In case you missed it this morning, a trailer for the canceled 2023 live-action CW Powerpuff Girls show was leaked. The internet almost universally deemed it a dumpster fire and started clowning on it, and Warner Bros., which owns the rights to the superhero sisters, has been going to great lengths to scrub it from the internet. Why would you care that much about a leaked trailer for something you’ve already canceled? Probably because it’s terrible.
The original trailer was posted by Lost Media Busters, a YouTube account that posts footage related to scrapped game levels, unaired commercials, and other stuff that never properly saw the light of day. It immediately spread throughout social media, including X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and elsewhere. On top of this, it was also published on the Internet Archive, which is used to save articles, webpages, and other media on the internet in the event they get deleted from live websites. At least, that’s the idea. Alongside hitting social media posts and the original YouTube upload, Warner Bros. has had the video taken down from the Internet Archive, which seems excessive considering the show isn’t even coming out anymore. You can’t claim it’s interrupting the flow of a marketing campaign if you weren’t going to put the show it’s promoting on TVs in the first place.
All that said, it’s ultimately meaningless because the video is already out there and circulating on the internet. Warner Bros. can copyright strike as many social media posts as it wants. Eventually, the company will stop caring, and people will still have the video to share. The irony of these attempts to wipe the internet of this video is that it only makes it more of a story. Warner Bros. hunting down every tweet and TikTok of the trailer is just as much a story as the leak itself. There’s a literal name for this phenomenon: the Streisand effect, a reference to the fact that when legendary singer and actor Barbra Streisand tried to have an image of her home removed from the internet, it only drew more attention.
In the meantime, I guess I’ll keep adding new embeds to our original story about the trailer each time WB nukes whichever one I’ve got in there. You can’t wash away the horrible stink of bad television, Warner Bros.