As Disney bows to AI, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles take a stance against slop

A new TMNT short has a very timely message

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Last week, the news hit that Disney has struck a deal with OpenAI, the owners of ChatGPT and Sora, to license over 200 hundred Disney-owned characters for AI-generated videos. As the BBC has reported, industry insiders are worried about what Disney’s $1 billion endorsement of artificial intelligence means for the future of Hollywood, as it's the first major studio to make such a move. Yet, as Mickey Mouse seems content to accelerate AI’s oncoming judgement day, another group of legacy characters are taking a katana-pointed stand in opposition.

The lengthy-titled animated short Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 – Lost in New Jersey is a seven-minute theatrical cartoon attached to The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants, which releases today in theaters. The short features the same versions of the TMNT that appeared in 2023’s critically-acclaimed, beautifully animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and sees the foursome Christmas shopping for their father, Splinter. (If you’re wondering why the Ninja Turtles can be openly shopping in public, it’s because they saved the city in the 2023 film and became heroes to all of New York.)

As they’re shopping, our heroes see a commercial in a toy store window for “Tubular Tortoise Karate Warriors,” a set of action figures clearly ripping off their newfound in-universe fame, yet with the aesthetics of a bad He-Man knockoff. From there, the Turtles decide to confront the New Jersey-based toy manufacturer, and that’s where the real meaning of Chrome Alone becomes apparent.

As it turns out, Tubular Tortoise Karate Warriors were created by an AI named Chrome Dome (a reimagining of a classic villain) which wants to cash in on the Turtles’ fame without paying them likeness rights. Chrome Dome also recounts its utterly hilarious origin story, which is a combination of the origins of Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, The Lion King, The Lord of the Rings and a few others, employing clear knockoff versions of characters and story points from each.

Being that the short is only seven minutes long, a fight quickly breaks out where Chrome Dome has the upper hand as it can predict all their ninja moves, until the Turtles start to employ some silly originality into their fighting to trip up Chrome Dome’s system and they win (and, for good measure, they blow up the factory). While some of that leans into traditional Turtle-fare, the message throughout is “AI sucks” — something Raphael actually says verbatim — for its unoriginality and the way it steals from real people (or in this case, real mutants).

While the message is very 2025, it’s in keeping with the spirit of the 1980s origins of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Back then, TMNT came out of the 1980s boom of independent black-and-white comics, which was an artist-led reaction to the often poor treatment and inadequate credit given to creators at Marvel and DC. Out of this boom came characters like Usagi Yojimbo and the Flaming Carrot, but the biggest success was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird.

When they hit it big though, Eastman and Laird didn’t just take the money and run, they invested in other independent artists. Eastman founded the ill-fated Tundra comics, which sought to give comic creators a space to tell stories and retain ownership of their creations. Meanwhile, Laird founded the Xeric Foundation, which gave publishing grants to independent creators for more than 20 years. Eastman and Laird were also instrumental in the creation of 1988’s The Creator’s Bill of Rights, a document signed by a number of comic industry professionals which sought to award things like profit sharing to creators across the comics industry. Unfortunately, it didn’t make much of a change as Marvel and DC generally continued their practice of cutting creators out of the profits from their creations, no matter how successful they became.

While the message of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 – Lost in New Jersey isn’t exactly the same of the Creator’s Bill of Rights, the spirit of it is very close, as the meaning of both is/was to protect original creations from being ripped off, be it from corporate overlords or intellectual property-stealing AI — or in Disney’s case with OpenAI, those two forces joining together. And while the right and wrong here is obvious and the Heroes in a Half-Shell are clearly on the right side, one can’t help but think that, given Disney's capitulation, protecting creators from the encroachment of AI might already be a cause as lost and the Creator’s Bill of Rights.