Betty Boop and Blondie are joining Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh in the public domain

on January 02, 2025

The first appearances of the classic cartoon and comic characters are among the pieces of intellectual property whose 95-year US copyright maximum has been reached, putting them in the public domain on January 1. That means creators can use and repurpose them without permission or payment.

The 2026 batch of newly public artistic creations doesn't quite have the sparkle of the recent first entries into the public domain of Mickey or Winnie. But ever since 2019 - the end of a 20-year IP drought brought on by congressional copyright extensions - every annual crop has been a bounty for advocates of more work belonging to the public.

Here's a closer look at what will enter the public domain.

When she first appears in the 1930 short Dizzy Dishes, one of four of her cartoons entering the public domain, she's already totally recognizable as the Jazz Age flapper later memorialized in countless tattoos, T-shirts and bumper stickers. She has her baby face, short hair with groomed curls, flashy eyelashes and miniature mouth. But she's also got dangling poodle ears and a tiny black nose. Those would soon morph into dangling earrings and a tiny white nose.

She started as essentially the Minnie Mouse to a popular anthropomorphic dog named Bimbo, whom she would eventually outshine - and push aside. She's got a supporting role in Dizzy Dishes, performing a slinky song-and-dance in a tiny black dress. She's not named, but sings "boop boop, a doop."

The character was designed and owned by Fleischer Studios, and the shorts were released by Paramount Pictures. She was based at least in part on singer Helen Kane, known as the "Boop-Oop-a-Doop Girl," thanks to a hit 1929 song. Kane would lose a lawsuit over Betty Boop's character and use of the phrase. During the proceedings the defense alleged Black singer Esther Lee Jones used similar phrases first.

Artists are now free to use this earliest Boop in films and similar work. But making merch won't be free. In an important distinction often raised by Disney over Mickey Mouse, a character's trademark is distinct from the copyright of works that feature them. The Fleischer Productions trademark of Betty Boop remains intact.

Boops and doops were apparently in the air in 1930. Blondie Boopadoop was, like Betty, a young flapper, and the central character of Chic Young's newspaper comic strip that debuted in 1930. It inspired a film series and radio show, and is still running today in papers that still have comics.

The strip followed her carefree breeze through life with her boyfriend, Dagwood Bumstead. The two would marry (and she would change her name) in 1933, and the strip would become the sandwich-heavy domestic comedy familiar to later readers. Though the strip was meant to be based on a woman's life, Dagwood would in many ways become its breakout star - a proto- Adam Driver, if you will, as the breakout actor from Girls.

Nine new Mickey Mouse cartoons also are becoming public domain, two years after Steamboat Willie made the first version of him public property. He's joined this year by his dog Pluto, who, in 1930, was known as Rover. (He would get his long-term moniker the following year.)

Books bring big detective debuts

The books entering the public domain this year open the door to three iconic detectives from the 20th century:

- The teen sleuth Nancy Drew, whose first four books came in 1930, starting with The Secret of the Old Clock. They were written by Mildred Benson under the pen name Carolyn Keene.

- The middle-aged(-ish) sleuth Sam Spade, who debuted via the full-book version of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. (It had been serialized in a magazine the previous year.)

- The elderly sleuth Miss Marple, who solves her first mystery in Agatha Christie's Murder at the Vicarage.

A year after his The Sound and the Fury became public, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying becomes public domain. It would help lead to his Nobel Prize in literature.

Marxes, Marlene and Oscar winners

A year after their film debut, The Cocoanuts, entered the public domain, the Marx Brothers' beloved Animal Crackers joins it, as they entered their prime of high cinematic antics. The film finds Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo invading a Long Island society party celebrating an explorer of Africa.

Other movies:

- The Blue Angel, the German film from Josef von Sternberg that emblazoned Marlene Dietrich's top-hatted image into film lore.

- King of Jazz, featuring the first screen appearance of Bing Crosby.

- A pair of Oscar best picture winners, All Quiet on the Western Front, which won in 1930, and Cimarron, which won in 1931. The award was known as "Outstanding Production" then, and the Academy Awards eligibility period didn't sync with the calendar year.

The coming decade will bring a true bounty of Hollywood Golden Age films into the public domain. 2027 will be a truly monster year, literally, with the original 1931 Universal Pictures versions of Dracula and Frankenstein among the titles due.