If you’ve read any of my blog posts, you know I utilize em dashes even more frequently than I reference TVTropes—and why wouldn’t I? You’re telling me there’s a mid-sentence punctuation mark that works for separating both dependent and independent clauses? A mark that can also function as a louder parenthesis if placed on either side of a word or phrase? And—unlike the semicolon—it doesn’t have a reputation for being bizarrely intimidating? The em dash is an English major’s dream come true.
Sadly, this short horizontal line has started to develop its own stigma: the widespread notion that its presence automatically denotes AI-generated content.
It’s a newish year, which means we’ve got a newish batch of old material available for use without exorbitant fees.
Copyright laws can get pretty convoluted, but as a general rule, expiration depends on the death of the author (no, not that one). In many countries, a work enters the public domain either 50 or 70 full calendar years after its maker’s passing; as of 2025, this means copyright has lapsed for the intellectual properties of several creators who died in 1954 or 1974. While the U.S. Copyright Term Extension Act stretched out renewals for works that were still under copyright as of 1998, even some of those IPs are now up for grabs.
The batshit post-pandemic media landscape has produced a surge of cheap, rushed, and poorly-reviewed horror movies based on freshly public domain characters. 2023’s Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey takes advantage of the earliest incarnations of A.A. Milne’s Pooh and Piglet, though writer/director Rhys Frake-Waterfield had to wait until the sequel to use Tigger. Meanwhile, the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse has already spawned at least two slashers: The Mouse Trap and Screamboat.
David Howard Thornton as the killer in “Screamboat.” It’s a cleverer title than “The Mouse Trap,” but this evil Mickey looks too much like an extra in the stage version of “Cats.”
These movies thrive on the shock value of turning beloved family-friendly characters into bloodthirsty monsters. But as long as people keep watching and talking about them, even solely to complain, opportunists will continue to make them.
While I don’t particularly care for the trend, it doesn’t bother me on a personal level; I have similar feelings toward things like Disney’s “live-action” remakes, or the Kardashians/Jenners. That said, I can’t help wondering if people seeking to cash in on the public domain are overlooking some high-potential material.
Just for fun, I’ve decided to brainstorm possible adaptations for a handful of media whose copyrights recently expired. On the off-chance that any reader actually turns at least one of these elevator pitches into a real movie, I ask that you hire a union cast and crew, put my name in the credits (preferably spelled correctly), and give me 1% of streaming revenue if applicable.
Advertising is one of those fields I considered using as a stepping stone toward my dream job as head writer and Weekend Update anchor at Saturday Night Live. Agency positions are hard to get without the right connections, though, and I suppose managers are less than eager to hire someone who would expressly rather be somewhere else. Nevertheless, I know I could write better ad copy than much of what’s been on TV over the last decade or so.
As an adult boomerang kid of Boomer parents who still have cable, I probably see more commercials on a daily basis than most people in the tail-end Millennial/elderly Gen Z bubble. My tolerance for repetition is quite high—one joy of being on the spectrum—so an ad has to be pretty damn irritating for me to dislike it. The ones that irk me the most tend to contain egregious grammatical errors, bad acting that’s not bad enough to be funny, and extremely clunky rhymes. For some reason, there’s been a recent uptick in the last of these.
Look, sometimes I need to reassure myself that majoring in English wasn’t a total waste.
“Death of the Author” is the literary criticism theory that writers ultimately lose control of their work, and a reader’s interpretation is valid no matter how far it deviates from the author’s intentions. Apart from helping generations of students bullshit their way through book reports, this school of thought opens the floodgates for fans to share their wildest hypotheses and desired shippings, often in the form of fanfiction.
Your favorite characters didn’t get together? No worries—you can just expand the story so they fall in love and live happily ever after, even if it means making their canonical partners cartoonishly evil. It’s not like their creator can stop you, especially if said creator is deceased in both a literal and figurative sense.
Of course, many authors’ corporeal forms continue to operate, and they frequently make their own statements on what is, isn’t, and can be canon. Certain online platforms have given fandoms unprecedented access to these writers, and their ensuing dialogues can have universe-altering implications. Consequently, I believe the social media age has ushered in a new lit crit variant: Death of the Living Author.
They say—whoever “they” are—to write what you know. This poses a challenge in genre fiction, since most of us don’t have personal experience time-traveling, riding dragons, or navigating a romance with a 3,000-year age gap. Still, creators of all stripes incorporate aspects of their lives into their stories.
As a half-Jewish, half-Mexican woman, I encounter the world in a particular way. It’s not always a smooth ride, but my mixed background is instrumental to my cultural awareness, open-mindedness, and sense of humor. During my childhood, though, I was a lot less conscious of my identity, and I tended to default to implicitly WASPish characters in my works of fiction.
Media Shower 