TV URBAN LEGEND: Rankin-Bass's Jack Frost special fell into the public domain.

An interesting occurrence during the 1980s and 1990s was that companies would take advantage of other companies that let their films fall into the public domain. You see, if a film or TV special came out before 1976, very often, the company behind the film (in the days well before home video was a thing) would not bother renewing the copyright on the films, because there was not a whole lot of money to be made from doing so. Once home video came about, then suddenly there was money to be made from these films and since so many companies forgot to renew their copyrights, there was this whole public domain marketplace out there that was big in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

There was a rumor that the original Rankin-Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was one of those accidentally public domain shows (due to a missing copyright notice), but there was another Rankin-Bass production that seemed even MORE obviously in the public domain, and that was Jack Frost!

One of the lesser known Rankin-Bass TV specials was Jack Frost, starring Robert Morse as the title character...

It was about the magical being known as Jack Frost who becomes human for a while before he has to go back to being a magical being...

During the 1990s, there were no official releases of the film on VHS but there were MANY different VHS copies of the film on sale. This led people to believe that Rankin-Bass had accidentally let it lapse into the public domain.

That is not the case, however. You see, the 1976 Copyright Act changed things so that anything AFTER 1976 didn't have to be automatically renewed. Jack Frost came out in 1979. Thus, it was automatically copyrighted (There was later a 1992 Copyright Renewal Act that allowed all films after 1964 to regain their copyright, even if it had initially lapsed into the public domain).

What happened was simply that they didn't care much about the product and thus people broke into the market with what amounted to bootleg copies of the film. Eventually, they released an official version on DVD and they have ever since.

There are so many bootleg ones released in the 1990s that it is an easy mistake to make.

The legend is...

STATUS: False

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