David Unger: Meet the tech wiz ‘fixing’ traumatic childhood movies with AI

We’ve all got that one childhood film that is burned into our consciousness for all the wrong reasons.

You could go as far back as 1942 for one of the earliest case studies, when a young Bambi lost his mother in tragic fashion — at the hands of callous poachers — in the Disney classic.

Or you could fast forward to the 1980s and 1990s, when a slew of family-oriented movies containing tragic twists and storylines hit the cinemas and video stores.

Who could forget the gut-wrenching way that Atreyu pleaded with his trusted horse Artax not to die — only to watch the white stallion slowly sink to his death in quicksand?

And spare a thought for millennials all over the world traumatised by the 1991 Macaulay Culkin classic My Girl.

The film, also starring Anna Chlumsky, was marketed as a love story between two innocent children.

Spoiler alert: Culkin’s character Thomas J. died in horrific circumstances after he was attacked by a swarm of bees.

His death culminated in the devastating funeral scene in which Chlumsky’s character Vader broke down over his open casket, demanding to know “why isn’t he wearing his glasses, he can’t see without his glasses”.

Films like these can live long in the memories of the children who watch them.

But a tech expert from California has emerged as an unlikely hero, using AI to “fix” the trauma we all suffered from childhood movies, one clip at a time.

David Unger, who works at Discord, says the viral videos are actually about more than just giving happy endings to movies that previously had none.

“It’s a controversial moment right now for artists specifically because they’re worried where their place is in a world of AI tools that are doing things that (those artists) have trained their whole lives for,” he said.

Unger, who has a background in the arts himself — as both a musician and a sound engineer — says the AI genie is “out of the bottle”.

A big part of his work has been guiding artists on how they can use AI themselves to their own advantage.

“(Some people) think you hit a button and out comes Avatar, which couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s not as easy as hitting a button,” he said.

“It does take a generalist and an artist and someone who knows Photoshop, Premiere, editing, storytelling, rhythm, all of the beats that go into crafting something that is not just, you know, a video of a cat dancing or something.

“So that’s when I realised, ‘OK, artists like me and my friends, they’re all gonna be out of work if they don’t hop on board’. And so I should help teach.”

Creating a YouTube channel with this aim was the starting point for Unger, until he realised that there was a way he could cut through some of the online distaste for AI.

“There’s so much hate about AI right now,” he said.

Unger believes his videos “fixing” movie trauma started to take off because there was a “cognitive dissonance” between that hatred and the positive reception that happier endings delivered.

The first clip, a reimagining of the fateful scene in The Neverending Story in which Artax died, shows the horse climbing up out of the quicksand.

“Oh wow, that could have been really bad,” Artreyu remarks before the pair scramble to safety.

The final scene shows him riding his beloved horse while Falkor, a luck dragon, flies in the background.

It’s closing in on 400,000 likes on Instagram and a whopping 12 million views on TikTok.

Unger said his idea for the scene came about when he was doing something “very mundane” and thought it would be “kind of funny” if Artax didn’t die.

He said he went to show his young daughter The Neverending Story but remembered the horse scene was quite “messed up”.

“And then I sort of imagined, like, what if?”

Next on the list was The Lion King, depicting a scene in which Mufasa, Simba’s father, was saved by his brother Scar instead of being killed by him.

And let’s not forget My Girl. In Unger’s reimagined version, Thomas J. notices the menacing bees and runs to safety.

Sitting under a tree without a bee sting in site, Vader hands Thomas his glasses and in a heartwarming twist on the tragic words she uttered in the original, says: “Here you go. You know you can’t see without your glasses.”

Bambi, Inside Out, The Land Before Time, The Bridge to Terabithia — and for the adults, the Brad Pitt classic Se7en has even received the AI treatment.

“We are at the end of the day telling different stories, right?” Unger said.

“They have a beginning, middle and end. They have a problem they’re trying to solve. There’s a hero. And then in this case, I’m just slapping the happy ending on it with some irony.

“I think, eventually, if I keep putting out decent stories that people resonate with, I can just sort of weave in, like, ‘Hey, let me show you how I’m doing this. It takes a lot of artisanal craft to get these to work.

“And if you’re an artist, right now, you can hop in. Here’s how you do it.”