Popeye and Tintin will enter the public domain in 2025
Tintin, the pioneering hero of the pulp genre of boy adventurers, enters the public domain of the United States in 2025, albeit in a way that would probably not please his creator Hergé very much. Not necessarily because the cartoonist would be upset if other people could legally create Tintin stories, but because the Tintin story entering the public domain is among his least favorite.
On January 1, 2025, works first published in 1929 (and sound recordings from 1924) will enter the public domain in the United States, and that includes much of Tintin in the land of the Sovietsa work of explicit and broad anti-Soviet/Marxist propaganda that Hergé was so ashamed of that he refused to allow it to be reprinted for forty years.
But Tintin and his dog Snowy aren’t the only cartoon characters whose earliest adventures are no longer under copyright. Popeye (you know, the sailor?) also appeared in EC Segar’s Thimble Theatre for the first time in 1929. Although at that time Thimble Theatre had been running at the New York Journal for a decade – Popeye was only a guest character with one arc in the adventures of Ham Gravy (friend of Olive Oyl) and Castor Oyl (brother of… yeah, you get it). The nautical hombre hadn’t even developed his signature spinach-powered super strength yet, and Olive Oyl wouldn’t break up with Ham Gravy until 1930 to date him.
Other 2025 entries into the wild world of public domain art include many cutting-edge films from the Silent Era and the Talkie Revolutionincluding Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film, Blackmailand the Marx Brothers’ first feature film, The Coconuts. There’s also a slew of Disney animated features hitting the market, like “The Skeleton Dance,” whose dancing skeletons (what else?) have been given new life in festive Halloween GIFs.
Mickey and Minnie Mouse themselves made a big splash last year when their first short films hit the public domain, making gleefully emotionally transgressive and carefully non-legally transgressive horror art possible. More than a dozen more Mickey Mouse short films from 1929 will follow in 2025, including “The Karnival Kid”, in which the famous mouse has a speaking role for the first time.
What would this Would you like to see a writer in the public domain in 2025? Perhaps our universal agreement is that low-budget horror, in the pursuit of anything having to do with new art in the public domain, is low-hanging fruit. (Of course we get Popeye the Killer Man by 2025.)
For more notable works entering the public domain in the United States in 2025, check out the Center for the Study of the Public Domain’s annual bulletin.