1975: A Boy and His Dog

 

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Don Johnson plays a young man in a post nuclear war world who has an interesting friend, a telepathic dog. The dog gives him an advantage in dealing with the barbaric world he lives in. When Johnson finds one place that has escaped the devastation of the war, he also finds some rather odd attitudes.

When I discovered a Boy and his Dog were listed in several collections of public domain works, I hardly believed it. Not only is it very recent, but it was an adaption of a novella by Harlan Ellison, who was actively involved in the film's promotion and reception. Ellison was notorious as a militant defender of author intellectual property rights, and wasn't shy about fighting against even the possibility of a violation of it. So to find out that no one on the production and distribution side of this movie bothered to officially register it is genuinely surprising. The earliest record of a copyright application is for the VHS release of the movie in the 1980s. So yes, the film is in the public domain, despite the attempts by Harlan and the studio to keep control of it, the film is out there and can be watched, edited, remixed parodied etc.

The film was released in 1975 which was just a few years before US copyright reforms made copyright automatic at the point of completion as in the rest of the world. Romero's Night of the Living Dead is a famous similar case, though Romero did register it for copyright, he forgot to attach the copyright notice to the film when he released it, which voided the copyright. There are quite a few American media projects that are in the public domain for similar reasons. And many works didn't have their copyright renewed for one reason or another. This is the first time I've encountered a major movie with serious backing that forgot to even submit the application.

As a result, the movie is easier to find than the original novella. The movie was a critical success but box office failure, but it did generate enough interest in the concept that Ellison launched several other spin offs. And like how sharing the Living Dead spurred on creative works involving zombies, a Boy and His Dog was very influential in apocalyptic science fiction, Mad Max and the Fallout franchise have clear connections to pick the most obvious. 

This poster owns.