Lost Media You'll Never See: The Nickelodeon Tapes, Children's Program Hijacks and more
Lost media, TV urban legends, and the moments kids’ networks never wanted you to see. This episode investigates the rumored Nickelodeon “destroyed tape” from Legends of the Hidden Temple, real broadcast signal hijackings (including the infamous Handy Manny incident), and a haunting stop-motion short known only as “The Butcher.” From grueling game-show sets to vanished DVR recordings, we dig into how media disappears and why people won’t stop looking for it.
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SOURCES
Kirk Interviews:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weZ3EyvurCc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UuVc8b58cg&t=114s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx1DU4NP0CY
https://www.avclub.com/legends-of-the-hidden-temple-s-kirk-fogg-on-the-time-a-1798254994
Contestant Interviews:
Banned episodes of cartoons
https://nickelodeon.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_banned_and_skipped_episodes
https://www.reddit.com/r/renandstimpy/comments/stlj3o/where_to_watch_banneduncut_episodes/
Double Dare:
https://www.avclub.com/it-smelled-like-death-an-oral-history-of-the-double-1798255802
Producer Interview:
https://www.avclub.com/legends-of-the-hidden-temple-producer-scott-stone-revea-1798254851
Legends of the Hidden Temple Details
https://nickelodeon.fandom.com/wiki/Legends_of_the_Hidden_Temple
fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Legends_of_the_Hidden_Temple_episodes
https://legends.fandom.com/wiki/The_Temple_Games#Ramp
https://legends.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Rooms
Kirk and Bradley career details
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirk-fogg-12588741/
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0048389/
Disney Channel info:
https://wrestlenomics.com/u-s-cable-network-households-universe-1990-2023-nielsen-data/
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/disney-junior-shifts-focus-educational-35845/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0173664/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454656/?ref_=fn_all_ttl_1
Lincroft
https://www.nj.gov/labor/labormarketinformation/assets/PDFs/census/2010/dp/cdp/lincroftcdp.pdf
Article with resident reaction:
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna18447282
Other porn incidents
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/mar/17/playboy-shown-childens-cable-channels
YouTube coverage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj4N5gXab78
Reddit coverage
Deaduser00’s Reddit profile
https://www.reddit.com/user/deaduser00/
Reddit posts
https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/d6uznn/tomtshort_film2010s_nickelodeons_creepy_film/
https://www.reddit.com/r/lostmedia/comments/d7u1wr/comment/f1eeg74/
Butchers Hook
https://vimeo.com/14545752?fl=pl&fe=sh
Simon Pummell’s website:
http://www.pummell.com/?C=18&A=6
Odokuro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naEpKfY7PGQ
Lopo the Butcher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVIB9JnGfiM
Strange Invaders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb3yrRttYJc
Attack of the Giant Vulture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JVo7p84u9U
https://lostmediawiki.com/Attack_of_the_Giant_Vulture_(found_Nickelodeon_short_film;_1998)
Mr Meaty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdLv4FZ37p4
Really You
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx9YDUZ60Wc
Locomotion Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotion_(TV_channel)
Lost Media Wiki Entry:
YouTube Coverage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQwhSA2j0R8
TRANSCRIPT
Deep inside the archive room of the kids network Nickelodeon, there was an urban legend that floated around for decades.
If you work in the archive, your job is to catalogue every episode, every sketch of every cartoon, every roll of film from every kids show the network has ever aired. These archives have EVERYTHING.
But the urban legend was that there was one tape that had been deleted because execs at Nickelodeon never wanted anyone to ever see it. It’s not from a cartoon, or even a sitcom, but one of the many game shows the network had at the time. The legend said that Something bad happened during filming to a preteen girl that was competing in the game show. Whatever it was, it was bad enough that they had the tape permanently destroyed.
And for decades, this rumor floated around, from employee to employee. And sometimes, an archivist would watch through the old tapes and try to find what people were talking about. But no trace was ever recovered
However, in 2013, a man named Kirk Fogg sat down to give an interview. 20 years prior, he was the host of the Nickelodeon game show Legends of The Hidden Temple. And in the interview he hinted at the fact that this tape wasn’t just an urban legend, that he was there the day the incident really did occurr, and he knew exactly why the network had destroyed the tape…
This is heart starts pounding, I’m your host Kaelyn Moore, and today, I want to tell you about the tape that Nickelodeon never wanted anyone to see, but I also want to tell you about a few other pieces of lost media.
Now, lost Media refers to any audio, visual, or other type of media that was once publicly available or known to exist but is now believed to be lost, missing, destroyed, or irrecoverable in any format.
Sometimes a fire burns down an old film archive and all of the films are tragically destroyed, but more often then we realize, pieces of media are intentionally “lost” so that no one will ever have access to them.. Not that that would ever stop us here at the Rogue Detecting Society. Our own archives are full of things other people left buried, so we’re going to try to get to the bottom of these things today.
But before we do, we are big fans of books here, as you probably know. So we are, at the urging of Patreon High Council member, Samantha, going to finally be starting a Heart Starts Pounding book club. We’re setting up a special chat in Patreon for members, and we’ll be announcing each month’s book in our monthly Rogue Detecting Society email, so if you want to sign up for that, go to heartstartspounding.com and use the form. I’ll link it in the description. So shoutout again Samantha for following up on that. If you are already a Patreon member, look out there for more details. Ok, let’s dive in.
In 1993 Nickelodeon was on its way to becoming the pre-eminent children’s network worldwide. I know many of us were raised on this version of Nick with Shows like Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Clarissa Explains It All, and Pete & Pete. Eventually, the network decided it was time to branch out into gameshows. Adults had Jeopardy and The Price is Right, so they wanted producers to figure out what a kid version of those looked like.
Nickelodeon signed a deal with adult game show producers Stone Stanley Productions in the hopes that they would come up with some kid-friendly ideas. 90’s Nick proved that children loved mayhem, but these producers really thought that kids gravitated more toward spooky and almost upsetting content.
The producers at Stone Stanley pitched a gameshow, sort of jeopardy, sort of american gladiator, where kids would try to make their way through a haunted house obstacle course while answering trivia questions. Adults in scary costumes would jump out and grab them, trying to keep them from making it through.
Naturally this sounded a little too intense to the people at Nickelodeon, so they asked Stone Stanley to tweak the idea to be less scary. The company then changed the setting from a haunted house to an ancient jungle temple, and swapped out the monsters for temple guards, but kept a lot of the idea the same.
That’s how the game show Legends of the Hidden Temple was born. Soon, it went into production.
Even with the tweaks the show was still terrifying for kids, and immediately it seemed like it was going to be too intense for the young players.
The game worked like this.There were six teams of two,each team had one boy and one girl between the ages of 11 and 15. These kids were usually cast from the local middle school.
The whole show took place on a sound stage meant to look straight out of Indiana Jones and was taped in front of a live audience. This audience was mostly adults and they wouldreact to the kids as they made their way through various challenges.
And according to host Kirk Fogg, it was during filming of one of these challenges where the alleged incident happened. He remembered the day this happened like it was yesterday.
It had been a long day of filming, and there was a young girl, the one from our opening urban legend, she was real. Her name and age have been lost to time because she was a minor during taping. But she and her partner made it to the final challenge of the day. They beat out all of the other teams in the physical challenges, so by the time she made it to the final round she was exhausted. The lights inside of the studio were getting hot, the live studio audience was screaming and cheering. And that included her parents, who were watching and hoping for her to win, as well as the parents of all of the kids that had already lost, that were hoping she’d trip and fall, or get captured by a temple guard.
She was breathing heavily, and her face was already starting to turn pale, but it seems like the producers urged her on. And so, the lights in the studio dimmed. The main set piece of the show, an easter island style head named Olmec read out the instructions for the challenge, and then a woman’s voice read the potential prizes over an intercom. Kirk then readied the girl, and had her put in her mouth guard. And then he called out “on your mark, get set, GO”
The girl started to run through, climbing various ladders, solving the simple puzzles, and pushing her way through blocked doors. For how exhausted she looked she was making decent time. She even got past some temple guards
According to Kirk,, she stumbled forward into a room appropriately called the Pit of Despair. It was a twenty-foot tall room with a pit of green, plastic balls in the middle, and high walls stretching up all around it. The contestant was meant to use some handholds in the wall or a rope ladder to climb their way to the next room.
But for our contestant, the prospect of this was just too much. She’d already been through a long day of filming. And now, she knew that the dreaded temple guards might be waiting for her at the top. It was too much to take.
And so, the girl just started sobbing, in the middle of the ball pit. Kirk would go on to say that this was actually seen as a good thing by the producers, though. I guess they liked the drama of it.
But this girl was winded, nervous, and her stomach was full of pepperoni pizza, the only food available on set.
Before she knew it, her stomach did a flip, and all of that pizza came spewing out of her as she projectile vomited onto the green balls in the Pitt of Despair.
The crew was shocked, and they immediately had to cut.
Now, I know what you may be thinking, a kid getting overwhelmed during filming and throwing up after running around maybe doesn’t seem that dark. But the reality of this situation, is that the show was much more physically taxing on the child contestants than anyone at nickelodeon was willing to admit. And now they had proof of that on camera. Let me explain to you, kind of the dark history of this show….
The reality of Legends of The Hidden Temple was that they did push their contestants very hard. It was made as cheaply as possible, so that meant the crew shot four episodes a day. Child contestants who made it all the way through to the temple run had been there for between 12 to sometime 18 hours, depending on how shooting went. And they were shooting really physically taxing challenges while they were there.
Challenge one was The Moat. The Six teams worked hard to cross a narrow swimming pool that was obscured by some obstacle. Sometimes the kids had to swing across a rope swing or balance on floating steps. And the last two teams to cross were eliminated and got a lackluster prize. I literally remember the prize being cans of tuna one time. And these were presented to the kids completely seriously, like it was a huge honor.
But the moat challenge was not easy Cracked has an article where they interviewed former contestants, and one shared just how horrible this challenge was. The former contestant remembers other contestants spitting up water, trying hard to keep breathing while they crossed. When it was her turn to go, she asked a producer “What if we drown?” and he just laughed at her.
Challenge two was the steps of knowledge. This was the only non physical challenge, and it was here the remaining four teams would answer questions to test their memory. Only two of those teams would advance to the next round.
The third challenge was the temple games. This level was really three different challenges that tested the kids’ agility. It could be climbing a wall or army crawling through an obstacle course.The point was, to win these challenges you had to be strong, fast, and have endurance.
And this was the part of the show where kids started getting really tired. I mean even in some of the footage you can see kids huffing and puffing. Some have to take a pause before answering questions. Others are really banged up, bruises and cuts starting to show on their skin. As kid watching, I thought it was just fun and exciting to see how hard they pushed themselves, but as an adult it’s upsetting to watch.
These episodes were shot in a very go go go manor. Meaning there wasn’t really time for breaks, water, or to compose yourself. And on top of that, the kids had already gone through hours of prep backstage before filming even began. That meant these were really long, grueling days.
By the end of the third challenge, only one team would remain. the final two contestants from the winning team–one boy and one girl–would make their way over to the final challenge. The Temple Run.
The Temple run was an obstacle and a maze. It was designed to feel like a jungle gym set within the adventurous world of Indiana Jones, and it consisted of 12 rooms with locked doors. The kids would have 3 minutes to figure out a path, one at a time, to get an artifact hidden somewhere in the maze, all while being chased by adult men dressed as temple guards that were hiding amongst the rooms. These guards would pop out of nowhere and try to chase down the kids, causing many of them to scream in horror, and even some to cry.
Most teams would prove unable to complete this task in the allotted 3 minutes, and it would later be revealed that Nickelodeon producers restricted the amount of teams that could win for budget purposes. See, if you won the whole show, you’d get WAY more than just a can of tuna. These winners got a series of prizes that included a vacation for their families.
So the game was rigged. The temple was intentionally treacherous, and confusing, and scary, so that no more than 8 teams would win each season.
With all this in mind, you can see why the young girl was so overwhelmed. But that leaves me wondering about the footage from this incident - did it ever see the light of day?
Once the show's host, Kirk Fogg, told the story of this incident in an interview in 2013, lost media hunters online started trying to track down the footage. There are Reddit posts from over the years asking if anyone has it, but none of it has ever revealed anything.
The reality is that Nickelodeon would have likely destroyed this footage. It makes them look bad, opens them to liability, and was probably very embarrassing for that girl.
But also, this wasn’t the only time that something like this happened on a Nickelodeon show.
Hidden Temple was preceded by another popular gameshow, Double Dare. It was a similar show with physically challenging obstacle courses for kids. The host of that show, Marc Summers, told AV Club about two instances where kids were seriously hurt.
In one, a boy neglected to tell producers that he had a condition known as brittle bone disease. When he fell off an obstacle, he shattered 17 bones, including one that broke right through the skin on his arm. Marc Summers literally had to look away to keep from throwing up.
Another time, an otherwise healthy boy fell backwards and hit his head. He was fine, but his father was a lawyer who threatened to sue unless the show gave his son the big screen TV prize that would have otherwise gone to a winning contestant. According to Marc Summers, they quickly complied.
So we can see why Nickelodeon would not keep footage of these types of incidents. Scenes that could maybe get them sued. And since these episodes did go unaired, there’s no one out there with their own VHS recording.
But there is plenty of lost media out there that did air, and only disappeared after the fact. In some cases, it’s content that was purposefully transmitted into select homes…and often with malicious intent.
Let’s move now from the nostalgia of the ‘90s to the nostalgia of the naughties, specifically to the year 2007. We’e also moving age groups and networks, as we go from a teen show on Nickelodeon to a show for preschoolers on the Disney Channel.
Now, the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon were equally big deals by this point. And they both had early morning preschooler programming, called Playhouse Disney and Nick Jr., respectively. And while Nick Jr. had Bob the Builder, Playhouse Disney had Handy Manny.
Handy Manny was a CGI repairman with talking tools. His show actually premiered that year as Disney ended some of their other big preschooler shows like Bear in the Big Blue House. And The show was decently popular, and a lot of parents trusted that they could just turn the show on and let their kids watched while they did other stuff around the house.
Only, this month, in one quiet New Jersey community, Manny would lose that trust in a pretty major way.
Lincroft is a picturesque subdivision of New Jersey,
And About half the community at this time was made up of families with children, so plenty of kids in Lincroft were sitting in front of their TVs one morning in May 2007, watching Manny fix things with his tools. A little boy, who we’ll call Aaron, was one of them. His father, Paul, could hear the tv playing from the next room over. The cartoon sounds, the music. But then he heard something that definitely was not part of a kids program.
The father ran into the living room to find that somehow, on the screen, an adult film had started playing. Now, Paul freaked out, and hit the remote as fast as he could to change the channel, but when he pulled up the digital TV guide , he realized the channel was still set to Disney, and Handy Manny was still the program that was supposedly on.
The little boy had no idea what he was seeing, he was far too young, and Paul turned it off so quickly he probably didn’t even register what was happening. But Paul could see out his window the whole neighborhood of other families with young children, and he wondered if they had caught what was happening in time.
This signal hijack wasn’t just unique to their home. It was happening all over Lincroft.
From what we know from how parents have described this event, after just a few minutes, the program switched back. Once again, Manny was on the screen, fixing things with his tools as if nothing had ever happened. But parents weren’t willing to let this go. Soon, they were all placing angry calls to Disney Channel
And of course, Disney took this seriously. Obviously the callers weren’t making the incident up - there were too many of them, all from Lincroft.
right away, that helped to narrow down the problem. If it had been Disney themselves airing the adult film, then you’d expect every household in America to have experienced the intrusion. Instead, it was just this one small neighborhood in New Jersey. That meant that somewhere along the cable distribution line, someone in the Lincroft area had altered Disney Channel’s signal.
The cable provider for the area was Comcast, so Disney naturally pointed the finger at them. In turn, Comcast promised to launch an investigation. But as days turned to weeks, the company didn’t seem to be revealing anything.
Paul, the father of the young boy who saw the adult film, was interviewed by the New York Daily News. He seemed distraught, and frustrated with Comcast for scaring his son. Though it could have been his horrified reaction that scared his son more than anything.
Comcast apologized to Paul, but there was never any explanation provided for what happened. And as it turned out, this wasn’t an isolated event. Hijackings had been happening all over the country
Earlier that year, in March 2007, there was a similar intrusion in the Phoenix area. The Ion cable channel, which was a health and wellness channel, was interrupted by an adult film.
Two years later and a two hour drive away, in Tucson, there was an extremely high profile hijacking of the biggest television event of the year: the Superbowl. Viewers watched in real time when the feed cut from the game to an image of a woman taking off a man’s pants and exposing him to the audience.
The following year, in March 2010, in Raleigh, North Carolina, the cable feed for two different children’s channels was replaced for two whole hours with the Playboy channel. However, it seems like it was just the preview screen, so luckily the kids didn’t see anything explicit.
But perhaps saddest of all, in 2012, also in North Carolina, our beloved Disney Channel fell victim once again. And this time, the interrupted program was much more iconic than Handy Manny; it was a showing of the original, animated Lilo & Stitch.
As usual, the interruption was an adult film, and once again, parents were upset. A local news station interviewed a mother who happened to record it on her DVR. She was able to replay it for the reporters and show them that the adult film played for six whole minutes. As soon as it came on, one of her kids ran from the room, screaming “I didn’t do it!”
This mom seems to have had a pretty good sense of humor about the whole thing, though obviously she still wasn’t happy. But she still wanted answers as to why this happened, And, once again, the cable network had no good explanation.
it was like an epidemic at the time, all of these hijackings. There are likely many similar situations that went unnoticed, unreported, or were intentionally swept under the rug.
You might be wondering how this could happen so often. And actually, the explanation is simple, if a little technical.
All of these hijackings happened in one of two ways - either the signal was intercepted and overridden by an outside party, or someone within the local cable station switched the feed. In the days of broadcast, it was somewhat common for hijackers to override a TV station signal by placing a transmitter of greater strength between the TV station and the targeted homes.
But in the days of cable, someone would have had to physically splice the cable line to hijack it from the outside. That’s not terribly easy to do, but because there’s a recording of the 2012 incident, journalists could see the family did lose the Disney channel signal for a moment before the adult film came on, so that’s most likely what happened there
However, bad actors at the cable station itself is the more common explanation. The 2007 Ion incident and the 2009 Superbowl incident both had similar culprits; they were employees of the cable companies who did it for whatever reason
The Superbowl culprit actually faced criminal charges but got off with a hefty fine, and the Ion culprit was fired. In general, the cable companies seemed to prefer firing the employee and moving on, because a court case can bring more negative attention to the event.
But no one ever got any answers as to how the Handy Manny signal intrusion happened. There was no investigation, and any recordings of the event seemed to vanish. Remember, having a recording of the event, as uncomfortable as it might be for parents, can actually be really useful to an investigation, which can ensure that this doesn’t happen again. But with Handy Manny, those tapes disappeared.
But that hasn’t stopped people from looking for them. Many of these incidents have been given new life online over the last few years as lost media sleuths try to find recordings of the broadcasts. There are Reddit posts from 2017, 2022, and 2023 looking for footage of the Disney Channel hijackings
In 2023, Reddit users thought they found the lost Handy Manny footage when a video titled “Disney Channel Hijacking 2007” was uploaded to the Internet Archive. But it was not meant to be - that user later came on the thread to say the video was a fake, and they had been misled. I mean, this type of video would be so easy to fake, anyone could splice something into a regular clip of Handy Manny.
The Lilo and Stitch interruption is actually shown pretty well in the 2012 news report, though of course the explicit scene in question is blacked out. However, i will add they forgot to edit the credits for the adult film out, and they do start to play at the end of the clip, so some sleuths have been able to guess what that signal intrusion looked like.
As for the Handy Many hijack, internet sleuths might never be able to find that one. as we’ve covered on this show, when the mouse wants something gone, it can be GONE. essentially wiped from the face of the earth.
And It’s too hard of a thing to look for. Typically, lost media describes actual, unique, missing content, rather than a specific television feed from a specific time. It would have to come from a DVR recording from a parent, who either deleted the broadcast, or turned it over to someone who deleted it (SFX Goofy hiyuck)
Me, personally, I’m much more interested in unique lost media. Like Unusual, disturbing, or otherwise memorable media that worms its way into your head, and won’t let you forget it. Our next story features exactly that: a short film that haunted a man his entire life.
Sometimes, the memories of things we viewed as children get jumbled as we get older. We mix up details and combine experiences, remembering things that never really were. What happens, though, when you know you saw something you shouldn’t have when you were young, but you just can’t put your finger on when it happened, or where you saw it? What happens when the distant memory of the horror still echoes in your mind in your adulthood?
We’ve mentioned the subreddit r/TipOfMyTongue on the podcast before. It’s a subreddit dedicated to helping people figure out the name of a movie, song, or other piece of pop culture they can’t quite remember. It’s usually pretty positive and chill, so one disturbing new post in 2019 really caught everyone’s attention.
It was from a user with the ominous name “Many Legs.” He was looking for any information on a film he saw on Nickelodeon as a kid while living in Brazil in the early 2000s - one that has stuck with him forever. I’ll go ahead and read you his exact description of this piece of lost media:
The opening scene is the title of the movie in white and a black background. I believe it was called "The Butcher".The film is black and white and there is a hand with a butcher's knife butchering animals made out of real bones. I believe all animals are small ones, Like a bird, rabbit, Dog etc...The video had no dialogues, only music and maybe special effects. In the end the skeleton animals rebels against the butcher. I am not sure if only the hand of the butcher is shown, but I believe so. I also believe that his hand is a real human hand. Can't confirm it tho.
I also remember seeing bones inside glasses and I believe the animal bones fuse together at some point making an abomination.
The film had severely disturbed him as a child, he was wondering how something so gruesome could have ever been shown on a kids network.
other users jumped in right away, they were totally caught up in this mystery. People started commenting things like “Damn, South American Nick sounds intense.” But there were also comments coming in from users who remembered something like this airing on the network.
“I really hope we find this because I VAGUELY remember this as well. Hope it’s not a mendalla effect”
“I can remember it as well. Or maybe I've seen a video about it once.”
“I very vaguely remember this... Could be just the Mandela effect in action (like someone else commented). PLEASE notify me whenever this is solved, I want to know too!”
So then the thread REALLY got to work trying to solve this mystery. And what happened next was almost as disturbing as the post itself.
People started suggesting short films that might fit the description. Which really opened up a dialog about just how many disturbing videos had been shown either to children or on kids networks…
One of the first suggestions as to what the missing short film could be was Lupo the Butcher. It’s an early cartoon from the creator of Ed, Edd, & Eddy, Danny Antonucci. It’s pretty shocking, and features an eerie looking butcher who is having a temper tantrum while cutting meat. Eventually, it leads to him cutting his finger off, and then he cuts himself up until all that’s left is his head. The end of the short features the credits rolling as just the butcher's head tries to slowly crawl away while screaming. However, this short is in color, it’s handrawn animation, similar to Ed Edd and Eddy, and has no animals, so it doesn’t fit the description of the film Many Legs is looking for.
Someone else suggested the short film Odokuro, which does show a small stop motion animal skeleton on a desk interacting with a bunch of strange objects. And it is in black and white. But ultimately, it’s not quite the creepy gorey short Many Legs is describing, and it’s far too recent, having been released in 2011.
Someone else suggested Strange Invaders, which they remembered playing on Nickelodeon at one point. This is actually an Oscar-nominated Canadian cartoon short about a couple dealing with an alien baby. It’s slightly creepy, but mostly cute and fun. And it’s not in black and white or stop motion. But Many Legs did remember seeing it. It had him wondering if it could have some connection to his “Butcher” short film.
From here, he went down a bit of a rabbit hole
He found that Strange Invaders was distributed by the National Film Board of Canada, or NFB, and so he wondered if they would also have a copy of the film he was looking for. Many Legs next posted to the “r/lostmedia” subreddit, and actually caught the attention of the NFB. They searched their archives, but in the end, they couldn't find anything like what he was describing.
Another person suggested a movie called Alice from 1988. It's a Czech movie and a very dark, disturbing surrealist take on Alice in Wonderland. It features many scary stop motion creatures, a little decapitation, and seemed to have scarred a whole generation of Czech children. But it wasn’t that either.
All of these were just dead ends for Many Legs. But then, he caught an unexpected break.
A new user reached out with a new film suggestion. The name? Butcher’s Hook.
Immediately, this seemed to check more boxes than anything before it. It’s a 6 minute film from 1995 described on ImDB as “A short film exploring the imagery of medical and scientific experimentation.” The film is in black and white, and the animation is stop motion, just like the original poster suggested.
And let me tell you, this thing is disturbing. It’s a surrealist film that is supposed to show a taxidermist working with his animals. We see dead rabbits in a jar of formaldehyde, with a bunch of gross squelching noises playing underneath. We see more animal carcasses and bones contorting and rotating, all being watched by an eerie, shirtless man who is supposed to be the Taxidermist.
The short has some color elements, but features a lot of animal bones in black and white stop motion. Before long, the taxidermist is somehow sucked in by the animal skeletons, who then turn his body into a skeleton. He screams and panics until his skeleton body is consumed by a root system, and a tree grows out of him. The circle of life, I guess?
The film is by a British filmmaker named Simon Purcell, who made a variety of experimental shorts like this before graduating onto features. Butcher’s Hook came out in 1996, so it fits the posters timeline decently well.
But there are two big issues. One,it’s a taxidermist, NOT a butcher, even though the title suggests something else. There is no chopping of bones. And second is that: something this disturbing was unlikely to have ever played on Nickelodeon. Nickelodeon has had some weird stuff over the years, but nothing quite this graphic. But Many Legs took his investigation further, and actually reached out to the filmmakers to see if the film could have somehow ended up on the network. But he didn’t receive a response.
However, he could always count on his Reddit friends to lead him back on the right path.
In an update post in 2020, Many Legs learned of a separate animation network that played in Latin America at the time - Locomotion. They mostly showed a lot of anime, but they did have a strong library of experimental short films. The network is long gone, and Many Legs didn’t know who to contact to try and learn more about their programming. But based on some of the other shorts they showed at the time, Butcher’s Hook could definitely have played on the network.
It’s a lot more likely than Nickelodeon, anyways. And given how animation channels tended to be grouped together in cable lineups back in the day, it seems very possible that Many Legs could have simply switched to Locomotion, seen the short, and later mis-remembered it as playing on Nickelodeon.
OR, it could have been some sort of signal hijacking situation like we’ve already talked about. Only, instead of playing adult films, the hijacker chose to play experimental british films. Maybe the hijacker was a cinephile, I don’t know.
Unfortunately, he had to settle for never truly knowing how he saw the film, or if this was truly it. It continues to haunt him to this day.
Ambience- mysterious
We all have those things we see as a kid that stick with us - for my sibling Leo it was an actual Nickelodeon short, Attack of the Giant Vulture, that bothered them for years. It was a creepy film that was made by little girls, about a puppet vulture that follows them around and tries to eat them. In the end, they kill and eat it. Leo had nightmares for no joke, two years after watching the short, and I found a thread on Reddit from other people who were also traumatized by this film and couldn’t find it for the longest time. If any of you remember this short from your childhood PLEASE let me know.
I think when you’re a kid you just can’t always make sense of certain special effects like stop motion or puppets and it really bothers you. And back in the day, when things might just air briefly on TV and never be seen again, it left you feeling like you were crazy. Like this weird thing you saw might have been a horrible hallucination.
Like Mr. Meaty, a Canadian teen puppet show that was distributed by Nickelodeon in the US, which is a perfect example of this. Before it went to full series, it would show up in the form of little shorts that played in between full-length shows. The show was known for its creepy puppets who encountered horrible situations while working at a fast food restaurant. In different episodes, they fried and ate their own hands, discovered a giant tape worm living in one of their stomachs, dated a girl made of roast beef who looked like she had no skin, and fought with their half dead, cryogenically unfrozen boss.
If you just happened to catch one of these storylines with no explanation right before your favorite episode of Clarissa Explains It All, you’d feel insane.
But these memories stay with us, as user many legs illustrates. I truly believe he saw something he wasn’t meant to as a child. I don’t know if it really aired on nickelodeon, but his memory is so vivid and he remembers so many details about the film. Whatever he saw was truly terrifying, no kid should have ever seen it. ((time))
But they’re not the only one that feels this way.
There are whole communities dedicated to finding lost media. Sometimes, building context around these strange things helps people to come to greater grips with their reality. And I want to continue to make lost media episodes to share some more of these with you guys, so let me know if that’s something you want to hear.
And I think revisiting these things does help diminish their power over us. Which is why this week in our footnotes episode available to the high council on Patreon, you can join Leo and I as we revisit Attack of the Giant Vulture. We want to go through the film, which was considered lost media for a long time, and see if it’s still as disturbing as we remember.
And I want to hear from you all. Do you remember seeing something as a child that you juuuuuust can’t put your finger on or have never been able to find again. Let me know in the comments because you never know, it just could be in our next lost media episode.
But for now, that’s all I have for you this week. Join me here next week as we start to ease our way into spooky season with one of Japan’s most famous unsolved mysteries. The murder of an entire family at the hands of an unknown assailant.
I will see you then, and until next time, stay curious…