Barney the Dinosaur, Clockman, and Childhood Nostalgia; Searching for the Media That Only Exist in Our Memories
When I was little, I lived fairly close to a Jumbo Video. It was basically the Canadian version of Blockbuster — you could rent DVDs, and I’ve got many fond memories of eating the free, low-quality popcorn they served. I rented movies a lot there when I was a kid, watching hours of whatever caught my eight-year-old eye. I can vividly remember the comedies and animated films I sat through with extreme fascination. What interests me, however, isn’t the films I remembered — it’s the films I forgot.
Every once in a while I’d see or hear something that brought back deep, tucked-away memories of movies I watched as a kid. I could only remember very unimportant, yet extremely vivid snippets of these films; “it was a movie where Adam Sandler got his tongue stung by a bee,” or “there were a bunch of kids in a house floating through space.” I needed to know what they were. I did extensive Googling and asked my friends and family, “Hey, do you remember this?” Sometimes these resulted in me finding what I was looking for. Other times, they remained a mystery.
For years, I had clear, vivid memories of movies that only I was sure existed. Luckily for me, I soon discovered that I was not alone in this phenomenon. There is a large community of dedicated people searching for these pieces of “lost media.” Lost media is basically what the name implies — it’s any old movie, piece of music, or book that has seemingly gone missing out of thin air. Sort of like the burning of The Library of Alexandria, except instead of crucial, historical documents, it’s just dumb stuff we watched when we were kids.
How Does Media Go “Missing?”
Media can go missing for a lot of different reasons. One factor is how well it was preserved. It’s a saddening fact that almost seventy-five percent of all silent films made in America are lost forever — never to be watched again. This mainly stems from the conditions these films were held in. Once sound rolled in, most studios just threw their silent film reels into storage. Universal-International even destroyed all of its remaining silent films in the late ’40s.
Sometimes, the piece could have been censored or outright destroyed over it potentially being controversial. However, when it comes to childhood movies we can’t remember, the most likely cause is that it just faded into obscurity. A lot of these childhood films sitting at the edge of our memory were low-budget failed productions or cheap sequel cash-ins. The movies I mentioned above with Adam Sandler and the floating house? These are real movies — “Bedtime Stories” from 2008, and “Zathura: A Space Adventure,” the sequel to the 1995 classic Jumanji. They both fall into this category and are almost universally forgotten, except for the few children who remember watching them once at a family movie night.
The Story Behind “Clockman”
One of my favourite examples of lost media is “Clockman,” or “O Parádivé Sally” as it was eventually revealed to be titled. The search for Clockman began in 2012, when a user by the name “Commander Santa,” (fantastic username in my opinion) made a post on an obscure internet forum in search of an animated short he watched as a child, home sick with the flu. He gave a vague, yet chilling description and a crude drawing of what he claimed to be an animated short that haunted him for almost 30 years, at that point. Miraculously, despite the severe lack of information, someone else remembered this exact same short and gave a similar description of what they remembered. From there, the search for Clockman was born.
It took five years to find Clockman. People all across the internet down dug through the over two hundred episodes of Nickelodeon’s “PinwheeI,” which was apparently where the short aired — the show never got any kind of official media release, so hunting down these old DVDs was incredibly challenging. What made the search even more difficult was the nearly 300 episodes they had to search through. Eventually, it was found on — of all places — YouTube, where it had been hiding under our noses the whole time.
Clockman is a fascinating study for a lot of different reasons. For one, it shows how much time distorts our memories. The Clockman that Commander Santa first described was about a terrifying man who kidnapped children in the middle of the night — but in O Parádivé Sally, he’s just a funky little wizard who teaches kids not to lie. Another concept that intrigues me about Clockman is the idea of shared, or hidden childhood memories.
The “Apples and Bananas” Phenomenon
There’s a fairly obscure nursery rhyme originating in North America around the 1980s called “Apples and Bananas.” You might’ve heard it before; it goes something like “I like to eat, eat, eat, apples and bananas…” and continues on, changing the vowel sounds. What does this have to do with the idea of collective childhood memories? I’m so glad you asked — it actually has a lot to do with it. When I was in sixth grade I randomly got that nursery rhyme stuck in my head, and I asked one of my classmates, “do you remember this song?” Not only did they remember it, but I soon found out almost everyone in the class knew this song — but not a single person could say its origin, or where the song came from.
It took me probably two years to figure out where everyone in my sixth-grade class might have heard this nursery rhyme. The Wiggles recorded a version of the song on their 2014 album, but it never aired on television. Since I wasn’t really listening to The Wiggles in 2014, I ruled it out. What I think is the most likely source of this earworm was from an episode of Barney and Friends that aired in the early 1990s — I watched a lot of Barney as a kid, so it’s highly likely that I heard the song there at least once.
I am obsessed with the idea that everyone in that class watched the same episode of Barney and Friends and had the exact same memories of the song I did. Not only is it incredibly interesting, but also strangely comforting. We all are connected by these childhood memories, no matter our differences in our gender, race, or upbringing. I’m not saying Barney will bring world peace, but I love the idea we all have these experiences in common, and we don’t even know it. The song was always there — buried deep in my classmates’ consciousness, just waiting to be remembered. If I hadn’t randomly got the song stuck in my head and decided to ask one of my friends about it, no one in that class might have ever thought about that song in their lives. We would never have bonded in that way.
These obscure songs, television shows, or children’s films that we remember watching might never be found, but I would claim they’re never really lost. Sometimes, the only thing needed to keep a piece of media alive is memory — all of our memories. Nothing is ever really gone if it exists in our collective consciousness, and we are never really alone because of that.
