Popeye can strike without permission and Tintin can move freely starting in 2025. The two classic comic book characters who first appeared in 1929 are among the intellectual properties in the making. public domain in the United States on January 1. This means they can be used and reused without permission or payment to the copyright holders.
This year’s crop of newly public art creations doesn’t have the striking vibe of last year’s. entry into the public domain of Mickey Mouse. But they include a large number of canonical works whose maximum copyright term of 95 years will expire. And the presence of the Disney icon in the public domain is expanding.
“It’s a treasure! There are a dozen new Mickey cartoons – he’s speaking for the first time and donning the familiar white gloves,” said Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. “There are masterpieces by Faulkner and Hemingway, early sound films by Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford, and amazing music by Fats Waller, Cole Porter and George Gershwin. Pretty exciting!”
A preview of this year’s harvest:
Popeye the Sailor, with his protruding forearms, floury speech and propensity for fistfights, was created by EC Segar and made his first appearance in the newspaper’s “Thimble Theater” in 1929, uttering his first words , “‘I think I’m a cowboy?’ when asked if he was a sailor. What was supposed to be a one-time appearance became permanent and the strip would be renamed “Popeye.”
But as with Mickey Mouse last year and Winnie the Pooh in 2022, only the first version is free and can be reused. The spinach that gave the Sailor his super strength wasn’t there to begin with and is the kind of character element that could give rise to legal disputes. And animated shorts featuring his distinctive mumbling voice didn’t begin until 1933 and remain under copyright. Just like director Robert Altman’s 1980 film starring Robin Williams as Popeye and Shelley Duvall as his oft-disputed sweetheart, Olive Oyl.
This film was initially received lukewarmly. It was the same for “The Adventures of Tintin” by director Steven Spielberg in 2011. But the comic strips about the young journalist that inspired him, created by the Belgian artist Hergé, were among the most popular in Europe for much of the 20th century.
The simply drawn teenager with dots for eyes and bangs like an ocean wave first appeared in a supplement of the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle and became a weekly feature.
The comic strip also first appeared in the United States in 1929. Its characteristic bright colors – notably Tintin’s red hair – did not appear until years later and could, like Popeye’s spinach, be the subject of legal disputes.
And in much of the world, Tintin would not become public property until 70 years after the death of its creator in 1983.
The books made public this year read like the syllabus for an American literature seminar.
“The Sound and the Fury,” arguably William Faulkner’s quintessential novel with its stream-of-consciousness modernist style, caused a sensation after its publication despite being notoriously difficult for readers. It uses several non-linear narratives to tell the story of the ruin of a prominent family in the author’s native Mississippi, and would help lead Faulkner to the Nobel Prize.
And Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” joins his earlier “The Sun Also Rises” in the public domain. The partly autobiographical story of an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I cemented Hemingway’s status in the American literary canon. It has been frequently adapted for film, television and radio, which can now be done without permission.
John Steinbeck’s first novel, “A Cup of Gold,” from 1929, will also enter the public domain.
Also on the list is British novelist Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” a long essay that would become a landmark in feminism from the modernist literary luminary. Her novel “Mrs. Dalloway” is already in the American public domain.
While a host of truly major films will be released to the public over the coming decade, for now the early works of major figures from the not-always-stellar sound era will have to suffice.
A decade before moving to Hollywood and making films like “Psycho” and “Vertigo,” Alfred Hitchcock made “Blackmail” in Britain. The film began as a silent film but switched to sound during production, resulting in two different versions, one of them being the UK’s – and Hitchcock’s – first sound film.
John Ford, whose later Westerns would place him among cinema’s most vaunted directors, also made his first foray into sound with 1929’s “The Black Watch,” an epic adventure that included Ford’s future chief collaborator John Wayne , as a young extra.
Cecil B. DeMille, already a Hollywood bigwig thanks to silent cinema, made his first talking film with the melodrama “Dynamite.”
Groucho, Harpo and the other Marx Brothers had their first starring film roles in 1929’s “The Cocoanuts,” a precursor to future classics like “Animal Crackers” and “Duck Soup.”
“The Broadway Melody,” the first sound film and the second film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture – known at the time as an “outstanding production” – will also be released to the public, although it is often ranked among the worst Best Picture winners.
And after “Steamboat Willie” brought the first Mickey Mouse to the public, a dozen more of his animations would achieve the same status, including “The Karnival Kid,” in which he first spoke.
Songs from the final year of the Roaring Twenties are also about to become public property.
Cole Porter’s compositions “What Is This Thing Called Love?” and “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” are among the highlights, as is the jazz classic “Ain’t Misbehavin’, written by Fats Waller and Harry Brooks.
“Singin’ in the Rain,” which would later be forever associated with the 1952 Gene Kelly film, debuted in the 1929 film “The Hollywood Revue” and will now be in the public domain.
Various laws regulate sound recordings, and those that have recently entered the public domain date from 1924. They include a recording of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” by future star and civil rights icon Marian Anderson, and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” by future star and civil rights icon Marian Anderson. Rhapsody in Blue” performed by its composer, George Gershwin.
