Tales from the Public Domain: The classics are enduring and free

Some episode titles of The Simpsons is a clever pun, a reference to something else, maybe obvious, maybe arcane, and sometimes, they’re literal.

Take, for example, a season 13 episode called Tales from the Public Domain – it’s brazen in its honesty about what it is. It’s a triptych episode, a la Treehouse of Horrors, where each section is a reworking of a classic story that the writers and the studio do not have to pay to tell.

For those specific The Simpsons adventures, it’s recasting its main characters as players in The Odyssey, Joan of Arc and Hamlet, all stories and published works that have long fallen into the public domain.

Producers love public domain source material, it’s one fewer cheque they have to cut, and they don’t have to deal with the precious feelings of, like, novelists or playwrights or comic book artists.

With public domain works, you don’t find yourself in a public spat with George R.R. Martin, who posted to his blog about his beef with the House of the Dragon showrunner who had cut a minor character, nor would you be contending with the author of Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi, trashing one of the film adaptation’s actors, and before the movie had even come out.

Those are probably extreme examples, and most creative tussles are actually kept well out of the public eye.

In the US, copyright expires 95 years after its publication, which was expanded from 75 years in 1998 after aggressive lobbying by Disney, who have an outsized interest in keeping its characters in its vaults. In Australia, copyright generally expires 70 years after the death of the creator.

But time marches on and in 2024, the earliest version of Mickey Mouse, as he appeared in the 1928 film Steamboat Willie, passed into the public domain.

There’s a certain irony in that given Steamboat Willie itself was, to put it generously, an homage to Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill Jr, and Disney built its animation empire on the back of public domain fairytales such as Cinderella, Snow White and The Little Mermaid.

In 2022, when the copyright hold on Winnie the Pooh and Piglet expired, it allowed some enterprising storytellers to reframe a beloved children’s character in a slasher horror, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.

And within the next few years, we’ll see another swathe of well-known pop cultural figures pass into the public domain, including the earliest versions of Superman, James Bond, King Kong and characters from The Hobbit.

The companies and studios that own these rights are probably freaking out, but it opens a world of possibilities for filmmakers and writers to put their own spin on something that while technically belongs to someone, also belongs to everyone.

They are part of our cultural foundations, and it’s why the business and art of adapting public domain material is never ending. Each new generation of artists wants to tell their version of something they already love.

Sometimes it’ll be “updated” into a contemporary setting, such as Cruel Intentions did when it took Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 French drama and transported it to late-1990s New York City, retaining the original’s sharp social commentary but added email, Donna Karan threads and prep school rich kids.

Other times, it’ll be relatively faithful to the original text, but have a modern resonance, such as Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, an ambitious screen epic that uses the framework of a classic story to have a conversation about the breakdown in civility and decency today.

Thank goodness he didn’t have to chase down the rights from Homer’s descendants, if Homer ever even existed.

Just yesterday, the first tranche of promotions dropped for an upcoming adaptation of The Age of Innocence, based off Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel about the New York social set in the 1880s Gilded Age.

It won’t drop until February and features in its cast, Camila Morrone and Kristine Froseth, with Australian filmmaker Shannon Murphy directing the first three episodes. The last significant screen adaptation was Martin Scorsese’s film in 1993.

It’s obviously not just about the financial savings of using public domain material, there is also something about the enduring appeal of a story that has remained relevant to every new generation, and how a modern audience can engage with it and get something new out of it.

Otherwise, we wouldn’t be constantly adapting Jane Austen novels – and there have been three major projects this year with the Sense and Sensibility movie, the forthcoming Pride and Prejudice, and the TV series The Other Bennet Sister, which technically comes from a copyrighted book that was able to appropriate the Austen story for free.

Ditto recent productions of Wuthering Heights and My Brilliant Career.

Obviously, copyright exists to reward and incentivise human artists who put a little of themselves into creating these works – and the Australian government and thieving AI companies would do well to remember that.

But once the original artist is long gone, it’s great that these stories continue to be interpreted through a fresh perspective and find a new audience.