The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are a pom-pom-wielding force in trademark law with a history that goes back to Debbie Does Dallas. Currently DCC and parent company Pro Silver Star Ltd. are seeking a restraining order against My Chemical Romance, who performed with backup dancers decked out in the white-and-blue getups during the first night of a five-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl.
The motion, filed October 23rd in Dallas County district court, also names Live Nation and asks for a preliminary injunction and unspecified damages. It claims fans believed the real DCC had shown up to cheer on “Teenagers,” right up until the dancers picked up prop rifles, fought a staged firefight, and were “depicted being shot.” Not your usual halftime routine. MCR haven’t commented, but fan video from Thursday’s show found the uniforms right back onstage.
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Consequence spoke to four attorneys about the question at the heart of the case, and the 1979 precedent hanging over it: Is it enough that people recognize the uniform, or do they have to think the Cowboys signed off?
The Ghost of You(r Cheerleading Outfit)
Silver Star’s lawyers, led by celebrity litigator Alex Spiro, claim they don’t want to do this. “Silver Star is not litigious,” the filing reads, the latest in a legal history that dates back to the Carter administration. To be fair, this ask, like all the other asks, is specific: not the setlist, not the choreography, not the guns, just the clothes. “The universe of alternative costume designs is effectively unlimited.”
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The evidence for confusion comes from social media: Instagram Reels, an X post tagging DCC, and TikTok fans who thought they’d seen the real squad, according to The Dallas Morning News. Silver Star sent a cease-and-desist letter, but the show went on. With two concerts left, the cheerleaders are now hoping for a temporary restraining order, the one legal tool built to move faster than a Hollywood Bowl residency.
Debbie Did Dallas First
In November 1978, Manhattan’s Pussycat Cinema began showing Debbie Does Dallas, which the Second Circuit later described as “a gross and revolting sex film.” Its plot, “to the extent that there is one,” per the court, follows a high school cheerleader trying to make the “Texas Cowgirls” and ends with roughly 12 minutes of her in a uniform “strikingly similar” to DCC’s. The marquee billed star Bambi Woods as an “Ex Dallas Cowgirl Cheerleader,” though the court found that to be untrue.
DCC won an injunction, and the 1979 opinion took an inventory of the uniform: white boots, white shorts, white fringe, a star-studded belt, and a vest with three blue stars on each side. Forty-seven years later, Kirk A. Sigmon, a DC-area IP and technology attorney and founding partner at KellDann Law, itemizes the MCR costumes: “White shorts, a white belt with blue stars, tall white cowboy boots, a top with three blue stars along each side of the bust and tassels extending around the waist area.”
“This is going to be a tough case for My Chemical Romance,” Sigmon tells Consequence, and the 1979 ruling “probably bodes poorly” for the band. The Pussycat court also rejected a First Amendment defense, reasoning there were “numerous ways” to comment on “sexuality in athletics” without the uniform.
It’s Not Just the Uniform, It’s How You Wear It
Among other issues, Debbie was marketed as starring a “Cowgirl Cheerleader,” which is a lie. Silver Star is alleging confusion, but MCR can argue that all the confusion is in the TikTok comments, not on some poster. To be fair to Silver Star, the 1979 court didn’t depend on the marquee alone: it held that viewers only had to believe the cheerleaders sponsored or approved the film, not that Debbie was one of them. Silver Star’s filing also points to a line from the stage: as the dancers cheered, it says, Gerard Way told the crowd, “Thank you, Dallas.”
“I think it is vital to understand the difference between acknowledging and endorsing,” says Alan Heimlich, president of the San Jose IP firm Heimlich Law. He suspects the answer is offstage: “I would need to look at how the event was put together and promoted to give an indication of how this would be decided.”
Nick Heimlich, a trademark and commercial litigator whose practice shares a San Jose suite with Heimlich Law, notes that the 1979 injunction covered “similar uniforms and advertising that implied that real cheerleaders were featured in the film.” In his view, “Just because someone recognizes the cheerleaders doesn’t mean they will believe they are endorsing the show.”
Sigmon adds that it’s “debatably quite unlikely” concertgoers thought the Cowboys endorsed the concert. Silver Star argues otherwise, and a judge will decide who’s right.
Famous Last Words
John Gilbertson, an attorney who specializes in trademark litigation and whose firm recently won Drake University a preliminary injunction against a community college’s “D” logo, thinks recognition may be enough. The more brands engage in high-profile lawsuits, he argues, the more the public assumes any use was licensed. “That makes even an obvious spoof look like an official partnership,” he says. “It’s a feedback loop with no obvious brake, and it means the Cowboys will probably prevail here.”
Silver Star also has a claim that doesn’t require anyone to be confused. Its filing alleges trademark dilution, a protection reserved for famous marks. Infringement turns on confusion; dilution, Gilbertson says, only requires that a famous mark be “damaged through an unflattering, unsavory, or low-quality association.” Like, say, a gunfight.
Even Cheerleaders May Join the Black Parade
The band’s best argument is artistic. The Black Parade show is a rock opera set in a fictional dictatorship that draws on American iconography. Sigmon admits the argument might seem “a little bit pie-in-the-sky,” but says “it is very important for artists to be able to call from the corpus of public iconography (like quintessential Americana) when creating art.”
The law has drifted that way since 1979. A decade after Pussycat, the same appeals court heard Ginger Rogers’ lawsuit against Federico Fellini, whose 1986 film Ginger and Fred followed two Italian cabaret dancers who’d built an act imitating Rogers and Fred Astaire. Rogers argued the title made it look like she’d endorsed the movie. The court sided with Fellini, and Rogers v. Grimaldi set a test courts have since applied to art more broadly: a creative work can borrow a famous name or mark unless the borrowing has no artistic relevance, or explicitly misleads people about who made or backed it.
In 2023, the Supreme Court clarified that protection in Jack Daniel’s v. VIP Products. VIP sold Bad Spaniels, a dog toy shaped like a Jack Daniel’s bottle, with the whiskey label rewritten as poop jokes. The justices ruled unanimously that the Rogers test doesn’t protect someone using another company’s look as the brand for their own product. In that case, the ordinary confusion test applies, or as Alan Heimlich puts it, it applies “where the brand has been borrowed to identify the individual’s own goods.” Justice Elena Kagan’s opinion contrasted the toy with Aqua’s “Barbie Girl,” which survived a Mattel lawsuit in 2002, because the song never used Barbie as the brand for anything. That leaves room for the idea that a costume in a rock opera is closer to “Barbie Girl” than to a dog toy dressed as a whiskey bottle.
The Smithsonian has also struggled with the distinction, and files the uniform under multiple categories. The National Museum of American History keeps a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader Barbie in its collection, and the catalog calls the uniform “a carefully guarded trademark” and cheerleading “a decidedly American invention.” What a metaphor: Trademark and Americana attempting to live side-by-side in one 11.5-inch doll with impossible proportions.
A hearing on the restraining order was scheduled for Tuesday morning in Texas, and no ruling had been reported as of press time. Sigmon doubts the case ever reaches a verdict. “Chances are high that the parties will settle for an undisclosed amount and My Chemical Romance will probably have to promise to stop using the costumes,” he says.
Either way, MCR has two shows left. The last one falls on Halloween, probably the one night of the year when anyone at the Hollywood Bowl can dress as a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader without hearing from Silver Star’s lawyers.
