Arthur: Lost Episode

Hey man, did you ever hear about that secret Arthur episode where he smokes weed and kills his parents? I was hiding from the police for years before I found out they were never even looking for me. See, I know things about “PBS” that the average “Steak and football loving American covered in dorito crumbs” would not know about “Arthur.” The show was about an Aardvark, and based on known availability heuristics, he wore clothes and glasses, went to school, learned life lessons and very rarely ate ants.

And that’s exactly the problem.

See, when you’re a kid, life’s a lot simpler. You just think money’s used to buy hot Frisbees and 8track players, the stylish fashions of the times, whatever they may be now. You don’t know about death, disease, mortality, what it is to love, what it is to die, you’re just a kid. Your whole life revolves around “tying your shoes” and “playing the Nintendo.” Sad to say, this episode of Arthur was nothing like whatever actually aired. See, I worked for the Public Broadcasting service from 1994 to 1996. I hosted the telethons, promoting fancy umbrellas, high quality tote bags and other quality products that only viewers like you purchase to enable “the Arthur.” But the animators went nuts in the later years, and PBS Kids outright REFUSED to acknowledge their ideas and suggestions for later seasons of “Arthur.”

PBS’ test screenings to kid audiences resulted in a whole new set of weird and experimental designs for “Arthur 2.0” the dubbed program title, which never aired. The show was created by “Cookie Jar Group” renamed from the more evil named group “Sinnar”, named as such perhaps because they were a cabal of satanistic lunatics that were inserting subliminal mind programming messages in “the Arthur.” I mean, the show taught “lessons” about exploring, building friendships and others. But. What a lot of people don’t know is that many of the lessons were often changed in post-production, including episodes where Arthur leans such gems as “it’s only wrong if you get caught” and “there is a certain level of morality to telling lies if they obscure a more hideous truth.”

But the most astonishingly vile of these “cancelled eps” was the one where Arthur smokes marijuana and learns that all of space and time are an illusion, the universe is just slow, vibrating consciousness, and human beings are basically fluid sacks designed to carry genetic material for the “maternal hivequeen” a budding, dormant virus that exists within all of us, waiting to one day awaken and overtake, usurp the throne if you will, and control all of the human populous as the singular controller of the operant radioactive bio machine head. I bit into a piece of spearmint gum and put the tape on. It was 60 degrees in the apartment, and the plastic was rubbery.

The episode started as normal. The theme song began to play: “And I said hey! What a wonderful time of day! To learn and laugh and play! And get along with each other!” The only difference was that Arthur looked slightly angry, and he was moving in more jerky motions with cartoon stylized eybrows that held a sinister smile. The episode became weird immediately, because his best rabbit friend Buster came in holding a blunt. I’ll put it blunt: he offered Arthur a blunt. “You know our parents are lying to us!” Buster said. “Check this out.” Buster lifted his leg, revealing that it had been cut off and the bloody wound had been cauterized. “That’s my lucky rabbit’s foot!” He laughed. I felt like puking.

This wasn’t meant for kids, no way. This was a KIDS SHOW. “What happened to your foot!?” Arthur said. “I cut it off.” Buster replied. “Now they’ll have bad luck for seven years.” “Who?” Arthur said. I fuck you not, he looked directly into the camera, smiled, and said “the animators.” He picked up 6,561 m&ms off the floor. This episode was titled “Arthur Learns his lesson about the animators” so it made sense, I guess. Or so I thought. Buster hands Arthur a blunt and lights it. Kind of disturbing considering Arthur is eight years old. “I can’t smoke that!” Arthur said, astonished. “It will impair my cognitive development.” Buster smiled… and his face started to melt. “But it will repair your oblongative telekenetive!” “We both hear voices.” A voice whispered, and both Arthur and buster baxter turned pale as a ghost. “Did you hear that?” Arthur grabbed the blunt and took a heavy, heavy dab. “Whoa.” Arthur said. The screen became extremely fuzzy. “What a wonderful time of day.” Arthur looked at his watch and it said “4:20” a common time that marijuana smokers love, because if you divide four into 2 you get two, and marijuana makes you feel more connected to the number 42.

Arthur is seen rooting through old family photos of his relatives. “What’s that?” Arthur says. He points to a picture of a realistically drawn aardvark, with a thick, long snout used to scout for ants in the equatorial south American plateaus. “That’s grandpa!” “And he has a snouth.” Buster says, taking a long, heavy toke of “the weed.” “What happened to my snout?!” Arthur grabbed at his face, revealing smooth, snot-filled nostril-holes. Buster looked high as hell, and his disheveled eyelids began to droop. “That’s circumsizion, bro. Your parents CIRCUmSIZED YOU!” Arthur’s eyes grew wide as saucers, and he smoked another blunt. He ate the blunt, and chewed the blunt, not realizing you’re not supposed to chew weed because it causes cancer. “My- whole life is a lie.” Arthur said. “I went to school, I went to church, I played the tag team foot ball, I learned about sharing and caring and playing, but…CLOTHING!” Arthur screamed. “CORRECTIVE EYEGLASSES!” He screamed some more. “THAT’S MY FUCKING FACE. MY FUCKING. FACE!” Arthur got really angry. Buster smiled. He turned over his palm, revealing horrific sores and cuts. He lifted his face, revealing a demonic face underneath. “I’m not Buster.” The luciferian effigy smiled and smiled away.

“You’re gonna have to kill them, Arthur.” Buster’s face lay on the floor like an old Halloween mask, but it was talking, despite the fact that his eyes were hollow. “Don’t listen to the devil man. I’m your friend. Your family is doing this. They took you from your natural habitat. They mutilated your face. They deprived you of ants and ant products. Kill them. Kill them all. As Mahatma Gandhi said: An eye for an eye gives everyone a slice of pie. Have you been sold something recently? Capitalism is a lie.” “Fuck capitalists!” Arthur said. What was this communist propaganda?

What Arthur said next truly confused me something terrible, and he was getting increasingly disheveled as the room appeared to be getting hotter. The demonic effigy had turned the thermostat in arthur’s house up to 126 degrees and was chewing on the bone marrow of Buster, who was now dead and rotting, with rodents feasting on his rabbit flesh.

“He picked up a book off the bookshelf and threw it at DW. She fell backwards with an apparent concussion and swallowed her tongue.”

She’s a four year old. She’s a fucking. Four year old. Arthur’s eyebrows had become angry now. “Where’s my snout!” Arthur said. He ripped off his glasses and he couldn’t see anything. He stumbled down the stairs and knocked into a book shelf.

He lifted his face up, feeling his face for a snout. “You’re a boy Arthur.” A voice whispered. “Go play with the kids outside.” The voice whispered. Arthur noticed a SOUND BOX IN THE CORNER THAT HE HAD NEVER SEEN BEFORE. He put his ear to it. “Sharing is caring. It’s fun to learn. A-B-C-D-E-F-G, government agents are watching you in a tree.” Arthur picked up the sound box and smashed it. He was really mad now, veins were popping out of his neck, he was visibly angry, fuming with rage. He looked in the tree and saw two men dressed in aardvark suits staring. “Go play baseball with your friends.” The tree whispered.

Arthur went to his father’s liquor cabinet and smashed it open with his fists. Smashing, and smashing, and smashing away. “This is all because of capitalism! The capitalist porks with their pork money and pork lies!” Arthur said. He fell on the floor, and kept smashing. “Currency is the controlling agent in the biomachine head, they want us fighting over the scraps as we feed the virus! But viruses aren’t alive!” Arthur said, turning to the side, where a real visible virus had pronged itself to the side of his bleeding neck. The capsid shook. The base plate and tail fibers furrowed, smiling.

The other characters walked in. They walked over DW’s corpse and the words “dope ass weed” flashed on screen, revealing what the animators had in mind all along. Francine Frensky began to open up a tea set and poured fake tea for her dolls in some fold out flip out chairs. Alan “Brain” Powers was celebrating kwanzaa. Muffy Crosswire began baking easy dough playset brownies. “Let’s learn to share!” They all began to say. Arthur looked really disheveled. “Listen to me you fucking assholes I have had enough of your shit. “

Ants began to crawl across the floor, drawn in high artistic vigor as Arthur became increasingly concerned and angry. The temperature was so hot that many of the characters were visibly sweating and burning to death as the door upstairs had mysteriously been nailed shut during the tea play set rodeo.

“George!” He started to cry. “George, you’re a moose!” Indeed, George began to cry as well. “They glued off your hooves and trimmed your antlers, put you in an orange button-down but you used to roam the fields and see the great midwestern aplines, mounties did this to you.” Arthur took out the family album and turned the page, revealing several highly scientific drawings of the other characters. “Let’s all share and play!” Binky stated firmly. “You want to share, right?” He picked up a tea set knife and lunged toward Arthur aardvark. Arthur started to cry.

The ants began to eat and consume the cast members, many of them screaming as they were chewed to skeletal remains. Arthur grabbed Binky and stabbed him with the plastic knife. He fell forward, screaming as his blood and entrails became saturated with heat and ant pheromones.

“My- my snout!” Arthur cried, with delate. It was an elephant snout. “I finally found it.” Arthur smiled and attached the elephant snout, sewing it on without anaesthesia, bleeding and screaming as he inserted the needles into his fucking face.

He took another toke of weed. He used his snout to inhale a big old snoutful of water, but instead blood shot out of the bleeding nostrils painfully. He was hemorrhaging, and as the blood plasma and H20 mixed together, he just laughed, he was complete.

The remaining bones were shaped into a house and Arthur sat there with his elephant snout, smiling away on his bone swing made from the dead remains of the other cast members, smiling and swinging as the heat slowly suffocated him to death.

That was when real, grown men in medvac suits came in. They sprayed the area down with white, fumagatory anti-persperant.  “On your six.” A SWAT team came in and cleared the area, shooting Arthur in the head twice to ensure he was dead. “What are we gonna tell the parents?” The man in the medvac suit said. “What?” The other one said. “I said what are we going to tell the animators parents?” The man in the medsuit laughed a hearty laugh. “Sharing is caring!” He laughed. He sweeped the bones and bloody remains of binky barnes into an anti-contaminent garbage bag full of syringes. One of the men in the medvac suit began to dance, laughing. “And I said Hey! What a wonderful time of day! Hahaha.” He laughed, lifting the melted remains of muffy crosswire’s bleeding corpse into the air, scanning it with ultraviolet light for evidence of parasites.

Indeed. Arthur never left town. There was no outside world, and Arthur the show? The whole thing was a lie. An experiment. A liesperiment. No school, no work, no jobs. Every incident of mobs. Halloween is black as night it seems. Little killers, for over fifty years, from dictators to followers with spears. No national relief, no government belief. No one asks them how they got that way. And me? I think they were right. But what was more curious, scarier, and confused me years later, and actually made me frightened, was not the fact that the show didn’t air. It did air, but most who saw it air, saw nothing wrong. What shocked and horrified me was normal for most people, and most parents watched it with their kids. They watched it and they smiled, and smiled, and smiled away. I bet deep down they knew something was wrong, but they didn’t say a word. The only thing worse than a conspiracy is something hidden in plain sight.