English: Title card for Hamateur Night, a seven-minute animated short film released to theaters by Warner Bros. on January 28, 1939. Directed by Tex Avery and written by Jack Miller, the film was a part of the Merrie Melodies series produced by Leon Schlesinger and distributed by The Vitaphone Corporation. The premise of the film is rather simple; it features a vaudeville-style amateur talent night wherein successive performers are mocked and jeered by the audience for their bad acts. The primary character of this short is an early prototype of Elmer Fudd who lacks the speech impediment of the character he evolved into.
Warner Brothers; original copyright by Leon Schlesinger Productions
Licensing
The film entered the public domain in 1967 when its last rightsholder, United Artists Productions, failed to renew the original copyright in time.
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This work is in the public domain because it was published in the United States between 1929 and 1963, and although there may or may not have been a copyright notice, the copyright was not renewed. For further explanation, see Commons:Hirtle chart and the copyright renewal logs. Note that it may still be copyrighted in jurisdictions that do not apply the rule of the shorter term for US works (depending on the date of the author's death), such as Canada (70 years p.m.a.), Mainland China (50 years p.m.a., not Hong Kong or Macao), Germany (70 years p.m.a.), Mexico (100 years p.m.a.), Switzerland (70 years p.m.a.), and other countries with individual treaties.