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2 years before ChatGPT, a kids cartoon warned us about the environmental impacts of AI

Kids should know what AI can and can't do, and what it really costs. Doc McStuffins is on the case.

Disney Jr./YouTube, Unsplash

My 4-year-old watches so much Doc McStuffins that the show has basically become white noise in my household. It's the only thing she'll watch, so when it's on in the background, I barely notice — outside of the absurdly catchy songs living rent-free in my head 24/7. But the other day, she was watching one particular episode when I half tuned in just to see what the plot was.

If you don't have kids in this age bracket, Doc McStuffins is a 10-year-old girl who helps fix up broken toys. It's a really cute show with sweet messages on acceptance, accessibility, imagination, caring, and more. But the episode in question seemed to have a lot more going on plot-wise than the usual, so I sat down and watched a little more. And pretty soon I was hooked into a fascinating story about the climate dangers of Artificial Intelligence and automation. I couldn't believe it!

'The Great McStuffins Meltdown' explained

Season 5, Episode 13. Doc McStuffins, in the previous season, has stopped running her toy-doctoring practice out of her childhood home and now works at McStuffins Toy Hospital. In this episode, it has received a major upgrade with lots of fancy new equipment.

The new machines do a lot of the work that Doc and her friends used to do around the hospital. There's a machine that plays with and encourages toy pets, a Cuddle Bot that cuddles sick toys, and even a Check-Up 3000 that gives routine medical care so the Doc herself can do other things. Doc and her friends are a little bored, and the patients aren't so sure about these new machines, but mostly, things are going pretty great. The hospital is able to help more toys, faster this way.

But oh no! Doc gets a distress call from her friends at the Toyarctic, a fictional frozen land where toys live. Chunks of ice have been breaking off their glaciers. The Toyarctic is melting!

Doc and her friends quickly figure out that the Toyarctic has gotten too warm, which is causing the ice to melt. And the culprit is McStuffins Hospital. With all the new automated machines running, the hospital is using too much power and overheating the power grid, which is causing the Toyarctic's climate to warm at a dangerous rate.

I mean... woah! Doc McStuffins definitely did not have to go this hard, but I respect it.

What fascinated me most was that this episode was released in 2020 — a full two years before ChatGPT became publicly available and the AI craze kicked into hyperdrive.

Disney Jr./YouTube

AI and climate change are both inevitable parts of our children's lives. It's crucial that they learn about them both from a young age.

AI is moving so fast and changing every day. It's also publicly available to people of all ages, and so many of us don't understand how it works very well. That's a dangerous combination. Teachers and college professors everywhere are bemoaning that more and more kids are using AI to write their papers and do their homework without ever learning the material.

And, of course, the even bigger elephant in the room is climate change, which will play a major role in our children's lives as they grow into adults. Parents are desperate for some way to help their kids understand how big of a deal it is. A report from This Is Planeted states "Nearly 70% of parents and caregivers surveyed in 2022 believed children’s media should include age-appropriate information about climate, and 74% agreed that children’s media should include climate solutions," but that less than 5% of the most popular children's shows and family films have any content or themes related to climate change.

(I'd be curious how much of the heavy lifting the GOAT Captain Planet is still doing!)

captain planet flyingGiphy

What's not being talked about enough — unless you're a McStuffins-head like my family is — is the relationship between AI and climate change.

In short: It's not good! AI seems like a quick and fun thing we can access on our phones and computers, but the massive data centers that perform the calculations behind this 'intelligence' consume staggering amounts of power and water, while generating heat and harmful emissions. Promises of more energy-efficient intelligence models, like DeepSeek, are murky at best.

Scientific American even writes that the environmental impact of AI goes far beyond its emissions and energy usage. What is it being used for? In many cases, to make things faster and bigger — including industries that can harm the Earth like logging, drilling, fast fashion.

I was so impressed that a show popular with children as young as 2 could tackle such an urgent and important topic.

Watching it together opened doors for us to begin age-appropriate conversations with both of our kids about AI, climate change, and how the two are related. Conversations that, I'm sure, we'll be continuing to have and build on for years to come.

To be fair, Artificial Intelligence can do some good things. You see this play out on the show. Initially, it does help the hospital treat more toys! And in the real world, for all the negative environmental effects, there are people out there trying to use AI to monitor emissions and create more energy-efficient practices that might ultimately help the planet.

In the end, Doc McStuffins and her friends decide to shut down the fancy automated machines at the hospital. Not only are they hurting the toys that live in the Toyarctic, they just aren't as good as the real thing. They don't always know the right questions to ask, they don't make the patients feel safe or cared for, and of course, their machine-cuddles don't come with any real warmth or love.

If nothing else, I hope that's the message that sticks with my kids long after they've outgrown this show.

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Television

Incredible video shows the genius that went into creating sounds for old-school cartoons

I'll never watch 'Snow White' the same way again.

en.wikipedia.org

Sound effects sound much different today than when we were kids.

I remember as a kid thinking I knew everything there was to know about how sound effects were made because I watched some guy on PBS show how to make the sound of thunder with sheet metal. Obviously, you needed more than one piece of sheet metal to make all the different sound effects and calamity in those old cartoons, but the gist of it was the sounds were made with imagination and by human operators.

Today, the sounds found in cartoons and movies are different. They're not necessarily worse, but they're certainly different to the created-for-the-moment sounds of yesteryear.

A rediscovered video demonstrates exactly how the sounds of old Disney movies were made and it's truly fascinating. The video is presented side by side, showing the elaborate setups that made the sounds next to the parts in the cartoon they coincided with. Interestingly, many of the sounds you hear in today's animated movies are created similarly to the way they were made back in the day, so why do they sound so different?

The sound effects you hear in animated movies now are enhanced using better quality recording devices and also by additional layers that are added by the sound editors as well as digital effects that alter the sound, making it sound more rounded and complete. Foley artists are in charge of creating and recording the sound effects, and they're made one at a time and then layered on top of each other in a process that is similar but different than the old-school ways.

Sound effects back in the day relied solely on the people who made the sounds. There weren't computers to layer additional noises to fill it out, yet they made it work. Check out the fascinating side-by-side video below.

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Innovation

Someone realized these scenes from different Disney movies are identical and you can't unsee it

@fred035schultz/Twitter

Have you ever been watching a Disney movie and had a bit of deja vu? Not just that "Oh, this movie has that familiar Disney look and feel" feeling, but more like, "I swear I've literally seen this exact scene before in another movie"?

If you've watched a lot of Disney films, you actually have seen the same scenes repeated in different movies. People have been pointing out parallel sequences on social media and it's got some folks super freaked out.

Check it out:

Watching that "Jungle Book" and "Winnie the Pooh" sequence, there's no denying it's exactly the same animation template, just with different backgrounds and characters. But how? And why?

Disney has actually been recycling its animation for various movie scenes since it created Dumbo in 1941. Floyd Norman, a veteran Disney animator who has worked on Disney films as far back as Sleeping Beauty in 1959 and as recently as Mulan and Toy Story 2, weighed in on the reason for reusing animation sequences, saying:

"It was done probably to save time, save money. Although I don't think it saved much time and I don't think it saved much money because it was much more of a hassle to go dig this old footage out of the archive. It would've been easier to just sit down and animate a new scene than to go back and try to retrofit all this old stuff to something new. We're looking back to the 1960s and 70s when people weren't thinking how films would change, how media would change, and how people would be able to look at these various films and compare one film against another."

This video by Cartoon Hangovers shares various recycled Disney scenes and explains why they were reused, showing how it all began with animators tracing over live footage of real actors to create more realistic animation in Disney's first full-length feature film, "Snow White."

Every Recycled Disney Shot & Why - Snow White, Frozen, Toy Story, Moana and More - Cartoon Hangoveryoutu.be

Despite the eventual mega-success of the Disney empire, the company's beginnings were not so rosy. "Snow White" was a surprise box office hit, but follow-up films "Pinocchio," "Bambi," and "Fantasia" went way over budget and were considered losses for the studio. "Dumbo" was a success, but then WWII hit. That's when Disney really got started with resuing animation.

The main reason was purportedly to save time and money. According to Floyd Norman, Walt Disney himself probably never even knew or noticed that animators were recycling scenes. He was focused more on the big picture and not so concerned with the technical processes of the animators.

The practice of reusing scenes continued, with "The Sword in the Stone" and "The Jungle Book" in particular snagging lots of scenes from previous Disney projects. But there are lots of well-known examples, including "The Aristocats" reusing scenes from "101 Dalmations," and "Robin Hood" stealing scenes—and even parallel characters—from "The Jungle Book" (Ever notice how similar Little John and Baloo are?) and other Disney films.

These Disney films from the 60s, 70s, and 80s can trace their recycled animation primarily back to one director–Woolie Reitherman. He's not the only one to utilize the reuse of animation, but he's best known for it. He basically didn't see a reason to reinvent the wheel.

However, the practice didn't necessarily save time or money. Floyd Norman has pointed out that it's a lot of work to go through old footage, find what you want, and remake it into a new animation. In some ways, it would be easier just to animate from scratch.

Even newer Disney movies have reused scenes, though more often not, those serve as an homage to the original films that made the newer films possible. Such is the case with the dancing scene at the end of "Beauty and the Beast," which mirrors the one at the end of "Sleeping Beauty."

So no, it's not your imagination—there is no shortage of Disney scenes that are repeated in different Disney films. No one is complaining, of course, with Disney having made dozens of beloved productions enjoyed by billions of people. Perhaps recycling scenes is even part of what gives us a sense of familiarity when we watch a Disney movie.

At the end of the day, animators are magicians. Whatever tools they use to make the magic happen, so be it.

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Popular

A 5-foot-tall artist makes adorable cartoons on the perks of being short

via Three Under The Rain / Instagram

Brisa is the the illustrator of Three Under the Rain, a comic series on Instagram about her relationship with her fiance Joan and Marley, her five-year-old Labrador.

She never really considered herself an artist, but all that's changed since September 2017 when she first posted a few comics on Instagram. The first batch were called Short People Problems, about the funny situations she has to deal with as a five-foot-tall woman.

"I started with the series Short People Problems since I thought it would be fun to laugh a bit about the small daily struggles that short people have to face," she told Bored Panda.

"They were super well-received, but in the comments, there were always people saying how they didn't like being short, or how that made them feel less confident or feel that being short is a problem itself," she continued.

RELATED: An artist built seesaws into the US-Mexico border and invited kids to play on them

So Brisa got to work on a series of illustrations touting the positive side of being pint-sized, called the Perks of Being Short. The comics aren't just a way to appease her fans, she's actually learned to love her stature.

"Now in my late twenties, I'm totally fine with my height of 152 cm, it's who I am, and I like it, but there was a time when that was not like that," she said. "So I thought it could be great to make a parallel series, focused on the perks that being below average height have."

Her illustrations have become pretty popular on Instagram, earning her over 280,000 followers and she's even launched an online store with Joan where they sells prints, clothing, and stickers featuring her artwork.

Here is the entire series of 15 Perks of Being Short that'll either help you love your height or appreciate the vertically challenged people in your life.

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