The Electric Piper (found Nickelodeon animated TV film; 2003)

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Status: Found

Date found: 09 Aug '16

Found by: Anonymous & StewartIsMe

The Electric Piper is an animated TV adaptation of The Pied Piper that aired on Nickelodeon in February 2003.^[1] The film was directed by Raymie Muzquiz and written by Bill Burnett, the creator of ChalkZone. Voice cast included Rodney Dangerfield, Rob Schneider, and George Segal.

Plot

Set in the late 1960s, the story centers around a guitarist named Sly (modelled after Jimi Hendrix) who uses his music to get rid of rats who are invading a suburban town called Hamlin. When the mayor doesn't give Sly his reward, a Harley Davidson motorcycle, he takes his revenge by convincing the children of the town to run away and join him on a mountain.

Availability

The movie hasn't been seen since its few initial airings on Nickelodeon, and it was never released on VHS or DVD. Only three clips of it have resurfaced onto the internet, one of which has since been taken down.

Legal status

The film's director Raymie Muzquiz confirmed he has a copy of the film but that he isn't allowed to release it. He hopes to one day find a way to release it online but has confirmed that Nickelodeon's legal department decided that it did not have enough documentation on the music rights to re-release the movie safely. He also added that before the original movie airing, they had to re-record some of the music because Nickelodeon's legal department at the time thought the movie's songs were too close to the other songs that they were referencing.

Finding

On August 9th, 2016, an Anonymous user contacted someone who had worked on the movie and was given a VHS copy of the film to release. Later that month on August 20th, 2016, Lost Media Wiki user "StewartIsMe" got ahold of a different copy of The Electric Piper sourced from an interlaced DVD master. This copy was then uploaded to Myspleen and then later uploaded to YouTube after the film was deinterlaced. Demos of selective songs from the movie, composed by Bill Burnett and Guy Moon, were discovered and released on December 27th, 2019.