some said, were simply better. Others still complained that the old typeface used by Dar Al-Hilal was nicer than then one used by Nahdet Misr.

Experts in children’s media say it’s not fair to compare.

“The original writers of Mickey? That generation is now gone. There is now a new generation writing. The writing is different,” explains Farrah. “This is a new Mickey. It has new opinions, new thoughts, and if people see it that way, then they’ll feel how beautifully it is made.”

“We were raised on the old Mickey. We had a specific viewpoint,” Khalil agrees. “The children of today might like something completely different. This is something personal between you and the publication. It’s more than just the appearance. A different generation is reading now with a different concept than we had when we read it.”

Nahdet Misr’s success with Mickey is clear, but still I wonder what it is about a mouse, a duck, a dog and their friends that make people rush to newsstands every Thursday morning to pick up the latest issue.

“When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human; and that is the secret of his popularity,” the late Walt Disney once said. Egyptian readers seem to agree.

“You never think that the characters are actually a mouse, ducks, dogs and horses,” says Chahire Adel, 28, a marketing director. “You think of them as real people. Each with its different and well-known characteristics to the point where you begin to expect how they will react in certain situations. Over the years, their personalities have remained the same.”

“The stories in Mickey have more meaning than the other magazines,” says Shaddy Emad, 10. “My mom likes Mickey because she used to read it when she was young and she still reads it because she likes it. I like Batoot most because he looks like my brother.”

“Mickey’s books and magazines are popular in the region because Mickey was the first character appearing on TV. It was also the first character developed by Walt Disney 75 years ago, then the other standard characters came,” explains Zahid.

“For the older people, Mickey offers them something to laugh at, for children, it’s playful and something that makes them laugh as well,” says Farrah. “Batoot is like any Egyptian, loud and tense. Mickey is civil and kind: All of the characteristics in the world complete in one place. So the people feel they are full, they swallowed a piece of culture.”

Call it the best of both worlds a cartoon character conceived in the America of another century and adapted to fit the ideals, insecurities and emotions of the Arab world today.

And, best of all, a business success story.  bt

MortifiedWalt Disney originally wanted to name his main character Mortimer Mouse, but his wife, Lillian, suggested the name sounded too pompous and suggested Mickey Mouse instead.

Mice and Bears and Orcs, Oh My!In Forbes magazine story last October, Disney characters were on top of the list of top-grossing character licences. In numbers:1. Mickey Mouse & Friends: $5.8 billion 2. Winnie the Pooh & Friends: $5.6 billion 3. Lord of the Rings: $2.9 billion 4. Harry Potter: $2.8 billion 5. Finding Nemo: $2.0 billion 6. Yu-Gi-Oh: $1.6 billion 7. SpongeBob SquarePants: $1.5 billion 8. Spider-Man: $1.3 billion 9. X-Men: $900 million 10. Pokemon $825 million

Whatever you call him, Mickey is loved around the worldEgypt: Holland: Mikki HiiriGermany: Micky MausIceland: Mikki MúsIndonesia: Miki TikusItaly: TopolinoFrance: Mickey MouseChina (Mandarin): Miqi LaoshuPoland: Myszka MikiPortugal: Rato MickeyMexico: El Raton MickeySweden: Musse Pigg