Is Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952) public domain?
The evidence we relied on to restore, describe and publish it — in full, so you can check it.
Rights basis on record
The finding, and the working behind it
Renewal searches returned NIL on every form that could reach the film. The renewal window for a 1952 publication is 1979-1980, wholly inside the Copyright Office's online catalogue, so a nil result is evidence and not an absence of searching. Distinctive words unquoted `bela lugosi meets brooklyn gorilla`: 0 renewal records. Exact phrase `"Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla"`: 0. With the alternate title `Boys from Brooklyn`: 0. With the director `William Beaudine`: 0. Searched again on 19 Sep 2026 one ordinary word at a time, reading every title in each complete result set: `gorilla` 120 hits, `brooklyn` 160 hits, `lugosi` 0 hits, and none of them this film.
How to check this yourself
Everything above is drawn from public records. None of it requires our word:
- The Catalog of Copyright Entries, the Copyright Office’s printed registration and renewal volumes, scanned and searchable at the Internet Archive and at the Online Books Page. Registration numbers beginning LP or MP are film entries.
- The Copyright Office online records at copyright.gov, which are complete from 1978 and therefore decisive for any renewal that fell due from then on.
- The NFPF Field Guide to Sponsored Films, for the industrial and educational titles, which records copyright status entry by entry.
The copy, and what we changed
- The print we started from
- The source print for Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla on archive.org
- Researched
- 2026-09-19
- What we did to the print
- 252 described cues across a 74 minute 25 second runtime, filling 15 minutes 29 seconds of gaps between dialogue -- 20.8 percent of the film -- at 151 words per minute.; Figures measured from the shipped sidecar and the shipped master.; The original soundtrack was repaired from the Archive copy: folded to balanced mono, rumble and hiss filtered, loudness matched to -16 LUFS. No picture restoration on this pass.; Described track flagged default and visual_impaired, with the original audio kept as a separate selectable stream.; Captioned verbatim: 774 cues, every spoken word kept.
What this does and does not mean
This is a finding about United States copyright, made in good faith from the public record. Copyright terms differ by country, and a film in the public domain here may still be protected elsewhere.
A negative search proves that no record was found, which is not identical to proving that no record exists. The Copyright Office says as much about its own catalogs. Where a search could not be decisive we say so above rather than rounding it up to certainty.
Restoring a public domain film gives nobody any new rights over the film, including us: this print is free to take, use and pass on, exactly as the original is.
The audio description is not part of that. It is an original work written and recorded by Always on Top Entertainment LLC — free to listen to here, and licensed separately for reuse. If you hold a right in this film and we have it wrong, write to mike@tapeterritory.com and we will take it down while we check.
Watch it
Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952) is free to watch here, restored and audio described, with no account and no advertising.
Why we did this research
Establishing what may be published is the first step before restoring a film and writing an audio description for it. That is what this site is for, and we do the same work on commission — audio description and captioning, with published rates.