The Crack Master watches you as you sleep…
The premise of the 1975 Sesame Street cartoon “Crack Master” AKA “Cracks” sounds like a bad trip. A girl lays on her bed staring at cracks on the wall. She imagines them into a menagerie of playmates—a camel, a monkey and a hen become her new friends. But wait—there is another animated crack—The Crack Master—who bears only ill will towards our protagonist and her comrades! The Crack Master eventually collapses from his own hatred, but it’s hardly a resolution that inspires optimism. A girl lives in a dilapidated building full of animated, sometimes malevolent indicators of rot, and her only hope for defeating these monsters is the further deterioration of her home? What the hell?
The short developed an infamous reputation, due to both the impression it made on a myriad of distressed young viewers, and the early withdrawal of the cartoon—it was only shown eleven times before disappearing from public view for years, breeding rumors that it had been banned. In 2009, a dedicated citizen named Jon Armond managed to get a copy from a very anonymous source under two conditions: the source’s identity must be kept an absolute secret, and the cartoon must never be distributed. In a (pretty funny) audio narrative Armond says the source claimed the cartoon wasn’t banned for its ominousness, merely retired. Sesame Street has a bit of a reputation for litigiousness when it comes to copyright, but they’re a product of public television, so why all the cloak and dagger? It’s possible the show is still a little embarrassed by the short’s inadvertently dark tone.
Now of course, the infamous is available on YouTube, so watch—if you dare.
Via Watch This Thing