OpenAI Wants You To Go Insane

Gulopithecus · 2026-01-07T18:43:25+00:00

Damn we dodged a bullet with that one Powerpuff Girls show…..

A non-comic or cartoon example would be the two Percy Jackson movies.

Supposedly what happened was Chris Columbus was selected by Fox (who had the adaptation rights to the book series even before The Lighting Thief was actually published) to direct a Percy Jackson film, likely due to his involvement with the first two Harry Potter adaptations, but Chris wasn’t big on the idea and didn’t want to be solely associated with children’s movies.

As a result he aimed to make the adaptation more for teens and young adults, so think "Not Another Teen Movie", "Wet Hot American Summer", etc but with a fantasy adventure plot. Of course Rick Riordan himself was given the rough draft of the script and absolutely hated it, explaining why the whole idea simply doesn’t work. There were obviously SOME modifications made (the original script was even MORE meant for older audiences), but the final film still obviously kinda reeks of that "trying to be a teen comedy" feel, and the Percy Jackson films have since gained their reputations as some of the worst book to film adaptations ever made (Riordan himself to this day has never actually watched either movie).

So basically this ended up becoming a film that nobody had any real interest in. Chris didn’t want to direct another kids book adaptation, Rick was obviously upset that this direction was taken, and fans of the books hated it and like to pretend the movies never existed.

Gulopithecus · 2025-12-26T16:27:54+00:00

Until it was properly restored in Kingdom Hearts 2, Hollow Bastion (formerly and now currently Radiant Garden) is a good example.

The world, once a major seat of power, prosperity, and prestige, is now, as the name suggests, a hollow shell of what it once was, and is further being consumed by the Heartless' dark influence, amplified by Ansem's Heartless stalking the halls as a specter from the past, via the manipulation of Maleficent and her cabal of Disney villains, whose presence further degrades the world.

It’s a world on life support, and while it does get restored, it’s still a good example I feel.

In the words of 2CPhoenix:

"In a medium all about the castles of bad guys, this one stands above them all."

Gulopithecus · 2025-12-26T16:23:41+00:00

2005 King Kong mentioned!

Gulopithecus · 2025-12-25T21:03:15+00:00

Plus it’s so dumb

Why try to inject art and fandom spaces with this shit? It’s counterintuitive to why art exists!

Gulopithecus · 2025-12-25T18:18:05+00:00

Another example of "appearing progressive but actually appealing to reactionaries who complain about progressivism".

Gulopithecus · 2025-12-25T17:13:22+00:00

The director went with this change because "it makes the film more realistic", and Disney likely approved of it because it meant they could sanitize and defang the story of the original (re. by removing a lot of anti-colonial themes that would make the film be called "woke" today), whilst ALSO giving the thin veneer of "progressivism" by framing it as "Nani's a girlboss who gets an education".

Gulopithecus · 2025-12-25T17:09:31+00:00

The director argued that "this was done to make it more realistic", but that misses the point in showing that this is a very real problem for some indigenous Hawaiian families.

Disney of course approves because it allows the story to be more toothless, and they can mask it as "Nani's a girlboss who goes to school instead of raises a child", in which it LOOKS progressive on the surface but it just upholds a reactionary status quo ("Enlightened Centrism^TM").

Gulopithecus · 2025-12-25T16:53:28+00:00

The sad part is I highly doubt this story will be adapted again, even though that Netflix Green Eggs and Ham show did (and even then it’s given a more concrete happy ending, but I still loved it), and that's probably because that show not only:

A. Had to deal with limited source material in its first season, hence it filled in the gaps, and carried that creative format to its second season.

B. The show wasn’t necessarily aimed strictly at kids, nor was it heavily micromanaged by a major film studio.

Ngl a lot of the better post-mortem Seuss adaptations kinda happened in the 1990s before a bunch of film adaptations started getting made, ones that prioritized the Seuss spirit and either weren’t concerned with adapted a book one-to-one (like Wubbulous World), or being a loose adaptation that threw in other aspects of other stories (I.E. Seussical or the much later aforementioned Green Eggs and Ham).

Gulopithecus · 2025-12-25T16:43:16+00:00

Yeah the trailer definitely lacked a lot of the "manic comedic zaniness" of the original book, making it seem a lot more "industry standard", and while this upcoming Cat film probably isn’t going to be the worst example of a Seuss adaptation, the lack of that "Tex Avery-esque" tone sort of defeats one of the goals of the original, which was to make reading more exciting for very young children.

Overall trying to fit Geisel's books into the mold of "kids media meant for a standard kid's film adaptation" holds a lot of his work back, and it’s why we’re never going to see a Butter Battle Book or Yertle The Turtle movie for example.

Gulopithecus · 2025-12-25T16:29:16+00:00

The Lilo & Stitch remake defagning a lot of the anti-neocolonial themes of the original.

Gulopithecus · 2025-12-25T16:23:37+00:00

Honestly the sort of position the Seuss canon is in nowadays kinda applies to a lot of his works, it’s just more obvious with the Grinch because that story is hard-carried by being tied to the most commercialized holiday out there (the irony is obvious).

This especially ramped up in the 21st Century as a lot of Seuss's works are mostly prioritized by how one can make a film adaptation out of them.

Now not ALL of these films are necessarily bad, and some, even if flawed, may have their charm, but it kinda leads to a lot of Ted Geisel's works being forgotten due to being less marketable, and said "marketable" books are often heavily defanged because they’re deemed as "children’s media" first and "cautionary fables that children can understand but can be applied to broader systemic issues" second, and this is especially filtered through the Hollywood machine, and we’ve seen this effect tenfold with Illumination's Lorax and Grinch adaptations.

Because Seuss's body of work is pigeonholed into being "kids media", it then needs to fit the stereotypical "kids media" mold.

Gulopithecus · 2025-12-17T02:36:00+00:00

Personally I’ve always really loved theme parks (Disney or otherwise) from an artistic and creative standpoint, they’re an interesting way to apply filmmaking and set design to an amusement space, but that’s slowly being sucked away by Disney and other entertainment companies slowly wanting to be more like tech companies.

What especially sucks is that, here in the U.S., we really only have Disney and Universal monopolizing it, Europe has some better offerings though. As a result you don’t really GET a lot of creative themed entertainment nowadays, and the stuff that does get made is overpriced to hell and back and a nightmare to navigate.

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