In September 2012, for the private view of Dove and White's "Face to Face" exhibition at London's Paul Stolper Gallery, Paul Stolper wrote; "The spontaneous medium of printing T-shirts allowed Dove and White to comment and respond quickly to contemporary news and events, and to reach a much larger audience than any art gallery could provide, with ‘Exploding Mickey’, 1975, being the perfect example, where America, as represented by Mickey Mouse the face of Disney, now just another corporate global monster, with wild acid-warped eyes, and head ripped apart by missiles, highlights their disappointment in an America as world bully not only domestically in their treatment of the American Indians but also of their continued presence on Vietnam. The American dream turned rotten".

Owing to Mickey's paradoxical stance, it was never a huge selling T-shirt but it sold steadily throughout the Seventies. Walt Disney Corp. only became interested when a German Mail Order company did a series of ads in the national press including the Mickey T. while it had became popular with the German Punks. We received a warning from Disney's legal department to cease trading printed T-shirts of Mickey immediately! Our solicitor, Desmond Banks, wrote to Disney asking if the design could be licensed, as Trevor Myles had done in at MR FREEDOM in 1970, then continue selling the T-shirt and negotiate a payment for back-dated royalties. Disney refused and stepped up their threat of Court proceedings saying the image was anti-American and not in the spirit of how Disney wished to portray their comic hero. Ende der Leine!

Despite the ban, the Exploding Mickey image had a good few years in the marketplace and has been included in many exhibitions. The original "Exploding Mickey" T-shirt is included in the British Collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum and an "Atomic" collage is in the Damien Hirst Museum collection.

30th. August 1975 was the anniversary of the USA atomic bombing on Japan, Mr. Takeshi Araki, the Mayor of Hiroshima appeared on TV making a remembrance speech to the News stations of the world calling for the abolition of all nuclear weapons since they threatened to erase the human race from the Planet. It was the first we had seen a global media event that reminded the world of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki genocide. Newsreels showed film of the aircraft, horrifically called 'The Enola Gay' releasing the first A-Bomb called 'Little Boy' from the belly of the plane which destroyed Hiroshima - then those sad, horrific smoky grey films of the victims with skin and rags hanging from their bones wandering around in a sea of smouldering rubble. We also see images of the Hiroshima Peace Park where the city remembers the victims by meeting at the Cenotaph. The inscription reads 'Rest peacefully for we shall not repeat the evil.' Lanterns are floated down the Motoyasu River, a custom which is re-enacted throughout the world by CND supporters and those in sympathy with the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Molly and I were babes in arms in 1945. The war in Europe had almost ended. My earliest memory of Mickey Mouse was at 3 years old when my Grandfather, a Civil Defence Warden, was visiting schools demonstrating how children should wear their gas masks in the event of a Nazis gas attack. John says he was also fitted with a gas mask but his was a rare Disney sample - a mask that was based on the face of Mickey. "I hated the smell of the rubber but quite liked the squeak that was emitted when you breathed out - to everyone's great amusement".

In the 50's, there was total fascination with my uncle Herbert's paintings of Mickey Mouse on glass that were coloured with silver-paper and sweet wrappers. Later when I met Molly's father Albert, a Folk-artist and sign painter, I was shown a wonderful picture of 'Mickey Mouse and Friends' that Albert had painted for Molly's first birthday. Painted on wood with house-paints during the war when artists colours were unavailable. Molly recalls; "I grew up with my Dad's Disney painting on my wall and it still occupies an important place in our house today".

In 1974 we visited Disneyland in Anaheim with our children, where we photographed the dozens of glass cases full of Disney Cartoon products. When we returned to London they began to draw Mickey Mouse."Molly and I had brought back our first Mickey and Minnie souvenirs from California - large shining china effigies of the famous pair in full colour. "It marked the beginning of a collection that spanned the next 40 years. Wherever we visited in the world, I would buy Molly a Mickey and she would buy me a Minnie Mouse".

Later, the Disneyland Mickey was smashed and Mickey lost his head. A few fragments were lying around the floor which led them to cut their drawings up into similar fragments, having already experimented with a 'Smashed Coke' design some years earlier. Collage was used for the contents of Mickey's head. The Artwork remained pinned to their wall until Dove and White decided to make a series of T-shirts on Nuclear war themes. Their friend Richard Yeend was working in Fleet Street as a Cartoonist at the time so he was able to borrow some amazing pictures from the Atomic Energy Authority for the background explosions printed throughout the series. The first Exploding Mickey T-shirts were made at the end of 1976 for their new shop, Kitsch-22 at 22 Woodstock Street, London W.1.

As teenage Art students at the time of the Cuba Crisis. October 1962, we were in a Manchester pub drinking with friends when JFK made his third world war announcement, laying down an ultimatum to Khrushchev to remove missile installations from Cuba - or else! Since the movie "Hiroshima mon amour" in 1959 there had been mounting concern in the Arts communities about the proliferation of nuclear weapons (the first CND Aldermaston march had taken place in 1958). The deep-rooted traumas and nightmares that such events could provoke: surreal dreams of flights from paradise while nuclear bombs fall from the sky. Norfolk was the centre of Europe's largest Nuclear arsenal with, as always, America's finger on the button. In the 60's, driving around country roads next to the Air Bases, rows of missiles could be seen on their revolving platforms pointing to the sky and huge radar dishes scanning the North Sea. We grew up in the nuclear age. As more countries have nukes, there is more likelihood that a nuclear war can begin. Just as Mr. Takeshi Araki, we are "calling for the abolition of all nuclear weapons since they threatened to erase the human race from the Planet".