The public domain has become a much more important concept over the past few years. If you don’t know what public domain means, let me give you a quick summary that doesn’t get into nearly enough detail to fully understand it. That’s because I don’t fully understand it. But I’ll try to make it make some sense.
When people create art, they can copyright it. That way, other people can’t use that idea for their own profit. It gives that person, or group of people, ownership of that idea for the time that the copyright is legal. But something can only be under copyright for a certain amount of time, so that copyright isn’t legal forever. After the time of the copyright, the art goes into the public domain. Anyone can use it. The public domain is a catch-all term for any intellectual property that is no longer, or has never been, under copyright by someone.
Certain properties have been in the public domain for years. That’s why there have been so many adaptations of stuff like The Three Musketeers, Tarzan, or Sherlock Holmes. I’ve covered adaptations of each of them for this blog. Since the original novels within these multimedia franchises have entered the public domain, people have been freely able to use them how they wish. Well, sort of. Many later adaptations are not in the public domain. The movies I’ve covered, for example. People cannot freely use elements that originated in movies or books that still fall under copyright. Winnie-the-Pooh is public domain, but Disney’s movie is not. People can freely use the character of Winnie-the-Pooh, but they can’t use his red shirt, since that originated in the Disney movie.
Speaking of Winnie-the-Pooh, that’s kind of where I want to steer this whole topic. Every year brings more properties into the public domain. As time rolls on, so does the limit for what is under copyright. This year, anything from 1929 hit public domain. Anything earlier had already entered. Each year we go forward, so does public domain. This means that more popular works and characters become available for public use.
Winnie-the-Pooh made his way into the public domain in 2023. People were quick to capitalize on his availability. Not even a month after Winnie-the-Pooh went public, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey was released to theaters. It was a slasher movie where the best friend bear killed a whole lot of people. There has since been a sequel, and a movie universe has been set up.
That has nothing on 2024, however. Last year was the year where Steamboat Willie dropped the copyright. That original version of Mickey Mouse could be used by anyone. And use him, they did. Sure, it wasn’t until a year later that the white gloves made it into the public domain, but that didn’t stop a whole slew of Mickey Mouse horror movies from coming out. The Mouse Trap was a Canadian slasher about a Mickey-masked killer at an amusement park. Screamboat came from the people behind the Terrifier movies. Mouse of Horrors, Mickey’s Slayhouse, and The Dark Doman: MvW Mickey-vs-Winnie were also made or are in the process of being made.
And then there was Mouseboat Massacre, which I found while scrolling through Prime Video. It was made by the studio that put out Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey but is, for some reason, not part of the Poohniverse. Mimi (Lauren Leopard) was a drug addict tricked into an intervention by her family. They isolated themselves at a family getaway home and locked her in the house to get the drugs out of her system. She wasn’t allowed to use the internet. Instead, she was given an old VHS and a VCR to play it. The tape showed a video that was a demented, violent version of Steamboat Willie. It conjured a real, killer Mickey Mouse (Jay Robertson) who picked apart the family, one by one.
I’m not going to lie. Mouseboat Massacre was a bad movie. It was a low-rent slasher that didn’t do much to make itself any more than forgettable in the horror department. None of the kills stood out. Some of them were barely even shown. A lot of it was simple slashes with a knife. I thought the movie would be a little more creative in that regard. Alas, this is what we were given.
Where I think it excelled, however, and this was the same way that Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey excelled, was in the story. There were glimmers of good storytelling in Mouseboat Massacre. The whole drug addiction and intervention aspect added layers that I didn’t expect from a movie that was so clearly cashing in on the Mickey Mouse intellectual property. Mimi’s family knew she was an addict. That was why the intervention happened in the first place. When she knew that her family was in danger, nobody would believe her. Anyone she warned would think she was hallucinating or making things up because of withdrawals. When she escaped from her bedroom, her family thought she was making a run for it to get drugs. In reality, she was trying to save people from the killer Mickey.
This led to a nice scene between Mimi and her father, where he talked about how he went through the same addiction issues at her age. It was a touching moment that brought the addiction storyline to a nice close as the family learned to understand each other. Before he was mutilated by Mickey, that is. Everything in a slasher must lead to a final girl. That is the way.
The other thing that really elevated the story was the way that they used Steamboat Willie. That animated short was turned into a VHS horror short in the vein of the VHS from The Ring. The imagery might not have been the spookiest or the most striking, but it got the point across. It showed some effort was put into making a movie to capitalize on the public domain, and that’s really all that was necessary. Show a little bit more than pure, basic capitalism.
As for the rest of Mouseboat Massacre, it was a very simple slasher that you could easily tell was from the studio that made Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. It shared many of the same elements. Obviously, a newly public domain character was the killer. There was a group of people going to a remote-ish house for a trip away from home. One of the women was sexualizing herself online for views. Some of the actors crossed over, too.
Mouseboat Massacre was only one of the movies to come out in the wake of Steamboat Willie and Mickey Mouse hitting the public domain. I don’t know how any of the others stack up to this one, as I haven’t seen them. I will be seeing some of them in the future, for sure. Only time will tell if they put in even the minimal amount of effort that the filmmakers put in on this one.
The movie business will get more interesting as time goes on and more things hit the public domain. Some filmmakers may decide to branch off from the abundance of horror movies capitalizing on the availability of popular characters. It has seemingly all been low budget slasher movies made with the characters so far. What if someone wanted to make Pooh: PI, or A Mickey Musical? They’ve done some interesting things with Shakespeare’s works. There are untapped creative avenues that still need to be explored with these properties.
There is a time limit for how long any intellectual property can be under copyright. If everything from 1929 is now in the public domain, that means it lasts 96 years. Eventually, we’ll end up with characters like Batman, Spider-Man, Willy Wonka, and James Bond in the public domain. There will still be filmmakers who do the bare minimum and put out another slasher movie with another public domain character. But, eventually, there will be really creative people who take the characters in directions we never would have expected.
When will those creative people come? That’s the real question here. And we’re waiting for an answer.
Now for a few notes:
- I mentioned that I’ve covered The Three Musketeers, Tarzan, and Sherlock Holmes for this blog. Here are the movies. 3 Musketeers, Tarzan the Ape Man, and Holmes and Watson.
- There weren’t any actor or director connections to other Sunday “Bad” Movies. That’s kind of surprising, this far into the blog.
- Have you seen Mouseboat Massacre? Have you seen any of the Mickey Mouse slashers? Have you seen any of the slashers based on public domain characters? Share your thoughts in the comments, or find me on Bluesky or Threads.
- If there’s a movie you think I should check out for a future Sunday “Bad” Movies post, let me know. You know where to find me. Comments. Bluesky. Threads.
- Okay, it’s time for another rundown of what’s coming up. This is post 557. Post 558 will be Beer League. Post 559 will be Guns. Then I’ll get to post 560. That will be all the Amityville movies from 2017. After that, who knows? I have a few ideas, but there might be something that just pops up and I can’t help but post about it. Like this post. Anyway, Beer League is next. See you then.
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