Today is Christmas Eve, and I have the story of the weirdest Christmas miracle I know. Our story is one about a very bizarre piece of lost media and the stranger still way that it was found. The media in question is the now infamous Sesame Street short known as Cracks. The year was 2013 and previously the short had been available privately under mysterious legal circumstances. Then on Christmas Eve, the owner of the Lost Media wiki, Dycate, got a surprising email.
An anonymous sender had sent him a video file with the complete short. And the lost media community rejoiced that the year spanning search for it had ended. To this day there's a lot of mystery regarding the short itself. For instance, nobody knows who sent Dycate that short. All that's really known is that it definitely wasn't anyone with the previous private access, because the copy Dycate received had different framing than the copy in private circulation. But for the sake of all of those who watched it as a kid and were left with their half memories of the surreal cartoon, I'm glad it is available to the public again.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Aside from the bonkers story of its rediscovery, my favorite thing about this short is how it demonstrates an effect in Lost Media that I call “Creepypastification”. When something for kids is lost, it’s common to speculate that it was just too scary and had to be locked away. This was the case with the movie Crybaby Lane, and the narrative got spread around for this one, too. Folks claimed that the short was just too spooky, so they took it off the air.
Why did they really get rid of it? Because once the War on Drugs started, you had to be more careful about throwing around the word “crack”. There were just too many double entendres.]
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