How Hollywood Sells Kids Stories Parents Don’t Want

By Joshua Tyler
| Published 1 hour ago

In a world gone mad, we could all use a little simple, silly, innocent fun. You take your kids to the theater to relax and create a memory you’ll share together. You put on a streaming show to make them giggle while you make dinner. You buy a ticket with your friends to a big-budget blockbuster to watch guys battle with swords, forget how much you hate your boss, and stop worrying about whether AI is going to take away your job. 

That’s how most people view entertainment’s place in their life. For it to keep filling that need, they have to be able to trust it.

Unfortunately, entertainment can’t be trusted. The entertainment you watch has never been less interested in giving you what you want. It has other plans, and this has never been truer than it is right now, in 2026. 

This is the story of how The Muppets and The Odyssey intersected in 2026 to destroy the last shred of trust audiences had left.

Making Muppets Hate Kids

On the surface, 2026 seems like a perfect time for a revival of The Muppet Show. The original was a family classic that spawned a generation of wholesome, non-controversial entertainment. Exactly the kind of thing that’s been missing from the usual streaming offerings. 

So Disney hired legit Muppet fan Seth Rogen to revive the iconic show and released it to the world. 

Rogen’s new version of the classic variety series was immediately praised for the way it looks, sounds, and feels exactly like the iconic Jim Henson series from the 1970s and 1980s. On that front, it was a triumph. A perfect production. Except there’s one big difference: Jim Henson’s version was the ultimate in wholesome, family-friendly entertainment. Seth Rogen’s version only pretends to be. 

It’s normal for family-targeted shows to work in a couple of edgy jokes that’ll go over the heads of little kids who might be watching with them. That’s part of the fun for parents. 

However, what would you think if instead of one or two sly adult references in your Pixar movie, there were twenty? Or thirty? What if all those sly adult references were only about one specific inappropriate thing? At what point would you start thinking, “Hey, is this Pixar movie trying to tell my kids something?”

That’s exactly what Seth Rogen’s The Muppet Show starts doing in its very first episode. 

That episode number one is only thirty minutes long, but if you watch and keep track, you’ll discover at least ten sex references in those thirty minutes. Actually, not just references; most of them seemed to specifically revolve around celebrating full-on, willful hedonism and adulterous cheating.

There’s a joke where Sabrina Carpenter tells Kermit she likes kink. There’s an entire sketch that revolves around Piggy cheating on her lover. After that, it’s back to Sabrina Carpenter so she can brag to Kermit about banging a married man. Then there’s a segment with guest actress Maya Rudolph, who seems to be engaged in heavy petting with a grumpy Muppet in the audience. 

Two of the musical numbers, one of which is sung entirely by rats, are popular songs about sex. The third song has Piggy replace Kermit as the object of Sabrina Carpenter’s sexual desire, just to make sure the sex references weren’t all heterosexual. 

Defenders might argue these gags are structured so that little kids won’t realize what’s going on. But it’s a significant portion of the first episode, which is a very weird thing to do for your debut episode of The Muppet Show. It’s not the jokes themselves so much as the volume of them, crammed into a short thirty minutes of otherwise perfect Muppet silliness.

Seth Rogen doesn’t have any children, and he’s been loud about how happy he is to be childless. He doesn’t like them, doesn’t care about them, so even though he was supposed to make a show for kids of all ages, it’s clear that he decided to make one for adults and lie about it.

Sexualizing children has become common in family-friendly entertainment, and the people making that entertainment never warn parents about any of it before they see it. They do that because no one would buy a ticket if they knew Zootopia 2 featured a weird predator-prey orgy scene for no apparent reason.

Trojan Horse Messaging

None of this is an accident; it’s Trojan Horse Messaging.

Trojan Horse Messaging is a persuasion technique in which a message is packaged inside a trusted, harmless, or ideologically acceptable frame so that a different, contradictory, or more objectionable idea can be introduced without triggering the audience’s normal resistance. 

It doesn’t only apply to family films slipping in sexual content to groom children into adult behavior. Sometimes it’s ideological dishonesty.

Angel Films recently released a new animated version of the famous George Orwell novel Animal Farm. The original Orwell book is infamous for being entirely anti-communist, and Angel Films, which is theoretically a conservative movie studio, was happy to tout its movie as being equally anti-communist to its conservative, Karl Marx-hating audience. 

Except their movie isn’t really anti-communist. This new version of Animal Farm twists Orwell’s story into a parable about the dangers of capitalism, effectively Trojan-horsing parents into taking their children to learn one thing, while intentionally teaching them exactly the opposite. 

Trojan Horse Messaging isn’t limited to children; it’s being used on you, too. 

It’s why, ironically, director Christopher Nolan’s 2026 version of The Odyssey race-swapped Helen of Troy, despite the story being a Greek myth about Greek people and the iconic, foundational story explicitly describing Helen as being pale-skinned and Greek. 

Loving Hats In A Fedora Hating World

Replacing the most beautiful Greek woman who ever lived with an African woman isn’t an innocent act of creative casting. This is Iconic Reconditioning.

Iconic Reconditioning is the deliberate alteration of a beloved character’s defining symbol, trait, or image to shift audience attachment from the original meaning to a new, preferred one.

It’s hard to see what’s really happening with The Odyssey through the race angle of the situation, so let’s put a different frame on it. 

Imagine a new Indiana Jones where Indy throws away his Fedora in favor of wearing baseball caps. Then imagine the movie was made only because the filmmakers behind it hate Fedoras and want to make other people hate them, too. 

Maybe the new baseball-cap-wearing version of Indiana Jones is well-acted and has amazing special effects. It wouldn’t matter; nobody would support it because it’s not Indiana Jones anymore. It’s some other guy in a different hat. People would hate it. No one would defend it, and the same people who made excuses for The Odyssey would be the ones leading boycotts against Indiana Jones and his baseball cap.

Christopher Nolan’s motives are no different from those of our hypothetical, fedora-hating Indiana Jones director. Only, instead of targeting your feelings on hats, he’s out to change your standards of beauty by stealing the most beautiful woman who ever lived label and applying it to someone totally different. He’s out to change your view of Western culture by rewriting its foundational stories and then pretending nothing happened. He’s using the story of the Trojan Horse, as an actual Trojan Horse, to screenwash you into sharing his worldview. 

This isn’t a guess; it’s a fact. The movie’s cast went out and promoted the film by talking about how much they hate the source material because it’s too male or too white, or whatever, and Christopher Nolan himself admitted that the movie isn’t even based on Homer’s classic story but instead on a politically motivated, feminist reinterpretation of it, written in the modern era. Nolan says one of his primary goals in making the movie was to persuade his audience into abandoning what he deems as “cultural prejudice.” He wants to “do away with some of those assumptions.”

Imprisoning Your Audience With Betrayal

That might seem like at least they’re being honest about what kind of movie The Odyssey is, but most of these comments are being buried and hidden by its marketing campaign, which tells the potential audience that this movie is exactly the opposite of what it really is. There’s a reason the movie’s definitely not blonde Helen of Troy is only shown in a one-second flash in The Odyssey’s trailers, and it’s the same reason Seth Rogen pretended he was making a family-friendly version of The Muppet Show, while doing the exact opposite. 

Because Seth Rogen’s version looks and feels so much like The Muppet Show, it’s likely many parents didn’t watch close enough to realize their kids are being fed a steady stream of sexualization. In the same way those parents saw Muppets and hit play on streaming, most people who buy tickets for The Odyssey will only see the trailers touting it as the next movie from the guy who made Inception and Oppenheimer, before making their decision. They’ll have no idea they’re wheeling Chris Nolan’s Trojan Horse directly into their brain.

It doesn’t matter if The Odyssey is good. It doesn’t matter if The Muppet Show is good. It doesn’t matter if you think the creatives did a good job making Star Trek’s message-heavy Starfleet Academy or the latest, diverse take on Lord of the Rings. The debate over the morality of this kind of screenwashing is not a question of storytelling. It’s a question of honesty.

At issue is something much, much bigger than opinions on joke quality or petty debates about skin color. What matters is whether filmmakers have the right to use screens to surreptitiously change or manipulate minds in ways their viewers would not consciously approve of.

Audiences have expectations. Bill your film as a comedy, and they expect to laugh. Position it as a horror movie, and they’ll rightfully be looking forward to a few scares. That doesn’t mean anyone expects to know the details of your story before they’ve watched. But it does mean people expect your intent in making your product to match their reasons for consuming it.

It’s like filling Pepsi cans with lemonade and then excusing it by telling consumers to stop complaining because it’s really good lemonade. It’s the dishonesty that’s the problem, not the quality of the liquid in the can. 

When you lie to your audience about what you’re doing, you aren’t just manipulating them. You make them into the worst kind of slave: people who think they’re choosing freely, while you’re quietly stealing their free will.