Cracks aka "Crack Master" (found animated "Sesame Street" short; 1975)

File:Crack master opening.jpg

The short's opening shot.

Status: Found

Date found: 24 Dec 2013

Found by: Anonymous, dycaite

Airing for the first time on Thursday, 31 December, 1975, was an animated Sesame Street short titled Cracks. The short (which aired in the US a total of only 11 times over the course of just 3 and a half years, premiering during episode 818) gained notoriety in the late 2000s due to it's unavailability, after recounts of the short started emerging online, with several claiming that the short had frightened them as children.

The 1 and a half minute short tells the story of a young girl making friends with imaginary crack creatures (ie. a camel, a hen and a monkey), formed by cracks in her bedroom wall, before encountering the unnerving 'Crack Master', a large, distorted face that proceeds to bellow at the group, moments before crumbling to the ground; the short is narrated (partially in song form) by an, as of now, unidentified woman. An official description of the short (as found in documentation sourced from the CTW archives at the University of Maryland, College Park) reads "A girl lying in bed imagines she sees a crack in the wall (DIVERGENT THINKING) (TIME 1:29)".

In late 2008, a man by the name of Jon Armond came into possession of a copy of the short after conducting a search effort for it, though he was ultimately contractually forbidden for sharing it with anyone and was, under no circumstances, to reproduce the short. While Armond offered people the chance to view the short in his own home (and, on a select few occasions, actually travelled to an audience to show it to them), he upheld his contractual obligations and refrained from putting the short online (despite the huge demand for it), much to the dismay of many. On top of his aforementioned agreement to keep the animation under wraps, Armond was also forbidden from even publicising the short's title or the names of those involved in its creation; the identities of the short's creators are still, to this day, completely unknown (for a time, animator Cosmo Anzilotti was rumoured to have had a hand in it's creation, though he would later go on to deny any involvement). Armond did, however, record a 9 minute 'audio documentary' on the short in 2009, including a word-for-word reading of the script, which he shared with a handful of users that he'd previously been in contact with (with the recording eventually finding its way to YouTube).

Notably, in the years following Armond's successful acquisition of the clip, several Latin American users came forward with claims that the short had aired in the 1990s and 2000s during the Spanish dub of Sesame Street, Plaza Sesamo, although this have never been definitively proven.

After conducting an extensive search effort of his own (involving letters and emails to both Sesame Workshop and the aforementioned CTW archives, plus petitions and the like), Lost Media Wiki founder dycaite was miraculously sent a copy of the once-elusive short by a generous anonymous source, in late December of 2013; it was uploaded to YouTube shortly thereafter and his since garnered over 100,000 views. It has been confirmed by blogger Jennifer Bourne, aka Namowal (who was privately screened Armond's copy) that the version sent to dycaite is not the same one that Armond had been provided with, as the latter was taken from an actual episode of Sesame Street and began with a brief glimpse of a previous skit, whereas the former appears to have been sourced from an archive of some kind, instead beginning with a title card (complete with production code and run time).

External links

• Jon Armond's 2009 audio documentary on the short, via YouTube; 29 Aug 2013. Last retrieved 04 Mar 2015.
• MEGA mirror of the anonymous source's original file. Last retrieved 09 Feb 2016.