Before watching the movie:

I didn’t really have any interest in this movie until very recently, though I had been aware of the title. It always seemed a little odd to me that Buster Keaton had at least two movies with “Junior” tacked on to them, and as I was disappointed that Sherlock Jr. didn’t have any connection to the Great Detective other than the protagonist being a detective enthusiast and dreaming himself into a detective adventure and didn’t even get the reference being made to “Steamboat Bill”, I never bothered. Until I learned about its connection to “Steamboat Willie”.

This is a particularly momentous year for the Public Domain as, after buying an extension of copyright law multiple times to prevent it, “Steamboat Willie” and therefore at least the early form of Mickey Mouse has lapsed in copyright and now belongs to everybody. What I didn’t know was that the title of that short was a reference to the song “Steamboat Bill”, and there is debate whether Keaton’s movie was an inspiration for the short, as they were released the same year. Apparently the copyright of this movie was not renewed and so expired in 1956, but the connection certainly got my attention.

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