I think I’ve made something up.
I think I’ve made up a video where Elmo and Zach Braff get into an argument, and Zach swears in front of Elmo.
Let me back up a little. Way back in January of 2009, the cast of Sesame Street appeared on the series Scrubs in an episode called ‘My ABC’s’. It’s pretty fun. Grover gets high fived by The Todd so hard he flies into another room. Oscar is the new chief of medicine and stares at JD. Elmo hits on Denise. You know, classic Sesame Street stuff.
After the initial announcement, I was super excited about it. Scrubs is one of my favorite comedies, and I’m partial to a bit of Sesame Street here and there, too. So I devoured everything I could find online about it. I saw the set photos, I read interviews with the cast and crew. And I watched a video.
At least, I think I watched a video. I’m like 99% sure I watched a video. The video was of Zach Braff and Elmo, standing in front of a window, talking about Scrubs’ move to ABC. And somewhere along the line, Zach swears, and Elmo reacts strongly. I think he mentioned a swear jar, or something about not hearing that word on Sesame Street. I remember watching it and laughing, thinking ‘Oh boy, someone at Sesame Street is gonna want this thing removed from the internet’.
The thing is, now I can’t find that video anywhere. I think someone at Sesame Street wanted that thing removed from the internet! Over the past 5 years, I’ve searched all over YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, even weird Russian video sites, trying to find some sort of evidence that what I saw actually happened. There definitely was a video – Muppet Wiki sources it on the Scrubs page, and that website (now defunct but found thanks to the Wayback Machine web archive) has an article on it. But the video is gone, and there’s no reference to any sort of swearing.
So – did Zach Braff swear at Elmo? I don’t know! And finding my white whale is driving me nuts!
It happens occassionally on the Muppets subReddit, like the example above. Someone will ask if anyone remembers something they 100% sure when they were younger, only to find that no-one remembers it, because it likely didn’t happen. Recently one user referenced a Muppet special they saw where The Muppets found a large monster in a warehouse, and had to hide it there while finding it’s home. Remember that? No, me neither, because it didn’t happen. It could be another movie, maybe? But it certainly didn’t star Kermit the Frog. Another person asked why The Muppet Movie deleted the scene where Animal eats the Insta-Grow pills in the Western town. That scene has never existed, but this guy remembers watching it when he was 8 in the cinemas. It’s a classic Mandela Effect. He swears he remembers something that others do not. And that’s how I feel about this video – I remember Zach Braff swearing at Elmo, but I’ve asked other people and they have zero recollection of that ever happening.
Am I insane? Am I in the Matrix, and this is a glitch? Did someone at Sesame just do a real good job of making sure that video never sees the light of day again? I don’t know. It’s probably all three.
Click here to not discover a monster warehouse on the ToughPigs forum!
By Jarrod Fairclough – Jarrod@ToughPigs.com
