Thirty-four years ago, on five consecutive episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, two feuding sects representing Russia and the United States began stockpiling parts for bombs—at one point stripping the neighborhood’s arts funding to bankroll the build-up.

    This might sound like some particularly dark, on-the-nose fan fiction about a Mister Rogers episode written in 2017, but these episodes really did air in November of 1983—and only then. The episodes were pulled from syndication and future releases. While production stills reappeared over the years, and a poor-quality, five-minute clip wound up on YouTube recently, the individual episodes themselves were never surfaced again.

    That was until this week. Two of them were anonymously posted to YouTube on Monday.

And I will kill for the other four.

This just got uploaded.



PirateBear:

Lost Media Wiki article on the series

I'm still amazed that the series (of episodes) managed to actually address kids' fears about the looming Cold War without talking down to them (assuming the remaining synopses are as accurate). I hated it as a kid when things were overly sugar coated for me.

I'm hoping the coverage of the uploaded episodes doesn't scare off TROG from uploading the other three if he has them. I also don't know how to feel about the politicization of it. I agree that PBS should be well-funded, but taking a shot at Trump's budget kind of goes against the message of the arc (people should talk about disagreements instead of taking shots at one another). On a more practical level, if a Trump supporter who has the other three episodes sees this, they may not release them is they're being used to take shots at Trump.

In any case, I was lurking around LMW when they were found so I have them mirrored on MEGA if anyone (am_Unition; rd95) wants them. Hopefully someone gets 3-5 uploaded somewhere soon.


posted 2586 days ago