Welcome to Public Domain Theater, your home for the wonderful world of films that have (in the United States, at least) fallen into the public domain, and are free for everyone to see!

Several years back, Public Domain Theater featured the 1974 martial arts flick The Street Fighter – and now we’ve finally got around to doing the sequel! Return of the Street Fighter brings back Sonny Chiba as karate master and killer-for hire Terry Tsurugi, once again getting involved in the schemes of mobsters who make Terry look like the good guy in comparison.

This film packs itself with brutal and energetic action scenes, amazing stuntwork, and one of the funkiest and most kickass theme tunes around. It makes for great fun, though fair warning: as a 70’s crime/action movie, there’s a fair bit of Not Safe For Work/potentially triggering content. Viewer Discretion Is Advised.

But don’t worry, our opening cartoon covers much lighter fare – just a young man’s nightmares about being drafted into the military!

“Drafty, Isn’t It?” is a cartoon commissioned by the U.S. Army in 1957, meant to allay the concerns of potential draftees, assure them that being drafted really isn’t so bad … while also telling them they’d really be better off enlisting first rather than waiting to get drafted. This short is notable for two things:

First is that it’s a time capsule of a very specific period in American history. A time when conscription was still an ongoing thing, hanging over the heads of most men as they graduated from school, but when the U.S. wasn’t currently involved in any wars. The Korean War was over, and the Vietnam War was still in the future, so when the film’s protagonist worries about being drafted, their concerns aren’t about having to fight and die in a foreign land – it’s that the work will be dull, the sergeants will be mean, and the uniforms won’t fit. It’s practically adorable.

The other noteworthy feature? This cartoon was written and directed by none other than Chuck Jones, of Looney Tunes fame (in fact, the young man in this cartoon is the grownup version of the little boy Ralph Phillips, who’d appeared in Jones’s earlier Looney Tunes shorts “From A to Z-Z-Z-Z” and “Boyhood Daze”). With such a master of the cartoon artform at the helm, little wonder this propaganda piece has enough creative visuals and fun approaches to storytelling to make it engaging in its own right.

So whether you’re up for some Chuck Jones or some Sonny Chiba, we got some star power here at Public Domain Theater – why not stop on by and give ’em a looksee?

Opening Cartoon:

Feature Presentation: