Two icons of comics and animation history will be entering the public domain in the U.S. as of January 1, 2025, opening their earliest representations up to be used and repurposed without permission or payment to copyright holders: E.C. Segar’s idiosyncratic sailor-man Popeye and Belgian comics artist Hergé’s globe-trotting reporter Tintin. They join other evergreen characters such as Mickey Mouse, who hit the 95-year mark last New Year’s, and Winnie the Pooh, who came up for grabs in 2022.
Mickey Mouse’s first talking appearance, The Karnival Kid, and a dozen more of his shorts are also among the thousands of new public domain titles and recordings entering the public domain in 2025, which will close out the creative copyright output of the 1920s.
Popeye was first introduced in Segar’s popular Thimble Theatre comic strip on January 17, 1929, followed by his love interest Olive Oyl in August of the same year. At the time, the squint-eyed hero had yet to take up his distinctive spinach eating habit, however. “Popeye the Sailor” made his animated debut in Fleischer Studio’s eponymous 1933 Betty Boop cartoon before beginning his own series of shorts with I Yam What I Yam, kicking off 600-plus cartoons from 1933-1942 (released by Paramount) and into the 1960s. He went on to star in radio, television, video games, comics and in a big-screen feature film starring Robin Williams (1980).
This year, Chernin Entertainment announced a new live-action movie in the works with King Features; in the tradition of Winnie the Pooh: Blood & Honey and The Mouse Trap, a live-action horror film titled Popeye the Slayer Man has also been announced, set in an abandoned spinach factory.
Tintin began solving mysteries in Hergé’s (Georges Remi) The Adventures of Tintin in the Le Petit Vingtième on January 10, 1929. After Nazi authorities shut down the magazine, Remi was hired as an illustrator for leading Belgian newspaper Le Soir and later became editor of the children’s supplement, where he continued the mystery-solving redhead’s adventures. After the war, Le Lombard began publishing Le Journal de Tintin, but Remi would poach the top artists and form Studios Hergé in 1950 for greater creative freedom.
The first Tintin book, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets was published in 1929/1930, and his first animated film The Crab with the Golden Claws, blending 2D and stop-motion, released in 1947. Several more stand-alone animated and live-action films rolled out (as well as a 1990s radio series by BBC), with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s motion-capture CG feature The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn making a splash in 2011. A sequel was reported in the works in 2018. Tintin has also featured in a number of video games and theatrical productions.
Another notable animation entry for 2025 is the first Silly Symphonies short, The Skeleton Dance, released on August 22, 1929. written, directed and produced by Walt Disney and animated by Ub Iwerks, Les Clark and Wilfren Jackson, the black-and-white cemetery romp stars four human skeletons who rise from their graves to cavort in a musical danse macabre.
You can look over the Duke Law Center for the Study of the Public Domain’s highlights list in their blog post. The complete catalog of copyright entries for 1929 can be found here.
[Sources: AP News, Duke Law Center for the Study of the Public Domain]
