Sean Bradley, Staff Writer

2025 is a great year to be a classic animation fan because on Jan. 1, 2025, all copyrighted works from 1929 entered the public domain in the United States. In this article, we’ll look at some animated films from 1929 that recently entered the public domain.

Starting with Disney, last year we saw the first versions of Mickey and Minne Mouse from “Steamboat Willie” enter the public domain. This year, we welcome a dozen more Mickey Mouse films from 1929, including some important films, like “The Opry House” and “The Karnival Kid.” “The Opry House” marked the first time Mickey wore his iconic white gloves as well as the first time Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” was used in an animated cartoon. The melody has since been a staple of animated cartoons and was notably featured in cartoons, such as the “Merrie Melodies” short “Rhapsody Rabbit,” starring Bugs Bunny, and the “Tom and Jerry” cartoon “The Cat Concerto.” “The Karnival Kid” is noteworthy for marking the first time Mickey spoke his first words “Hot dogs! Hot dogs!”

 “Mickey’s Follies” is another important film because it marked the debut of Mickey’s first theme song “Minnie’s Yoo Hoo”, which was first performed by Mickey in that short and was written and composed by Carl Stalling, who later went on to score music for the Warner Bros. cartoons in the 1940s. Not only do we now have access to more Mickey Mouse films, but we also have access to an additional 5 Disney films from the “Silly Symphony” series, which debuted in 1929, including the series’ debut film “The Skeleton Dance.” Unlike the Mickey Mouse shorts, which were character-driven, the “Silly Symphonies” were musical shorts that focused on combining music and storytelling. The idea of the series was first suggested to Walt Disney by Carl Stalling while working on the scores for the first Mickey Mouse films. Initially, Walt was uninterested in the idea. However, after hearing Stalling’s idea of a musical cartoon about dancing skeletons, Walt opened to the idea and thus the “Silly Symphonies” were born and would last for 10 years until 1939.

Also in the public domain is the pilot film that launched the Looney Tunes series. As the Disney films grew in popularity in 1929, around this time in Hollywood, two young animators, Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, were interested in creating their own cartoon star. The two had previously worked for Disney on the “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” series, but were hired away in 1928 by producer Charles Mintz to make new Oswald shorts at a new studio  when Disney lost control of the character to Universal, who owned the character’s copyright (Disney bought the rights back to Oswald from Universal in 2006). However, Universal was displeased with the new Oswald shorts and fired Mintz and formed its own in-house animation studio run by Walter Lantz, who later went on to produce the “Woody Woodpecker” cartoons. Out of jobs, Harman and Ising decided to start their own studio and produced a live-action/animated sound short titled “Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid,” starring a black minstrel character named Bosko, to sell to film distributors. After being turned down by a few distributors, the two eventually found a distributor with Warner Bros. after Leon Schlesinger, head of Pacific Title and Art Studio, took an interest in Bosko and used his connections  to get the two a distribution deal for a cartoon series. That cartoon series was Looney Tunes, which was a play on Disney’s “Silly Symphonies” and has since grown to be one of most famous cartoon series of all time, starring iconic characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

Additionally, many cartoons from animation producer Max Fleischer are now public domain too. These include the last few silent “Inkwell Imps” (formerly “Out of the Inkwell”) films starring Koko the Clown and Fitz the Dog, several sing-along films in the Screen Songs series, and most importantly, the short “Noah’s Lark,” which was the first entry in the Talkartoons series which launched the career of popular character Betty Boop. Another notable Fleischer cartoon in the public domain is an educational film titled “Finding His Voice,” which was produced for Western Electric and showed how sound was put on films and reproduced in theaters. The film stars Billy Murray and Walter Van Brunt, who were both popular singers in the 1910s and early 1920s and lent their singing voices for some of the early Screen Song cartoons from 1929. Murray also voiced the character Bimbo the Dog in some of the early Talkartoons shorts.

Other cartoons now in the public domain include a few of the misbegotten sound Felix the Cat shorts made by producer Pat Sullivan and animator Otto Messmer (Felix, once a cartoon superstar during the silent film era in the 1920s, was losing popularity with audiences due to the series’ failure to embrace the new sound technology at the time), many Krazy Kat shorts made by animators Ben Harrison and Manny Gould for Charles Mintz (including the first sound entry “Ratskin,” a play on the 1929 Paramount film “Redskin” (Note: the term “redskin” is a derogatory term for indigenous peoples of America.)  The Prohibition Era short “Farm Relief,” the Mintz “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” shorts (including the now-lost, first sound short “Hen Fruit”) as well as the first ones by Walter Lantz (including the horse race-themed short “Race Riot”), several silent and sound Aesop’s Fables cartoons starring Farmer Alfalfa from the Van Beuren Studios, and much more.

If you’re ever bored and looking for something cool to watch, next time take some time to check out some of these public domain animated cartoons.