Free 1930s movies, cartoons and shorts

132 titles on the air now, made between 1930 and 1939 - about 101 hours of viewing in all. 71 are feature-length (40 minutes or more) and 61 are shorts. 5 are silent films presented with a public-domain (CC0) piano score.

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Every title from the 1930s that is on the air at Starlite TV right now, across all of our channels, sorted by year. Films from this decade are on Starlite TV because they are U.S. government works, were published without a valid notice, or their copyrights were never renewed; each title page shows the evidence.

Starlite TV works like broadcast TV, so these play on schedules: open a title to see when it airs next in your time zone, or jump into a channel live.

Where to start

Prime-time headliners and titles with full background guides.

• Animal Crackers (1930) 93 min · Laugh Track
  Animal Crackers was the second Marx Brothers feature, adapted from their hit 1928 Broadway musical by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, with songs by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby.
• The Big Trail (1930) 117 min · Dusty Trails
  The Big Trail was one of the most ambitious films of the early sound era.
• Hell's Angels (1930) 132 min · Adrenaline
  Hell's Angels is the epic that the young millionaire Howard Hughes — before he was famous as an aviator, industrialist and recluse — poured his money and obsession into for three years.
• The Most Dangerous Game (1932) 63 min · Graveyard Shift
  Richard Connell's 1924 short story "The Most Dangerous Game" has one of the most famous premises in fiction: a big-game hunter is shipwrecked on a remote island, where a cultured Russian aristocrat reveals that he has grown bored of hunting animals and now hunts the most dangerous game of all — human beings.
• Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936) 16 min · Saturday Morning
  By 1936 Popeye was one of the most popular cartoon characters in America, rivalling Mickey Mouse.
• Reefer Madness (1936) 68 min · Laugh Track
  Reefer Madness began life in 1936 as Tell Your Children, a low-budget morality tale produced by George Hirliman and directed by Louis J. Gasnier, a veteran of the silent era. It was financed by a church group and meant to warn parents about the supposed dangers of marijuana.
• A Star Is Born (1937) 111 min · Silver Screen
  A Star Is Born is Hollywood's most famous story about Hollywood, and this 1937 film is the original. Producer David O. Selznick, who two years later would make Gone with the Wind, made it in full three-strip Technicolor at a time when colour features were still rare and expensive.
• White Zombie (1932) 65 min · Graveyard Shift
  White Zombie is generally considered the first feature-length zombie film. In the early 1930s, American readers were fascinated by Haiti and Vodou after William Seabrook's 1929 travel book The Magic Island, which described stories of the dead being raised to work in the fields.
• Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (1939) 21 min · Saturday Morning
• Arctic Antics (1930) 7 min · Saturday Morning
• Barnacle Bill (1930) 8 min · Saturday Morning
• The Barnyard Concert (1930) 6 min · Saturday Morning
• Blotto (1930) 26 min · Laugh Track
• The Cactus Kid (1930) 7 min · Saturday Morning
• The Chain Gang (1930) 8 min · Saturday Morning
• Circus Capers (1930) 9 min · Saturday Morning