Public Domain Day - 2026

Welcome to 2026, and our annual celebration of Public Domain Day!

This year, movies from 1930 that are now in public domain include:

Betty Boop’s first cartoon Dizzy Dishes, and several more Mickey Mouse cartoons

All Quiet on the Western Front

Animal Crackers – starring the Marx Brothers in their second film.

In King of Jazz, in which, as the Center for the Study of Public Domain, Duke Law Center astutely notes: a man gets drunk and stammers: “You know what’s the matter with this country? It’s a tariff! That’s who!”, referring to the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that worsened the Great Depression and eerily reflects our own troubled times.

Morocco with Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich

The Blue Angel, likewise, with Marlene Dietrich in her breakout role, introducing her to American audiences.

Hell’s Angels – Jean Harlow’s first film

The Big Trail – John Wayne’s first feature role, though his stardom would wait until later in the decade.

Free and Easy – Buster Keaton’s first speaking role and singing role. 

For more on the movies, books, music, and art of 1929 that now enters public domain, have a look at this Center for the Study of Public Domain, part of the Duke Law Center website.

Here's a look at past posts on movies entering public domain:

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2025

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2024

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2023

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2022

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2021

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2020

 

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

 

 

Helen Kane - portrait of the "Boop-a-Doop Girl"

This sepia-toned portrait of Helen Kane, the Boop-a-Doop Girl from the book Stars of the Photoplay, a book of photo portraits of the Hollywood stars (Photoplay Publishing Co., 1930), recalls the heady days of the glorious wide-eyed flappers with their spit curls and sexual suggestiveness expressed through a gauze of pretended innocence.

The year 1930 also brought the first appearance of her cartoon alter ego, Betty Boop.  We've discussed Betty's influence on pop culture in this previous post.  Miss Kane would sue cartoonist/animator Max Fleischer over his creation stealing her "boop-a-doop" line.  She did not win her case.

Helen Kane's career would lose its momentum partly due to the Great Depression and the end of the flapper era, and due to all those impersonators, cartoon or human, who made boop-a-dooping a flood on the market, and the originator was no longer so original.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism.  Her latest book is Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

Betty Boop's Hallowe'en Party (1933)

Getting ready for Halloween, here’s a glimpse of the weird and wonderful world of Max Fleischer and the never-a-dull-moment in the life of Betty Boop. This is “Betty Boop’s Hallowe’en Party” (1933), directed by Dave Fleischer and featuring the voice of Mae Questal as Betty. Note the NRA “We Do Our Part” at the beginning.

Betty Boop and the Production Code

Betty Boop suffered the indignity of lewd and lascivious employers groping her and threatening her for sexual favors. Then the hapless creature suffered the indignity being called naughty by the Code.

The cartoon heroine with the giant head with its coy rolling eyes burst from the Fleischer studio in the early 1930s and made full use of what the new sound technology had to offer. Mae Questel, who voiced Betty, did a Helen Kane impersonation, and “boop-oop-a-doop” became a catch phrase.

An interesting evolution of Betty and the Fleischer manner of production is noted in “Serious Business” by Stefan Kanfer (Scribner, 1997), which notes that unlike the Disney studio which recorded the dialogue before creating the cartoon, a method which continues today, Fleischer did it the other way around. Max Fleischer had the cartoon created first, a kind of stream-of-consciousness storytelling on the part of the cartoonist (which led to some pretty weird dream-like scenarios for Betty and her crew), and then the sound came afterwards.

Mae Questel was reportedly very good at ad libbing, as this is what she was required to do in the recording session after the cartoon was filmed. The actors watched the cartoon and then invented lines to go with what was happening on the screen. (A technique which led to Popeye, another Fleischer production, noted for its humorous extemporaneous patter of dialogue.)

Some of Betty’s earliest outings have been called by some critics, including Leonard Maltin, as a kind of “cartoon noir” because of the menacing shadows and looming backgrounds, and the inanimate objects that spring to life in threatening manner. Betty started as a guest in “Bimbo’s Initiation” (1931). Bimbo and Ko-Ko, a clown, were the Fleischer stars through the 1920s. By the time Fleischer’s “Snow White” was released in 1931 (not a bit like the Disney’s version), Betty was established as the star of Fleischer Studios.

From “Stopping the Show”, “Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle” both from 1932 we get Betty singing, stripping, and pouring her heart out. Naiveté was never so suggestive. The cartoons always had at least one song, and the scenarios were usually risqué.

Cab Calloway’s dance steps were Rotoscoped on the body of Ko-Ko, and he wailed “St. James Infirmary.” Betty imitated Fanny Brice and Maurice Chevalier. It was raucous, and riotous, and freewheeling.

Then the Code, and Betty had to clean up her act, or rather, the Fleischers did. Glimpses of her underwear were no longer allowed. Her dress was lowered to cover the garter, and the neckline was raised. Pals Bimbo and Ko-Ko were pushed aside for a cute puppy, a cute nephew, and Grampy, who never leered at Betty.

The run-down houses and apartments were Betty struggled to keep up like everybody else did the Depression became cozy cottages and swanky digs. Betty was doing well. But her saucy underdog persona suffered.

She became matronly, where she no longer appeared as a race car driver or circus performer, but sang songs about housecleaning. Finally, Betty no longer starred, but was the supporting player to the new cast. Though Betty had always been a black and white cartoon, now she was truly colorless.

A new cast member in a minor role, a guy named Popeye, broke free from the mundane polite menagerie and became a star on his own. “Boop-a-doop” may have been outlawed by the Code, but bashing somebody’s skull in, as Popeye and Bluto repeatedly did to each other, was good clean all-American fun. Fortunately for Miss Questel, she took on the job of Olive Oyl’s voice, and continued to ad lib while watching a cartoon, and doing a splendid job.

Decades later we see Betty again in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988) in the nightclub scene where she is a lowly and somewhat forlorn cigarette girl making small talk with Bob Hoskins. But nobody is pinching Betty, or even noticing her, despite that she is portrayed in black and white in a room packed with cartoon characters in full color. There is something poignant in her down and out manner of telling Mr. Hoskins that work for her has been, “kinda slow since cartoons went to color.” But it wasn’t color that got our Betty. It was the Code, as omnipotent a master as one of her old lecherous employers.

“I still got it,” Betty pitifully jokes, boop-a-dooping once more. Mr. Hoskins gently agrees that she does, but his response is only an act of kindness to a worn out dame who’s seen better days.

But she does still have it, or she must, or we wouldn’t see her on mugs, T-shirts, novelty clocks and radios, depicted as a biker chick on the backs of leather jackets, still coy, still innocent, still suggestive, but less a victim of sexual harassment than an assertive modern woman. Yeah, I got your Code right here, buddy. Betty lives, in full color, in the world of merchandizing. Max Fleischer might well be amazed.

Perhaps Betty’s plight is best assessed by the sexy Jessica, voiced by Kathleen Turner in “Roger Rabbit.” Protesting her own innocence she remarks, “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.”