We all grew up watching various educational programs as children. Depending upon your age group, you watched shows like 3-2-1 Contact, The Electric Company, Kids Incorporated, Blue's Clues, etc.
Those shows took us all on many adventures and often taught us some lessons we have continued to utilize in our lives to this day.
But there were other adventures. Darker adventures. These episodes never saw the light of day and teams of handlers and lawyers were deployed to wipe clean the slate and hide these incidents from the masses.
Luckily, we have a crack investigative team* here at BDF and we have uncovered a few of the hidden histories of educational children's programming.
Sesame Street
A new character was introduced for the 1971 season of the PBS educational show. In the wake of Roger Sessions' sucessful opera in three acts, Montezuma, America was swept with curiosity about Moctezuma II and other aspects of 15th century Mesoamerican culture.
A muppet ostensibly from Central Mexico, Tlahuicole was a unique personality. Garbed in stereotypical Aztec clothing, Tlahuicole was initially met with the same kindness and cultural curiosity granted to all newcomers on Sesame Street.
Of course, once Tlahuicole began his blood sacrifices to appease Huitzilopochtli, things took a dark turn.
Jughead Jones was the first to fall. Roosevelt Franklin soon followed. At this point, led by Oscar the Grouch, the other inhabitants of Sesame Street were forced to invite a new muppet named Hernán Cortés to visit Sesame Street.
Two weeks later, Tlahuicole disappeared never to be seen or heard from again.
Artist's depiction of an Aztec sacrifice similar to the fate of Roosevelt Franklin
The Great Space Coaster
Running from 1981 through 1986, this show was about the adventures of three humans (Francine, Danny, and Roy) who were brought to an asteroid by a giant puppet clown character named Baxter.
Baxter was the pilot of a space coaster (hence the name of the show) and in league with other denizens of the asteroid like Goriddle Gorilla, Edison the Elephant and Gary Gnu to teach the humans life lessons.
Unfortunately, the humans learned a few scary lessons, too.
Baxter had a drinking problem. On one of his more disastrous benders, he crept up on Danny and invited him to "take a trip on the Great Rape Coaster". It took both Goriddle Gorilla and Edison the Elephant to pull Baxter away from a visibly terrified Danny.
After and intervention instigated by Knock-Knock the Woodpecker, Baxter got himself clean. Unfortunately, the damage was already done. The show was canceled a month later.
You can see it in his eyes....that clown wants some booze.
Fraggle Rock
Many episodes featured Gobo receiving a postcard from his Uncle "Traveling" Matt. Matt was exploring what he considered "outer space" but was in fact "the real world outside of the fucking cave located inside Doc's wall".
Generally, Matt's epistles were mildly amusing anecdotes about Matt's inability to understand the human world. He thought a fire hydrant was a sentient creature. Television fascinated him. Things of that nature.
One particular missive from Matt to Gobo dealt with the time Matt stumbled into a brothel. His in depth descriptions of his experiences in "the vaginal caverns" was a bit much for the target audience of age 12 and under children. This episode was erased and never saw the light of day after the initial airing.
Boober took his negative attitude and obvious beatnik influenced fashion sensibilities to their logical extension. He got hooked on junk. His apathy and lethargy went largely unnoticed at first. Eventually, Mokey caught on that something wasn't kosher and with her assistance, Boober found the strength to kick heroin cold turkey.
While no overt references were made to Boober's addiction, the trained eye can spot the episodes where Boober is clearly whacked out of his mind on some high grade horse.
*There is no actual crack investigative team. It just isn't in the budget at this juncture. So...we made it all up. Just go with it.
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