With the start of every new year, several works will be free from the bounds of copyrights and head to the public domain. This year, thousands of works created in 1929, including the original versions of popular characters like Popeye and Tintin are now free to reuse and adapt in the United States.
First introduced in E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre comic strip story Gobs of Work, Popeye was a very different character from the one so known and loved today, with the most notable difference being that the original Sailor Man did not eat spinach to grow muscles and gain strength, although he was still strong enough without it to deliver a mighty beat-down.

That being said, this doesn’t mean that the character’s now iconic spinach power is still bound by copyright. According to an interview by NPR, close examination uncovered that Popeye had mentioned spinach in 1931, and the King Features syndicate did not renew that particular comic. Under copyright law at the time, copyrights lapsed after 28 years if they were not renewed, making spinach fair game.
The young reporter Tintin and his loyal dog Snowy are also heading to public domain in the form of their earliest iteration from Belgian cartoonist Hergé’s Les Aventures de Tintin, although this only applies in the U.S. In the European Union, copyright protections apply throughout an author’s life or 70 years after death, and since Hergé died in 1983, Tintin won’t be available in the public domain for the EU until 2054.

Of course, the characters are only two out of the thousands of works entering public domain this year, spanning across films, books, musical compositions and sound recordings. Here are some other noteworthy works entering 2025, according to the Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of Public Domain roundup:
- The Karnival Kid, a Mickey Mouse short film where he speaks his first words: “hot dogs”
- Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, his first sound film
- The Skeleton Dance from Disney’s Silly Symphonies short film series
- The Broadway Melody, the first sound film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture
- On With the Show, the first all-talking, all-color, feature-length film
- The first English translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front
- Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms
- John Steinbeck’s first novel, Cup of Gold
- Arthur Freed’s Singin’ in the Rain and the film it appeared in, The Hollywood Revue of 1929
- Cole Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Love? and Tiptoe Through the Tulips