Betty Boop and ‘Blondie’ enter the public domain in 2026
The first appearances of the classic cartoon and comic characters are among the pieces of intellectual property whose 95-year U.S. copyright maximum has been reached, putting them in the public domain on Jan. 1st. That means creators can use and repurpose them without permission or payment.
The 2026 batch of newly public artistic creations doesn’t quite have the sparkle of the recent first entries into the public domain of Mickey or Winnie.
“It’s a big year,” said Jennifer Jenkins, law professor and director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, for whom New Year’s Day is celebrated as Public Domain Day. “It’s just the sheer familiarity of all this culture.”
Here’s a closer look at what will enter the public domain on Thursday, based on the research of Jenkins and her center.
Betty Boop began as a dog. Seriously.
When she first appears in the 1930 short “Dizzy Dishes,” one of four of her cartoons entering the public domain, she’s already totally recognizable as the Jazz Age flapper later memorialized in countless tattoos, T-shirts and bumper stickers. She has her baby face, short hair with groomed curls, flashy eyelashes and miniature mouth. But she’s also got dangling poodle ears and a tiny black nose. Those would soon morph into dangling earrings and a tiny white nose.
Mae Questel, who provided the loopy, childlike voice of cartoon characters Betty Boop and Olive Oyl, poses in this 1978 file photo with a poster of a version of Betty Boop.
Artists are now free to use this earliest Boop in films and similar work. But making merch won’t be free. In an important distinction often raised by Disney over Mickey Mouse, a character’s trademark is distinct from the copyright of works that feature them. The Fleischer Productions trademark of Betty Boop remains intact.
Blondie Boopadoop was, like Betty, a young flapper, and the central character of Chic Young’s newspaper comic strip that debuted in 1930. It inspired a film series and radio show, and is still running today in papers that still have comics.
Dean Young — who took over the strip from his father — shows off one a Dagwood sandwich at his New Orleans test kitchen, next to two life-sized versions of Blondie and Dagwood, Tuesday, May 9, 2006. (AP Photo/Cheryl Gerber, File)
The strip followed her carefree breeze through life with her boyfriend, Dagwood Bumstead. The two would marry (and she would change her name) in 1933, and the strip would become the sandwich-heavy domestic comedy familiar to later readers. Though the strip was meant to be based on a woman’s life, Dagwood would in many ways become its breakout star.
Nine new Mickey Mouse cartoons also are becoming public domain, two years after “Steamboat Willie” made the first version of him public property. He’s joined this year by his dog Pluto, who, in 1930, was known as Rover. (He would get his long-term moniker the following year.)