Mickey Mouse has company: The earliest Popeye has timed out into the public domain
BY REID CREAGER
His pop culture muscles have atrophied for decades now, buried in a bizarre animation landscape of Homer Simpson and SpongeBobSquarePants and South Park and X-Men ’97. But when the 1929 cartoon Popeye the Sailor Man lapsed into the public domain this January 1, it marked the opportunity for anyone to freely use that likeness and associated elements for commercial purposes—and perhaps revive the salty spinach snarfer in our collective consciousness through creative uses.
One year ago, Mickey Mouse famously entered the public domain in his original incarnation via the 1928 film short “Steamboat Willie.” This year, a dozen more Mickey shorts have entered the free fray, including his first talking appearance in “The Karnival Kid”—released July 31, 1929. This marked the first appearance of his iconic white gloves.
A similar passage for our buffed sailor buddy was as inevitable as a progression from 1929’s “I (y)am what I (y)am” to today’s “It is what it is.”
Cartoonist Elzie Crisler (E.C.) Segar introduced Popeye that year in his comic strip Thimble Theatre. The Illinois native’s relatively short life underscored the value of creativity and intellectual property: The Popeye-led strip was picked up by many national newspapers and begat a series of animated shorts and merchandise that, according to fandom.com, had him making more than $100,000 a year ($2 million in today’s dollars) when he died in 1938 at 43.
During the next half-century and beyond, many others penned the Popeye strip in newspapers around the world. Because Segar was an employee of King Features Syndicate when he created Thimble Theatre, that’s considered a work for hire under U.S. copyright law.
King Features was consistent in aggressively trying to keep the brand relevant. In early 2010, Sony Pictures Animation was reported to be developing a movie written by the co-writers of “The Smurfs.” The project languished and died a decade later.
As recently as 2004, the syndicate celebrated Popeye’s 75th anniversary with what it heralded as its “most aggressive and wide-reaching licensing, marketing and promotional program to date.” This included a prime-time TV special and DVD release in a 3D, computer-generated imagery format.
But that was his last major hurrah. With the copyright term winding down, the sailor man was not “strong to the finich.” Today, he’s becoming a ghost in more ways than one.
A few months ago came the announcement that a live-action horror movie, “Popeye the Slayer Man,” was in development. The plot involves a group of friends who sneak into an abandoned spinach factory that is now haunted by Popeye.
The movie was set to release in January 2025, coinciding with the public domain factor.
Still some restrictions
When that historic, geodesic Waterford Crystal ball measuring 12 feet in diameter with 2,688 crystal triangles dropped again on Times Square last month, millions of Americans screamed with joy and exchanged joyful kisses and threw confetti and launched fireworks and did other things to ensure that the first day of the new year would be their least productive.
Happy Public Domain Day!
Never heard Ryan Seacrest utter those words, but that’s how the wheel of fortune spins sometimes.
January 1 is one of the most important dates of the year in the innovation community, a kind of “creativity birthday” for opportunities via the end of long-held IP protections for public works—whether they are still popular or not. These pieces can now be copied, shared, reproduced or adapted by anyone without paying the rights owner.
U.S. copyright law generally expires after 95 years for books, movies and other works of art, or usually 70 years after the creator dies. Sound recordings from 1924 are also now copyright free.
Public domain only applies to a specific version of a character portrayed during the expiring year. But copyright law can be misinterpreted and even misleading when oversimplified—as was the case with some of this year’s mainstream media reporting about Popeye on Public Domain Day.
Some headlines and even entire stories could have left the impression that everything Popeye related is now fair game for all to reproduce or use in any way they want. Bruce Berman, founder of the Center for Intellectual Property Understanding, told Inventors Digest that’s far from true.
“Whoever currently controls Popeye [King Features subsidiary Hearst Holdings Inc., listed as holder of many active trademarks] likely has taken pains to have copyrighted newer versions and trademarked them as well,” he said. Berman cited a similar situation with Mickey Mouse in a story he wrote last August:
“The original Mickey Mouse and Steamboat Willie have evolved and new copyrighted versions of them exist, which will not expire for some time. Also, Mickey and Company are protected by multiple trademarks, which never expire as long as they are used and enforced.
“Is this approach fair? It depends who you ask. Like some of the pharma companies [that] extend patents on current drugs or reformulate them for extended patent life, brands and publishers with franchise properties like Mickey Mouse are reluctant to relinquish IP rights if they don’t have to. In fairness, they have a huge capital investment.”
According to restonnyc.com, there are still some “residual areas” associated with Popeye under copyright, and any new Popeye works since 1978 are still under individual copyright.
“So while the original creative material is free to use, the Popeye name itself still has some restrictions. But the underlying characters [including Olive Oyl, who first appeared in 1919], stories, and cartoons are firmly public domain.”
Jennifer Jenkins, a clinical professor of law teaching intellectual property and director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, told Inventors Digest that “not everything from a later Popeye will be copyrightable.
“It has to be ‘original, creative expression,’ and not ‘merely trivial’ or ‘minuscule’ variations or what copyright law calls ‘scènes à faire’—stereotypical or standard things for an animated sailor character.”
And trademark law? A totally different can of spinach.
Trademarks protect words or images connected to a particular brand. Unlike copyrights, trademarks don’t technically expire (although the USPTO says that to keep them alive, you must use your trademark in commerce and file certain documents at regular intervals).
Smithsonian magazine reported recently that Hearst Holdings “has filed applications to trademark certain graphical depictions of the sailor.”
Others joining the party
Popeye isn’t the only hallowed cartoon character entering the public domain this year. Many Americans may not know the name Tintin, the teen created in 1929 by Belgian cartoonist Hergé, but they might recognize the simple, cherubic face and swooped-back hair tuft on his forehead.
Cub reporter Tintin and his trusty dog, Snowy, are free for use in America but still under copyright in the European Union until 2054. EU copyright terms extend 70 years beyond creators’ deaths, and Hergé died in 1983.
In other entertainment and cultural realms:
- Bookworms entertaining the notion of using classic literary works for promotional and other purposes will be glad to learn they now have royalty-free access to “A Farewell to Arms” by Ernest Hemingway; “The Sound and the Fury” by William Faulkner; “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf; “Cup of Gold” by John Steinbeck (his first novel), and the first English translation of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” by German author Erich Maria Remarque.
- Newly usable musical compositions include “Bolero,” by French composer Maurice Ravel; “An American in Paris” by George Gershwin; “Singin’ in the Rain” (Arthur Freed lyrics, Nacio Herb Brown music), and “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” (though the 1969 recording by Tiny Tim is still copyrighted. He died while singing the song onstage in 1996).
- Sound recordings that joined the PD club include Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”; “It Had to Be You,” recorded by the Isham Jones Orchestra and by Marion Harris; and “California Here I Come,” recorded by Al Jolson.
Duke site rocks as time rolls
OK, so you may never hear about public domain on “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” but the Duke University School of Law likes to keep track of these things. Every December, the school’s aforementioned Center for the Study of the Public Domain publishes an entertaining and comprehensive package of the high-profile works that will lose their copyright(s) in the new year.
The website web.law.duke.edu/cspd/ also includes new public domain entries in recent years, links to numerous public domain-related stories and interviews, and much more.
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A Plethora of Pluses
When a long-protected work becomes public domain, the benefits are more vast and lasting than we may realize. The classically simplified website SuchScience.net, a collection of one-sentence declarations, lists these pluses that encompass the creative and practical:
• Artists can freely adapt and reimagine classic works.
• Museums and archives can share old materials more easily.
• Visual artists can incorporate famous paintings or photos into fresh artworks.
• Game designers can bring classic board games into the digital era.
• Libraries and museums can digitize old books, photos and recordings without copyright concerns.
• Scholars can freely study and share important historical documents.
• Educators can use vintage educational films and textbooks in lessons.
• Community groups can perform classic plays without paying royalties.
• Old films can be restored and re-released.
• Crumbling books can be reprinted.
• Forgotten music can be performed again.
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‘Shocking Tale?’ Not Really
When beloved singer-songwriter-comedian-congressman Sonny Bono crashed face first into a tree during a fatal skiing accident on January 5, 1998, any secrets he had went with him. He also is unable to respond to recent claims by his ex-wife, Cher, that he took control of her money without her knowledge during their marriage and considered killing her.
But rumors of a payoff to Bono by The Walt Disney Co. to ensure passage of the posthumously named 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act are patently false, according to Stephen Carlisle.
A copyright officer at Nova Southeastern University, Carlisle wrote an article on the Florida university’s website in 2015: “The Shocking Truth Behind the Passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension! (Is That It’s Not Really Shocking).”
The legislation sought to extend copyrights another 20 years, delaying their entry into the public domain. Carlisle noted that as a singer and songwriter of hits including “The Beat Goes On” and
“I Got You Babe,” Bono had personal motivation for the bill’s passage without any influence from Disney.
He also researched records and found that House Resolution 2589 “was not even considered by the House Committee on the Judiciary until March 3, 1998, almost two months after Sonny Bono died. … and was signed into law by President Clinton on October 27, 1998.”
Carlisle noted that Disney did contribute to the re-election campaign of various members of the House: “Of the 13 initial sponsors of the House bill, 10 received contributions from Disney’s political action committee.”
But his research also found that the largest amount given by the Disney PAC to any representative was $5,000—hardly the stuff of largesse and scandal.
The 1998 law updated terms of the landmark Copyright Act of 1976, which stipulated that copyright would last for the life of the author plus 50 years (or the last surviving author), or 75 years from publication or 100 years after creation. The ’76 act also increased the renewal term for works copyrighted before 1978 that had not already entered the public domain from 28 years to 47 years, giving a total term of 75 years.
Although the 1998 law passed without significant opposition, critics say it extended a copyright term that was already too lengthy. Rebecca Tushnet agrees.
The Frank Stanton professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Law School, speaking with Harvard Law Today in 2023, said: “Given that most of the profit comes in the first few years after a work’s publication, the copyright term is already way too long.
“In my ideal world, it would be much shorter, and then after a reasonable opportunity to exploit the copyright, the work would enter the public domain.”
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Remember the movie?
The buildup to Popeye’s first entry into the public domain coincided with last July’s death of actress Shelley Duvall. In the same year she emerged as the chronically hysterical wife in the horror thriller “The Shining,” she played Olive Oyl to Robin Williams’ lead in the 1980 movie “Popeye”—and was said by some to have upstaged a performer whose very presence all but rendered that notion impossible.
Critically, the movie resounded like a Big Mac with spinach. The mixed reviews betrayed the film’s unequivocal feel-good energy and quality production numbers.
It’s still under copyright.