Disney's Gatekeepers Gatekeeping 'The Gatekeeper'
And you thought Deadpool and Wolverine went heavy-handed with the meta.
The internet is abuzz (for both good and bad reasons) with talk about the “The Gatekeeper,” the “lost episode” of Marvel’s animated series “Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.” If you are not one of Wonkette’s many 6- to 12-year-old readers, this might not have appeared on your radar as yet. But the storylines make a compelling case that it should.
First debuting in February 2023, MG&DD is the adventure stories of genius inventor and 13-year-old Black New Yorker Lunella Lafayette. While your friendly neighborhood Crip Dyke was only mildly amused with the show, as these things go it was astonishingly good, scoring 100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes’ TomatoMeter, an aggregate of professional critical reviews, and a 93% positive rating on the site’s audience feedback Popcorn Meter. The show is a work of excellence and well-loved by its intended audience, using music and what Yr Wonkette is told is high-quality and innovative animation to tell engaging, character-focused stories about Lunella and her diverse group of friends.
Despite this, Disney cancelled the show ahead of broadcast of its fully completed second season, and as of Friday we learned that one of those completed episodes is being held and may never be aired. Why? Because it tells an engaging, character-focused story centered on Lunella’s trans friend, Brooklyn.
In “The Gatekeeper,” all Lunella’s girlfriends play for Intermediate School 833’s girls’ volleyball team (“The Squirrels,” naturally) and are set to play against the presumably face-eating Lady Leopards, led by Coach Greer and her daughter, team captain Bella. The seemingly fierce Greer turns big ol’ softy before the game, sharing orange slices and offering the Squirrels first crack at the court to warm up. But after MG’s besties have their chance at the court and while the Leopards are taking their turn, Brooklyn and the non-binary Tai chat on the bleachers about how the orange slices take them back to the long-ago days of 5th grade (last year, natch — ed.) and the dark times when Brooklyn had to play on the boy’s soccer team.
Coach Greer overhears, and immediately sets about trying to disqualify first Brooklyn and then the entire Squirrel team after, get this, Coach Hrbek sticks up for Brooklyn’s girlhood and her right to play. [Excelsior!]
Supervillain antics revolve around Coach Greer and the magical but evil gadget she picked up at a yard sale, which confines the Squirrels in a pocket dimension until they can break free. Often the hero of the show, Moon Girl is reduced to delaying tactics in an attempt to prevent the ref from calling a forfeit before the girls of IS 833 can return to their home universe. Despite Devil Dinosaur’s growling rendition of the Squirrels’ fight song, the effort seems doomed to defeat until Bella finds out what her mother is up to and refuses to play along. Bella just wants a fair fight, Leopard-on-Squirrel, and while her mother/coach insists that wanting a fair game is why she locked the Squirrels away, Bella is clear that her vision of fair play is different from her mother’s.
The episode was written, animated, and produced long before the current controversy over San Jose State’s fully compliant volleyball roster became a thing, but it’s obviously socially relevant in this particular moment — which is one huge portion of the explanation why the reaction to news of this lost episode hit so hard and spread so fast this weekend.
One of the episode’s creators leaked the news that the episode existed, and that it focused on Brooklyn — long known to be a trans character — telling people that if they knew Brooklyn, they knew why this show was pulled. Other posts insisted that the ep got yanked in the wake of the election. That turns out not to be true, with the decision having been made to “hold” the story as long as a year ago. Officially there has not even been a decision to never broadcast the episode, just one not to broadcast it until further notice, whenever that might be.
For the many fans of Moon Girl, canceling the show was already lunacy; gatekeeping “The Gatekeeper” is only making fans feel worse. A great deal of love and effort was poured into its making, with industry insiders obviously as disappointed as fans. From OhNoTheyDidn’t:
“One of the projects (episode) I worked on is getting shelved because of which party that won the recent election,” Derrick Malik Johnson, a storyboard artist who worked on Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur said in a recent, since-deleted post on the social media platform Bluesky. “It breaks my heart knowing this impactful and amazing [episode] is now about to be consider[ed] a lost media episode.”
The Collider added insight from animation professional Matt Braly:
“If an episode got this far, it was approved multiple times by multiple divisions, only to suddenly be struck down at the last second? Total breakdown of process and spitting on your team's careful/thoughtful work. S&P [the Standards & Practices review board] approved this ep. It was good to go.”
Meanwhile Disney responded that they weren’t being anti-trans (Brooklyn has been out as a trans character from the start of the series, with Tai being specifically non-binary almost as long), they were merely trying to make sure that the episode didn’t preempt parents’ ability to speak with kids about social issues before the show had its turn. Presumably this means that Disney believes that trans people existing has been discussed around the kitchen table, but trans people serving a volleyball has to be separately covered before they’re comfortable releasing the concept of girls who are different playing on a sports team together.
But as bad as all this is — you can see it coming, can’t you? — the internet is still the internet, and so the full episode was immediately leaked in almost all its glory. While there are distracting lines of production data shadowboxed at top and bottom, you can see the otherwise intact episode right now at Archive.org with all its pride flags, trans-love stickers, musical interludes, brilliant, loving brown girls, and an animated tyrannosaur that quite suspiciously resembles a member of abelisauridae to this dinosaur pedant.
Previously in Trans Disney and Trans Volleyball!
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Your friendly neighborhood Crip Dyke also writes other perverted stuff!
It feels to tired to point out that comedians getting million dollar comedy specials on Netflix to complain about being criticised for making anti-trans jokes call themselves "censored" and "cancelled" and insist that people should hear challenging jokes that shake up their world view, yet a children's cartoon that actually was cancelled for being pro-trans isn't called "censored" or "cancelled" or assumed to be required viewing for soft, safe-space dwelling comedians who can't handle ideas they don't agree with.
Stop. Obeying. In.Advance.