Tag: 1950s Debut

Ruffle-Necked Sala-ma-goox

page from a dr seuss book depicting an unusual bird

And so I decided that, just for a change,
I’d scramble a new kind of egg on the range.
Some fine fancy eggs that no other cook cooks
Like the eggs of the Ruffle-Necked Sala-ma-goox!
A Sala-ma-goox’s!
Say! They should be good!
So I went out and found some
As quick as I could!

This Dr. Seuss poem appears in the childrens book Scrambled Eggs Super! from November 11th, 1953. The book failed to be renewed for copyright in the US and is therefore in the public domain. The book depicts a boy’s encounter with a bunch of birds to find the best eggs gof a scramble.

Notes

  • Ruffle-Necked Sala-ma-goox would appear in the 2008 Horton Hears A Who films
  • No copyright renewal was found for this book, neither by searching its name nor the original copyright registration number (A84364).
  • The book ceased publishing in 2021 due to depicting outdated and hurtful stereotypes (not the birds but some human characters that appear, like a guy named Ali who appears in a turban and fur wearing people of a fictional arctic nation)

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Gorilla Grodd

Gorilla Grodd is a staple character in the Flash’s Rogue’s Gallery. He’s a superintelligent gorilla from Gorilla City, a highly advanced metropolis and he has the ability to use telepathy and is super strong.

Gorilla Grodd is public domain due to a failure to renew Flash #106 from 1959, meaning the copyright expired in 1988.

Barry Allen and other Flash characters remain under copyright. I also could find no trademark for Gorilla Grodd, but maybe i just didn’t search thoroughly enough.

Links

Wikipedia

Captain Z-Ro

Black and white image of a person in a superhero costume with a helmet and circular emblems on the chest with a z in it

Captain Z-Ro was a space opera serial from the 50s playing off popular serial characters like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

He had a device called the ZX-99 which was a time machine used to view the past but also send people back in time, usually in order to alter it in some way. While it was always used to go back in time, mainly as a way to teach kids history it stands to reason the ZX-99 could also travel into the future.

The serial was not renewed and subsequent renewal efforts in the 80s were rejected by the copyright office.

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