New court documents reveal a list of nearly 200 words or phrases the Trump administration told Head Start programs it does not want to see in their funding requests.

(Image credit: Rebecca Blackwell)

The first thing I saw this morning when I opened X was an AI-generated trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom stood in a shapeless void alongside Captain America and Reed Richards. It was obvious slop but it was also close in tone and feel of the last five years of Disney’s Marvel movies. As media empires consolidate, nostalgia intensifies, and AI tools spread, Disney’s blockbusters feel more like an excuse to slam recognizable characters together in a contextless morass.

So of course Disney has announced it signed a deal with OpenAI today that will soon allow fans to make their own officially licensed Disney slop using Sora 2. The house that mouse built, and which has been notoriously protective of its intellectual property, opened up the video generator, saw the videos featuring Nazi Spongebob and criminal Pikachu, and decided: We want in.

According to a press release, the deal is a 3 year licensing agreement that will allow the AI company’s short form video platform Sora to generate slop videos using characters like Mickey Mouse and Iron Man. As part of the agreement, Disney is investing $1 billion of equity into OpenAI, said it will become a major customer of the company, and promised that fan and corporate AI-generated content would soon come to Disney+, meaning that Disney will officially begin putting AI slop into its flagship streaming product.

The deal extends to ChatGPT as well and, starting in early 2026, users will be able to crank out officially approved Disney slop on multiple platforms. When Sora 2 launched in October, it had little to no content moderation or copyright guidelines and videos of famous franchise characters doing horrible things flooded the platform. Pikachu stole diapers from a CVS, Rick and Morty pushed crypto currencies, and Disney characters shouted slurs in the aisles of Wal-Mart.

It is worth mentioning that, although Disney has traditionally been extremely protective of its intellectual property, the company’s princesses have become one of the most common fictional subjects of AI porn on the internet; 404 Media has found at least three different large subreddits dedicated to making AI porn of characters like Elsa, Snow White, Rapunzel, and Tinkerbell. In this case, Disney is fundamentally throwing its clout behind a technology that has thus far most commonly been used to make porn of its iconic characters.  

After the hype of the launch, OpenAI added an “opt-in” policy to Sora that was meant to prevent users from violating the rights of copyright holders. It’s trivial to break this policy however, and circumvent the guardrails preventing a user from making a lewd Mickey Mouse cartoon or episode of The Simpsons. The original sin of Sora and other AI systems is that the training data is full of copyrighted material and the models cannot be retrained without great cost, if at all.

If you can’t beat the slop, become the slop.

“The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works,” Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, said in the press release about the agreement.

The press release explained that Sora users will soon have “official” access to 200 characters in the Disney stable, including Loki, Thanos, Darth Vader, and Minnie Mouse. In exchange, Disney will begin to use OpenAI’s APIs to “build new products” and it will deploy “ChatGPT for its employees.”

I’m imagining a future where AI-generated fan trailers of famous characters standing next to each other in banal liminal spaces is the norm. People have used Sora 2 to generate some truly horrifying videos, but the guardrails have become more aggressive. As Disney enters the picture, I imagine the platform will become even more anodyne. Persistent people will slip through and generate videos of Goofy and Iron Man sucking and fucking, sure, but the vast majority of what’s coming will be safe corporate gruel that resembles a Marvel movie.

In Cult Of Criterion, The A.V. Club highlights a new release from The Criterion Collection each month, examining the films entering an increasingly accessible film canon.

Capturing what it means to be a child doesn’t just mean blaring a zippy soundtrack over some fast-paced antics. Being a kid isn’t just about goofy energy, or naivety, or wonder. Petulance and rage simmer under the silliness, the emotional consequences to a self-involved young person’s friction with the established ways of the world. Every wide-eyed moment of discovery is matched by a narrow-eyed moment of disdain. It’s this balance of whimsy and snot, of gleeful mania and furious hysteria, of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, that makes Pee-wee Herman such a perfect grown child—and makes Pee-wee’s Big Adventure such a perfect idea for the kind of journey he might dream up.

By the time Paul Reubens gave 26-year-old filmmaker Tim Burton his big break with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, his character Pee-wee Herman had already become a comedy fixture through Reubens’ stage show, HBO special, and talk-show drop-ins. He was on The Dating Game three times! But it took Burton’s Disney-trained, Disney-rejected sensibility to fully bring Pee-wee’s world to life—and to encourage the edgy streak that pushed Big Adventure away from Reubens’ planned remake of Pollyanna. After working on The Fox And The Hound and The Black Cauldron, Burton had made a few of his own live-action shorts, pouring his fully formed, Hot Topic-defining aesthetic into a Disney Channel version of Hansel And Gretel and the project that got him fired from Disney: Frankenweenie.

The latter is what caught Reubens’ eye, despite the former’s Witch living in what looks like an evil version of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. But all of Burton’s early projects proved that their sensibilities were aligned—they wanted to play in the gray area between kid and adult, between safety and danger, between camp and sincerity, between cutting-edge hip and retro uncool. 

Both artists were obsessed with translating their experience of the past—of the wacky shows and old movies they grew up watching on TV—into a punk-inflected mid-’80s milieu. If Reubens and Burton fell asleep while Howdy Doody and a Universal Monster movie played on adjacent television sets, their shared fever dream would look a lot like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. It’s a journey through the collective unconscious of a generation of grown American children, just immature enough to connect with an audience of actual kids.

As Jesse Thorn points out in his Criterion booklet essay, this partially takes the form of Pee-wee’s hyperreal road-trip iconography. Pee-wee, on his quest for his stolen Schwinn, zips through a country remembered from a backseat window: Truckers, diners, bikers, roadside dinosaurs and clown statues, rail-riders, drive-in theaters, and tons of cowboys, naturally, right outside the Alamo. These are the larger-than-life images zipping past you when you traverse our highway circulatory system; stuffed into a movie, and it feels like a mind-numbing slog across the country to see a kid’s grandparents has been juiced with imagination (Also, uh, Santa was there! And Godzilla!) when retold on the playground.

And Pee-wee is just the kid to tell it. In his form-fitting Glen Plaid suit and shiny Alfalfa haircut, he looks like an especially bullied kid was on his way to picture day when he got Big-ified. He’s a kid’s idea of an adult (they wear suits, right?) sneering through life, laughing at his own jokes, fighting off the advances of the girl who’s got a crush on him, and taking on bullies. He’s also a Looney Tune. For every improbable success Pee-wee pulls off with his Bugs-like cross-dressing and costume-swapping, there’s a Daffy-like plummet to earth—a moment of rage, failure, slapstick, hubris blowing up in his face. It’s Bugs who wins over the biker gang with what’s effectively a drag performance of “Tequila,” and it’s Daffy who immediately crashes a motorcycle afterward.

It’s all part of the silly-scary balance that Burton would make his kid-enticing hallmark. Creating a world not just navigated by a grown kid, but one that had a kid’s burgeoning understanding of safety and danger, Burton infused Pee-wee’s Big Adventure with fantastical threats. It’s not the escaped convicts you need to worry about, or the grumpy bikers, or the furious bulls, or even the jealous boyfriends. The terror had to also be, in its way, a punchline. From Hansel And Gretel and his short Vincent, Burton brought in stop-motion animators Rick Heinrichs and the Chiodo Brothers in order to create these playful scares. Together, they made Large Marge, whose scene is all but a movie reaching out and goosing you.

This is the thoroughly childish spirit permeating Pee-wee’s Big Adventure: The volatile, puckish, myopic-yet-charming energy of a kid recounting their day spent playing pretend. And it’s the complexity within this tone, the sourness that comes out when Pee-wee blows up at those he’s gathered to search for his bike, that situates its fantasy in reality. There’s no false schmaltz or saccharine cutesiness, none of the cloying child-courting fluff that softens so much disposable children’s media. The stray sass, the random venom, the whiplash between innocence and indignation—these are what makes Pee-wee’s Big Adventure an enduring encapsulation of childhood.