Toys 'R' Us—the once-ubiquitous big box toy store chain—doesn't really exist in a traditional since, at least not anymore. The company was bought by a gaggle of venture capital firms in 2005, which gradually stripped it of resources until it finally declared bankruptcy in 2017. The following year, the company finally closed all of its stores. Since 2019, the brand has been overseen by Tru Kids Brands, which in turn is owned by a bunch of other private equity holding firms, and has slowly started to pop as a store-within-a-store toy section that exists within other big brand stores.
Which is all to say: Toys 'R' Us is a toy store that only exists on paper. So naturally, these private equity firms decided this would be a great time to become even less real, engaging the generative AI video software called Sora to produce a two-minute "movie" of sorts about the life of Charles Lazarus, the original founder of the company (who, conveniently, died exactly one day before the corpse of his company started getting stripped down to private equity assets).
Here's how The Private Equity Asset Formerly Known As Toys 'R' Us describes the "first ever brand film created with SORA."
We are thrilled to partner with Native Foreign to push the boundaries of Sora, a groundbreaking new technology from OpenAI that's gaining global attention. Sora can create up to one-minute-long videos featuring realistic scenes and multiple characters, all generated from text instruction. Imagine the excitement of creating a young Charles Lazarus, the founder of Toys"R"Us, and envisioning his dreams for our iconic brand and beloved mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe in the early 1930s.
Wow so cool. The only way it would be cooler is if literally any of this meant absolutely anything to the material world.
