>>107273345Huh? I thought Felix's first appearance was the shorts. Granted, it's a different design, but if we're going by the wikis the Feline Follies cartoon is the first one (even if it's a different name and design), and that was out in 1919.
That reminds me, I was looking at some of the old cartoons and just remembered something
>>107268095 said. Sometimes things go into the public domain because of misplaced/missing copyrights, but stuff with the wrongly written copyrights (prior to the 70's or 80's?) also go PD. A proper copyright required a copyright symbol or the word copyright, the year it's supposed to be copyrighted, and the name of the copyright holder.
And it looks like the old Felix cartoons had a lot of wrong copyrights, even stuff were past 1923! Take this "Felix All Balled Up" cartoon from 1924:
https://archive.org/details/Felix_the_cat-all_balled_upNotice the copyright only says "Copyright MCMXXIV".
Felix Gets the Can (wiki says 1925, cartoon has a copyright of 1924):
https://archive.org/details/Felix_GetstheCan_NoAudioOnly says "Copyright MCMXXIV".
https://www.wikizero.com/en/List_of_films_in_the_public_domain_in_the_United_States brings up the public domain 3 Stooges cartoons, which are public domain because they had copyright notices similar to those Felix cartoons.
This commercial may also be PD because I don't see a copyright notice in it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfFFs0SnHtQI can't seem to find many of the Educational Pictures cartoons, but this one from 1927 ("The Non Stop Fright") just says "Copyright by Pat Sullivan":
https://archive.org/details/FelixTheCat-TheNonStopFright1927While this other 1927 cartoon ("Flim Flam Films"):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpjNO0MYH-Iactually seems to have the correct copyright notice on it ("Copyright MCMXXVII by Pat Sullivan"), so you may want to double check to be sure.
