Public Reel

The Phantom Creeps · Beat 141 · permalink

Newsroom

1:12:22–1:13:19 Registered 1939

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks passed (partial). 2 quotes checked against the transcript; 4 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; 0 of 1 visible events checked against a frame. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 1:12:501:12:50

Play from 1:12:22 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 94 · shots 193–193. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
newsroom (newsroom, interior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • unseen, audible only audible
  • Jim (named at t:72:22): unseen, audible only audible
  • Dr. Mallory (named at t:72:22): unseen, audible only audible
  • Doctor Zorka (named at t:73:00): unseen, audible only audible
Seen happening
  • A newspaper headline reads 'MAD GENIUS RUNNING WILD!' and 'Doctor Zorka Alive May be Invisible To Human Eye'. [frame:1]
Seen
newspaper
On screen
MAD GENIUS RUNNING WILD! Doctor Zorka Alive May be Invisible To Human Eye
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: urgent and sensational; themes: media sensationalism, government control, scientific menace; style notes: static close-up on newspaper, high-contrast print, bold headlines dominate frame

A newspaper headline announces Doctor Zorka is alive and may be invisible; a character named Jim is told to get an ambulance while another says planes are grounded by government order.

“Get an ambulance, Jim. These men have to be gotten to Dr. Mallory at once.” 72:22 · “Hey, can you fly a plane? Sure I can. Nobody's flying today. Why not? Government ordered. All planes are grounded. Hey, don't you read the papers?” 73:00 automatic transcript, may be wrong

The record

No renewal found An automated finding, not a verdict. A renewal would have appeared in the Copyright Office's renewal registrations 27 to 29 years after the term began. Those volumes are loaded and our parse of them found no matching renewal. If that is right, a work published 1931–1963 that was not renewed entered the public domain at the end of its 28th year; the volumes are OCR of old print, and the method page reports how often the parse has been found to miss one. Evidence dossier. The finding concerns the US copyright record for the film; it is not clearance for any use, and this page's annotation is machine output.

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Frame from The Phantom Creeps (1939) at 1:12:50 (passage 1:12:22–1:13:19); US record: No renewal found

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