Public domain characters in 2025 Public domain characters in 2025

Each year on January 1, 95-year-old copyrights expire and a multitude of works enter the public domain, allowing them to be freely adapted and interpreted by anyone in the United States.

Following recent notable additions to the public domain that include Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse from Disney’s 1928 short Steamboat Willie, and Winnie the Pooh, 2025 has seen a bounty of animation and comic icons entering the public domain, which means that the work is no longer protected by copyright.

Below is a look at a few of the characters who have entered the public domain, but it is important to remember that in most cases, only the versions of these character from 1929 is public domain.

Therefore even though the 1929 comic strip version of E.C. Segar’s Popeye is public domain, the more iconic animated version of the character produced by the Fleischer Studios won’t become public for another four years. Conversely, other 1929-debuting characters, like Buck Rogers, who are technically entering the public domain this year, have already been in the public domain for years prior because their copyright registrations weren’t renewed, so even later iterations of the characters are accessible to those who want to further explore their creative potential.

Joining these characters are a host of other creative works from 1929 that may be used and repurposed without permission or payment to copyright holders from 2025 onward. These include novels by Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Virginia Woolf, music by Fats Waller, Gershwin, and Ravel, paintings by Dali and Magritte, films by John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, Disney’s Silly Symphony short Skeleton Dance, Walter Lantz Productions’ first cartoon Race Riot (embedded below), along wtih thousands of other artworks. For a broader overview of material that has newly entered the public domain, see the Center for the Study of the Public Domain’s website.

Here’s a look at the class of 2025:

Popeye

First seen in Segar’s Thimble Theatre comic strip in 1929, the big-hearted, pugilistic Popeye debuted as an animated character in a Fleischer Studio 1933 Betty Boop cartoon before embarking on his own series of shorts in 1933. Early Popeye adventures featured a fascinating ‘Stereoptical Process’ with 2d cels over miniature backgrounds. The character’s multiple media reincarnations went on to include Robin Williams embodying sailor-man’s squint and mumbled discourse, with disturbingly realistic prosthetic swollen forearms, co-starring with Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl in Robert Altman’s 1980 Popeye musical. More recently, in 2018, a series of Popeye animated web shorts appeared from Wildbrain, which featured a non-verbal, more youthful sailor whose trademark pipe had been replaced with a whistle. In 2022, an 87-minute animatic leaked for a canceled Sony Pictures Animation cg Popeye feature, directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, which imploded. Popeye the Slayer Man, a horror slasher yarn set in an abandoned spinach factory, is slated for release this year.

Tintin

Fresh-faced adventurer Tintin and his faithful wire fox terrier Snowy (originally ‘Milou’) first appeared in comic strip form in a Belgian newspaper on January 10, 1929. Nazi invasion canceled the publication in 1940, but Hergé continued to created his intricately-rendered ‘ligne claire’ comics until 1983. Tintin and his globe-trotting adventures filled 24 books, and inspired animated series, beginning with Belvision Studios 1947 stop-motion adaptation, continuing with cel animation, French-language live-action features, stage productions, video games, a BBC radio show, and a Canadian animated series in the 1990s. In 2011, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson created the first of a planned trilogy of performance-captured cg feature films, the first of which Spielberg directed, which Weta Digital animation, as The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. Jackson and James Cameron were rumored to be directing subsequent films. Public domain will make available characters from only the first Tintin adventure, set in Soviet Russia. Thus, this does not include Tintin’s two-fisted side-kick Captain Haddock, nor the bowler-hatted detectives Thomson and Thompson, nor the befuddled Professor Calculus.

Bosko

Animators Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising registered Bosko as one of the earliest talking animated characters, as filed with the U.S. Copyright Office on January 3, 1928. They produced a five-minute pilot, Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid, featuring Ising on camera, seated sketching Bosko, who comes to life with a broad Southern patois (voiced by animator Carman Maxwell), laughs, whistles, dances, and breaks the fourth wall. The short led to Bosko starring in Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoons from 1930 through 1933, a total 39 titles, but the first of those will not enter public domain until 2026. Bosko was last seen in Amblin’s Tiny Toons Adventures and, briefly, in Space Jam (1996).

Horace Horsecollar

Mickey Mouse’s friendly anthropomorphic horse first appeared, walking only occasionally on four legs, in Ub Iwerks’ 1929 short, The Plowboy, followed by The Jazz Fool that same year. Horace most often appeared in the company of Clarabelle Cow – who was herself created in 1928 – and he later made appearances in Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983), Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), and the Disney series Mickey and the Roadster Racers (2013). Could Horace and Clarabelle find love in the public domain?

Count Screwloose

Or, to give him his full title, Count Screwloose from Tooloose, as Milt Gross named him in the funny pages of the New York World newspaper on February 17, 1929. The Count began his life in comics as an escapee from Nuttycrest Sanitarium, and he later featured in a pair of M-G-M cartoons – Jitterbug Follies and Wanted: No Master, with J.R. the Wonder Dog – that Gross directed in 1939 and Mel Blanc voiced anonymously, due to contractual obligations.

Buck Rogers

Philip Nowlan and Dick Calkins’s Buck Rogers in the 25th Century first appeared as a comic strip in 47 nationally syndicated newspapers. The science fiction series, about a 20-year-old airman from Pittsburgh who is transported 500 years into the future, ran until 1967. For many, Hollywood star Buster Crabbe embodied the essence of Buck Rogers in the Universal’s 1939 movie serial. Many other multimedia adaptations followed, arguably culminating in NBC’s 1979 TV series, produced by Glen A. Larson, starring Gil Gerard as a temporally-dislocated space shuttle pilot alongside Erin Gray as star-fighter Colonel Wilma Deering. Since then, feature film adaptations have been announced – including the involvement of comic book maestro Frank Miller, superstar George Clooney, Legendary Pictures, and Skydance Studios. All fizzled.

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