Dream of a Rarebit Fiend

The most prominent film with this title is the 1906 live-action short directed by Edwin S. Porter and Wallace McCutcheon for the Edison Manufacturing Company. This film was released well before the critical 1928 cutoff for US copyright. Under current US law, all works published or registered before January 1, 1928, have entered the public domain regardless of renewal history. While there have been other adaptations of the Winsor McCay comic strip (notably McCay's own 1921 animated short series), they also predate the 1928 threshold. The 1906 film is documented in the Library of Congress and is widely available from archival sources like the Internet Archive and the Museum of Modern Art, confirming its status as a historical public domain work.