I guess a lot of people luckier than me have been getting a video recommendation on YouTube about a quest to find a lost creepy cartoon from some guy’s childhood. I say “luckier than me” because my recommended videos have been flooded with a character named Emilia Fart ever since I clicked on one of her videos, and I don’t know how much Emilia Fart I’m supposed to consume but apparently it’s a lot more than I’m able to.
Back to this video that’s been recommended to the lucky people. Maybe they’re not so lucky either, because the video that was recommended to them is 23 excruciating minutes long. Maybe I found it excruciating because there is so much hyperbole in the description of the search for this lost cartoon. A fruitless search for the former owners of a foreign cartoon distributor from the ’80s is embellished with “it was as if they vanished,” and so on. A chapter (yes, this thing has chapters) is entitled “False Leads.” Way too much time is spent on explaining the plots of other cartoons and fairy tales that people on the search are conflating with the cartoon in question. And a great deal of this search seems to have been made on 4chan, where everybody is stamping their childhood fever dreams (literally; “I REMEMBER THIS FROM TV WHEN I WAS HOME WITH THE FLU”) as irrefutable fact. I can’t blame anyone for wanting to have a good old fashioned Freak Ourselves Out Klub meeting, but all of this is presented so breathlessly that I couldn’t help rolling my eyes.
Of course, maybe I found it excruciating because I watched the cartoon in question before the “in search of” video, and it’s just not creepy. I know that “creepy” is awfully subjective (I find Sesame Street’s classic opera singing orange somewhat disturbing, if fascinating), but come on. Maybe I’m annoyed because the “in search of” video never addresses the fact that all of the young men describing this cartoon remember the main character as a boy instead of a girl, or maybe I’m annoyed because there is an overproud air of “look what great researchers we are” to this thing that really should not have taken five years to resolve. I don’t know. Have your fun, I guess. I’m just a cranky old person who gets scared by citrus fruits singing Carmen.
If you find “The Search For Clockman” pop up in your recommended videos, allow me to recommend that you skip it and just watch the actual cartoon “About Dressy Sally” instead. Here it is: