I love Tintin! People in the US grew up with Marvel comic books. We grew up with Tintin, as did our parents before us. Can't wait to see what people do with it.
Same here. I grew up on Asterix & Tintin comics. Some of the most idyllic parts of my childhood.
The smell of old books, dusty libraries, and having to pick 1 book per month from what seemed like endless shelves of these comics.
American here; our kids pore over their Tintin books. I suspect we’re part of a trend; unsure how large. I vaguely knew about Tintin growing up but never had the opportunity to read more than a few pages, and no friend ever brought them up.
I also love Tintin and was a big fan as a kid. Recently though, a friend of mine highlighted many of its racist elements stemming from its colonial context -- someone I hadn't fully internalized. Don't want to generate hate for Tintin, I still love it and will introduce it to my kids -- just wanted to highlight this.
Yes, the earlier Tintin comics, (like Tintin in Congo, which I don't think is published any more), are quite blatant in its colonial stereotypes. But to his credit Herge did change his world views (and that of Tintin), to become more "multicultural", when he became friends with a chinese artist and sculptor. (See: Tintin, Hergé and Chang – A Friendship That Changed the World - https://thewire.in/books/tintin-herge-and-chang-a-friendship... and the HN discussion on this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36468028 ).
> When Hergé published this comic book, he was only 23 years old and wrote it as part of government-led initiative to encourage Belgians to take up commissions in Congo ... Later on his life, Hergé would say: "For the Congo as with Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, the fact was that I was fed on the prejudices of the bourgeois society in which I moved ... It was 1930. I only knew things about these countries that people said at the time: 'Africans were great big children ... Thank goodness for them that we were there!' Etc. And I portrayed these Africans according to such criteria, in the purely paternalistic spirit which existed then in Belgium".
See: Tintin In The Congo, by Hergé (Georges Remi) - https://archive.org/details/tintin-in-the-congo-herge-george...
This guy was an asshole, even for the times. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/when-nazis-took-be...
> Can't wait to see what people do with it.
Yikes.
what do you even mean by this? I can't understand what your take is.
If Tintin in the Congo is the part entering the public domain, perhaps a yikes is in order?
Like was saw with Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19623240/), there's now also a slightly higher budget movie taking advantage of Popeye entering the public domain: Popeye the Slayer Man (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30956852/). Great line from the trailer: "You know why the factory closed down 20 years ago? There was a spinach contamination."
Not be confused with Pops the Slayer Man (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33362807/), also coming out next year.
Tintin has been satirized for years already, so we have an idea of what might be yet to come!
My favourite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tintin:_Brea...
Others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tintin_parodies_and_pa...
Tintin en Thaïlande is quite something!
Both of the mentioned movies probably wouldn't have had any problem releasing while the copyright to the characters remained in-tact under fair use. If someone is trying to make a movie with existing well-known characters, people aren't too interested in non-transformative work, and distributors probably wouldn't distribute something due to the general lack of audience interest.
The main benefit that public domain brings to a work is that you can make small edits or changes to a work without violating its copyright. Imagine if you wanted to go through all the episodes of Spongebob, change the colors to make it clearer to watch for colorblind viewers[a], and then sell those edits as a box set or otherwise sell access to them via some accessibility-focused streaming service. Under copyright this would probably not be seen as transformative, and something non-transformative then has an incredibly high bar to clear for fair use to apply to it.
I also think that making new episodes that aren't super transformative would probably not have met the burden for Fair use: for example, making a new episode of Popeye that otherwise follows the same script beats as existing episodes would probably be seen as copyright infringement by the courts. However, once you get into the territory of making a sequel/prequel movie where you really flesh out his character, it starts getting into the realm of qualifying for transformative under fair use (depending on how the judge sees it).
But the mentioned movies really seem like they're so different from the source material. For Pooh Blood and Honey, it doesn't affecting the market for the original, given the works are so different in what they do (and there is likely 0.1% or less overlap between the audience of the slasher genre and the children's programming genre cohort), it did not use almost any of the original copyrighted works to tell its story, just its characters, and the content is transformative enough to where it's not like it's just another episode of Winnie The Pooh.
This popeye film seems to use the same approach as Blood and Honey: it's just Popeye killing people with stuff like "look, it's the Spinach from the original episodes!".
a: not sure if this would actually be beneficial, but it's the best example I can think of for a barely-transformative work other than putting sunglasses on the characters' faces or putting Subway Surfers next to it.
My understanding is that what counts as fair use is not well defined because litigation is expensive and publishers don't want to take a gamble, go to court, and potentially lose or have large legal fees to deal with.
One approach I've seen to this is that you don't distribute the edited work, rather you distribute something that edits the work. A mod.
For a movie that could be a video player that applies certain effects and transformations at the right timestamps.
The current popeye artist is a fairly interesting public domain ally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._K._Milholland ... he did a mickey mouse thing at the beginning of the year. I assume he's fine with it but I can't find any statements by him.
I just can’t get my head around that this (Tintin) is for the US. For the rest, including the EU, the copyright is until around 2050.
Hemingway has been in public domain for a while in Canada (pretty sure)
So in about a month we can expect to see a trailer for horror film renditions of Popeye and Tintin, (also board game Kickstarters that use them as a theme) like we did with Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh?
Cool. Cool cool cool.
Almost a month ago the trailer for Popeye the Slayer Man was released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1hsxK0UMlQ
Surprisingly violent trailer, fyi.
We run a public domain jam every January - come join us and make games with the new public domain material! https://itch.io/jam/gaming-like-its-1929
Earlier discussion:
What will enter the public domain in 2025?
I love TinTin! I feel like we're going to see a ton of AI drawn TinTin fan works pop up, will be interesting to see.
Is there a model that cares about copyrights and has incapable of doing that right now?
Or is this sarcasm? Hard to tell!
not a model per se but there are plenty of safeguards on, for example, oAI products.
Go ask an oAI product 'draw a portrait in the style of Patrick Nagel'.
Here's the reply I got : "I am unable to generate images in the style of Patrick Nagel due to content policy restrictions regarding artists' styles. "
I don't know of any specific copyright-centric error messages, but in my ignorant naivety I would assume that if oAI products are having problems mimicking an artists' style, it'll probably avoid copyright as much as possible.
Teesside Tintin was one of the early treasures of the internet, I had so much joy seeing that for the first time however crude it was.
Is there a place where we could see all public characters good to use without payment?
All episodes of the 90s Tintin animated series are on DailyMotion:
There's also the original 1957-1964 TV show, Herge's Adventures of Tintin. Here's a fragment of its original airing on Catalan public television (TV3) during the 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMH76zya8MQ. That's seemingly the only available piece of that particular translated version on the Internet, and its audio is damaged, at that. Makes me think of how much content has been completely lost through the years.
I vaguely recall seeing this in the UK in the 80s and then being impressed with the much more authentic animation styles of the later cartoons.
As a kid I found it embodied quite fittingly the naive mystery of the comics, the direction, pacing, music .. everything was on point. (Something that was lost on spielberg 3d movie variant imo, too much indiana jones in spirit)
I agree. The cartoons felt literally like the comics brought to life.
Internet archive has it too https://archive.org/details/The.adventures.of.Tintin.animate...
So now that a lot of books used for studying literature will become freely available, I wonder how long it's going to be before the syllabus "needs revising"
Why? Most books you read in lit class aren't part of a textbook. You just buy the Dover Thrift edition of some book for $2.99 and read that. Or a used copy, or the Gutenberg e-text. Nobody at the school makes any money on it.
High schools still teach Shakespeare and that's always been in the public domain. As is a lot of Mark Twain's works.
Somewhat tangential, but it makes me nuts that my son's small high school, that is always struggling for money, pays stupid amounts for Disney scripts for the school plays instead of doing Shakespeare or any of the other public domain plays out there.
> pays stupid amounts for Disney scripts
How much do they pay exactly? Does it come out of a specific program’s budget, eg drama? Just curious.
To play a devil’s advocate:
Perhaps the plays generate some money for the school or the drama program. Disney might draw a larger audience.
Also, for better or worse (probably worse), Disney is “safe” and designed for mass appeal.
Small schools probably have a harder time with these sorts of decisions. Ideally, a school might encourage adaptations of classics, to foster deeper understanding and creativity (as well as to ensure that there aren’t too many “re-runs”, furthering student and audience interest). But a larger student populace makes that easier via access to more ideas, more interest, more hands.
They pay about $1K per production. It's certainly not making them any money, as the ticket sales amount to about $500 total, and that money is coming from parents and family who would be paying the $5 ticket price no matter what is on stage. Nobody else is attending these plays. I think the main reason they're doing it is because it is what most the kids want to do, especially because it is a combine high school/middle school play so there are younger kids in it.
At least this year, they let the seniors pick the play and completely run the show. They're still paying about a grand for the rights, but they did make a more interesting choice, "The Crucible".
Since Disney classics often riffed off public domain works, the school conceivably might have gone straight to the source.
Maybe the argument is accessibility, Disney is much more approachable and likely to get the kids invested and involved than Shakespeare and is worth the cost?
Or they could just do Hamlet with Lions
How much do they spend?
Arguably impoverishing the students, too. The impulse to pander to keep both the kids and parents interested is too strong, I guess.
Not only that, but what GP is suggesting would require schools to have a reasonable, sizeable budget. Schools provide most of that reading material, so they'd have to be the party responsible for buying all of the new, copyrighted books.
A fairly laughable idea if you follow the general trend of school budgets...
I think this will be the original black and white Tintin.
The modern colored Tintin we see was made after WW2 and drastically rehabilitated Tintin's reputation.
For example - https://sauvikbiswas.com/2014/11/18/tintin-in-america-the-bl...
I love reading Tintin, but being honest about it's origins and baggage is important as well. Highly recommend reading "Tintin: The Complete Companion" as well.
IIRC there were also plenty of changes in later editions that didn't relate to controversies (or to colourisation): for example radio sets were made more up-to-date.
Yep! BW Tintin was already very dated by the 1950s.
Really shows how much progress (positive and negative) happened in just 20-30 years.
I'd also mention that Tom McCarthy's "Tintin and The Secret of Literature" completely changed the way in which I viewed the series - genuinely exciting stuff.
Never read that before! Thanks for the rec!
Looks like it will be "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets", which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Land_of_the_Sovi... says "is the first volume of The Adventures of Tintin" and "it was the only completed Tintin story that Hergé did not reproduce in colour" due to Hegré's "embarrassment at the crudeness of the work."
As much as I love Tintin, gotta agree with Hergé here. Although Congo and America aren't that much better.
Every Tintin upto "Land of Black Gold" had a black-and-white version written before the war. They did not age well, and if you read them you can understand why Hergé had a hard time in the 1945-1950 period.
See, every day we get new data to train LLMs. Just think, all of the current LLMs were trained without Popeye, Tintin, Faulkner and Hemmingway. Just imagine how much better they will be with all this new public domain data to use for training! /s
All that WWII war propaganda becoming public domain at the perfect time for inciting the next mass murder!
Rule 34 is going to get a lot of newfound attention, I wager.
My (IANAL) understanding is that rule 34 renditions generally fall under the parody clause of fair-use in any case
IANAL either, but that is _way_ oversold by the general public. It's only parody if the point of the new work is saying something about the original.
Popeye having explicit sex with Olive Oyl isn't parody, it's just for people to get their rocks off. There's no commentary on the original work being made. Nothing wrong with that, but if people think they're in the clear because they shout "parody", they're mistaken.
You act like that has stopped any artist. Ned time you hear about a new Pokemon game releasing or any expansion to a franchise. New characters will have content drawn of them before the announcement is over.
I'm strong to the finish 'cause I eats me <CENSORED>