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One of the remaining episodes of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur set to release in 2025 will now allegedly no longer make it to air, according to since-deleted comments on social media from crew who worked on the Marvel and Disney animated series, citing concerns over the developing political climate in the U.S. in the wake of the 2024 presidential election.
The remaining episodes of Moon Girl‘s second and final season were set to air on the Disney Channel sometime in 2025, but now at least one episode produced for the Marvel series—adapting the titular young comics heroine, aka Luna Lafayette, and her adventures alongside the giant T-Rex-esque creature Devil Dinosaur—may not make it to air, supposedly due to revolving around a plotline involving the topic of trans kids involved in school sports.
“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 a lost media episode.”
In a thread on the Moon Girl subreddit about Johnson’s post, someone claiming to have worked on the series alleged that the episode revolved around the character Brooklyn, a teen volleyball player who attends Luna’s school in the series. “If you put attention [sic] to details about the character, you can figure out about what theme [the episode was based on] and why it was canned,” the user wrote in a now-deleted comment thread.
io9 was not able to independently verify the veracity of the above posts on Bluesky and Reddit, but has reached out to Disney for comment and clarification over the status of the episode, titled “The Gatekeeper,” as part of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur season two’s remaining release schedule. We’ll update this post when and if we hear more.
“The Gatekeeper” leaked online this week in various forms, with some sources already pulled through copyright claims from Disney. Footage from the episode, first reported on by Polygon, sees Brooklyn and her volleyball teammates in the Squirrels preparing for a regional championships match against another school.
In footage from the episode seen by io9, Brooklyn discusses her history of formerly being forced to play on the boys’ volleyball team, which is overheard by the coach for the rival team, Greer. The opposing coach then pushes to disqualify Brooklyn from play while interrogating the teenager for her Pride flag-themed kneepads and for having a water bottle that has a trans flag sticker on it.
After the Squirrels’ own coach defends Brooklyn’s place on the team,, in further footage from the episode seen by io9, Greer uses a magical key to lock Brooklyn, Luna (acting as the team’s water girl), and the rest of the Squirrels in a facsimile of their locker room playing escape room trials in an attempt to force a disqualification through non-participation. This leads to Luna’s best friend Casey seeking Devil Dinosaur’s help to buy time and save the day.
The episode is clearly not subtle about either centering a trans teen character in Brooklyn, or the explicit prejudice she faces as a trans teen who wants to participate in school sports. “It’s like creepy hologram Greer said, ‘to get out, you must follow my rules,'” Brooklyn says at one point in the episode after she, Luna, and the team fail to escape the locker room. “I’m trans. My very existence breaks Greer’s rules… how many doors? How many doors do I have to break through before they stop locking me out?”
Although conservative politicians have spent several years pushing back against the inclusion of trans athletes in purported “women’s spaces,” especially in school sports, anti-trans rhetoric was ramped up in the closing months of the recent U.S. presidential election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, with the Republican party spending an estimated $215 million on campaign TV advertisements targeting trans issues across the election. For Disney to air an episode of a series in defense of trans youth athletes would put the company directly in the spotlight just as Trump prepares to return to the White House for a second term, so its purported scrubbing would come as no surprise, especially given Disney’s history around LGBTQ commentary in its various studios’ projects.
In 2022, Disney was infamously at the heart of discussions around Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” bill, after facing internal dissent for a lack of vocal support by the company to stand up to the bill’s plans to control discussion of LGBTQ topics in Florida schools. At the time, Disney was in the process of moving several of its operations into Florida, where it also provides a major boost to the local economy through the operation of Walt Disney World.
Workers at Pixar further alleged that Disney had explicitly reduced LGBTQ characters and plotlines in its material “down to crumbs” after corporate review in an open letter released in March 2022.
After a series of legal disputes with DeSantis’ administration, and formally deciding to come out against the legislation, Disney eventually buried the hatchet earlier this year, negotiating up to $17 billion in future investment into expansion of Walt Disney World.
It would not be the first time Disney has capitulated to right-wing systems of power by censoring its own material, and likely won’t be the last. AdWeek reported today that Disney was one of several major corporations who had begun returning to spending advertising on X, having paused late last year over concerns with the platform’s then-new owner, Elon Musk. Musk has regularly used his prominence on the platform to uplift anti-trans commentary and express his own anti-trans beliefs. He will play a major role in the incoming Trump administration; the President-Elect announced earlier this week that Musk will co-chair a new “Department of Government Efficiency” aimed at cutting waste in the federal government.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
