The world is dark and scary, but we can all breathe a well-deserved sigh of relief tonight: According to Gizmodo, GIF-sharing platform Giphy has restored its supply of “Baby Yoda” GIFs from Disney+’s The Mandalorian. The GIFs started to get pulled from the the Giphy library at some point last week, leading to speculation that Disney and its army of lawyers in Mickey Mouse ears had gone after Giphy on copyright-violation grounds (speculation that, to be fair, seemed incredibly persuasive).
But the “why” doesn’t matter, because we can all still enjoy GIFs of Baby Yoda eating that frog or reaching for that shiny knob and nobody can stop us! And yet… the “why” of it still seems kind of puzzling. Gizmodo got a statement from Giphy about the Baby Yoda crackdown, but rather than explain what happened, it made everything more confusing. “We temporarily removed [the Baby Yoda GIFs] while we reviewed the situation,” the statement explained, adding that it did so because of “some confusion.” It also made a point to apologize to Disney “for any inconvenience,” seemingly indicating that the mouse lawyers hadn’t actually been involved at all. It’s possible Giphy was afraid of some legal action from Disney simply because of how popular the GIFs had been (a Vulture story built entirely around Baby Yoda GIFs was a big part of this weird mystery, for example).
As Giz notes, all that matters is that Baby Yoda is back in our GIFs. Of course, nobody ever took the Porg GIFs away, and they’re just as good as Baby Yoda GIFs, so it’s not like this would’ve been a complete disaster.
[Note: Gizmodo, like The A.V. Club, is owned by Great Hill Partners.]