On the 25th day of last month I discovered - quite by accident - the identity of an old animated TV show that for me was clouded in mystery for many years, one that left me with memories I had yearned to understand.
A long time ago, I gained an incomplete knowledge about this obscure TV show as I saw some amount of moments on it, while being just a kid. Naturally, the starting life amnesia set in hard, and I never registered the name of this thing in all of my life until 2024.
Everything I Knew - Or Thought I Knew - About The Show Back Then
Let's refer to the show as Rabbit T. In Rabbit T, the one character I remembered was an anthro rabbit character - with no known name - in white fur who wore a cyan or teal outfit that I basically remember but can't find in an image search and, if I can be trusted to redraw it properly, appeared to me to look kind of like this:
It seemed a little appealing in my memory. The outfit's not "cool", but it did have a strong aesthetic. One that I know I have absolutely failed at drawing the way it deserves to be shown. Naturally I could have also told somebody with questions that there were other protagonists alongside this rabbit. But I didn't remember their species or seeing how they looked. The memories were extremely incomplete. After that, you probably understand why finding this show again took so long.
I also knew that the setting was some kind of old time Victorian England - as best as I can guess with my very limited knowledge of what "Victorian" really was, and that there were villains - though like with every other character I didn't have any recollection of what their appearances were like - and something to do with a chase with the villains and the protagonists running away from them, and the rabbit at some point having a joyous face, maybe because he was so full on cleverly winning a victory over his pursuers when he got away, or because that was just the sort of person he was.
So why did I want to find the show so much again? Well, I think just about any average memory of unknown origin makes the brain that owns it demand an answer. That's one reason. However, there was one final thing I retained from back then - the freaking end credits screen.
It's common for me to feel swayed by pretty music that uses bells, and this is what the ending theme for Rabbit T allegedly had. It also had a still shot of the Victorian England city from above while the credit text cycled through. Text just disappeared and was replaced by other text that appeared. In other words, basically no moving parts.
I think I somehow ruined this for myself, but the problem with the credits is that at this point I don't know if a steam train in the still frame existed in my original memories or not. So let's throw a quantum steam train in there, and sort of pretend like maybe I was swayed by the train while watching the end credits as well but also maybe I didn't know it was there at all.
It's not like I actually liked Rabbit T in any meaningful way. Remember, I could barely recall anything about it. If I found the show again, I probably would still not bother to watch a full episode. But aside from the element of wanting to solve a long-held confounding mystery, it for some reason also had a kind of magical allure to me.
Probably because of the bells.
The First Serious Attempt To Find Rabbit T
In the 11th of June in 2021, I guess I thought about the show pretty hard again, because I reached a point where I really, really tried to find the identity of Rabbit T. Sometimes I'll know about something from my past that's really mysterious like this for a long time but then one day actually give it my attention for the first time since losing touch. Rabbit T came up at some point after several years of inactivity, as I said, where I somehow was not considering that I might actually want to try to find it. These don't always have to happen on the same day I actually go searching.
In that day of 2021 June I went searching all over the place online for everything I associated with the mysterious memory of Rabbit T - which wasn't a large collection - and trawled Wikipedia through a page that was called "List of fictional rabbits and hares". Which, I remind you, did not work. It wasn't 2024 yet. And that page does include anthropomorphic ones.
Strained and defeated, I finished the entire Wikipedia list and several web searches like "anthro rabbit in a green hat" and so forth without anything remotely like what I wanted appearing, and gave up. It must have been very obscure. The show was not going to be found.
An Amazing Encounter of Straight-Up Chance
In some places, you can find "complete" lists of television series cartoons that were made. One day, I was having a rough time that called for a specific kind of cartoon series to watch that I wasn't going to find on the main beaten path where all the usual shows I know about and watch are seen.
I scrolled down one of my frequent alphabetical list haunts, and the recognizable for reasons of no relation to anything name "Saban's" caught my eye.
This would be the day, August the 25th in 2024, that I discovered that the name of the cartoon I had unanswered questions about was called Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist. But I didn't know this, or that it was the show containing who this post calls Rabbit T, yet. In fact there was a moment where I didn't even suspect it. I clicked the thing out of curiosity.
What I Know About the Show Now
Somehow, Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist felt a little disappointing, now that I understood what it was for a tangible, real thing at last. I wasn't so absorbed as in another time I may have imagined. I was still excited in the minutes that followed of checking random points in episodes - but not any wiki pages according to my browser, for some reason - but not very absorbed. I didn't take the time to watch a full episode either. It's not really for me. I am just kind of glad I have some critical information now.
The disappointing value of seeing the show in 2024 probably comes from a lack of powerful, exact recognition of things in the show. I couldn't say "seeing this scene took me way back" or "Oh, I remember this guy!" I think a lot of good-feeling memory exploration when you find something from your life during a period a long time ago is good because you see what's in it and you are amazed with how suddenly, overpoweringly familiar it is. I would have liked to have that feeling with Rabbit T but this year I simply did not. Because it was just too different, and I had to accept that the show my brain pictured just did not actually precisely exist.
The first revision I had to concede was the design of the white rabbit. We have a name now, he is called Artful Dodger. He's the one on the left. Yeah I don't recognize the other two upright animal characters even while seeing them now, too. As you can see he actually wears a completely different outfit than the one I drew for this post up there - making the real design wrong in my memory's terms. It's sort of a "shouldn't gripe" change when I think about it, as that suit from my discredited memory wasn't exactly at the cutting edge of looking-super-cool fashion. Not compared to a dark suit and buttoned shirt for his upper body and a top hat, either. He was very different though. His face was coloured wrong, with most of his fur being grey, and it's a bit insulting that the real Artful Dodger cartoon rabbit anthro looks fucking nothing like the Rabbit T namesake of my memories. The most important and only previously-seen character in this quest, unrecognizable.
That's what a lot of things about this show now that I was seeing the real thing are. Unrecognizable. Seeing that, the question might arise of "how am I so sure I found the right show?"
It's quite simple, really. I don't feel very drawn to that conclusion out of feeling - again, it didn't hit me with familiarity the same way memory jackpots usually do - but through logic it's impossible to deny. Because it would take some ridiculous coincidence, so freaking contrived, some serious screwing around for there to be a second show out there that's that similar to Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist and is a more exact match with what I remember. I just don't think our plane of existence would do that, even after some of the stupid things it's done before. There would have to be some ridiculous level of screwing around with unnecessary show production and fictional material management to mislead me that hard. A key word here could be "specific". I simply have no reason not to conclude that my memories have a far range of possibility for being inaccurate and that the reason it's different in 2024 is simply that. My past has to just be adorned with memories that are wrong. As a side note, I don't know how much sway missing episodes could have had in all of this.
There's also much more solid proof that I have the right show in the recognizable nature of the ending screen.
The ending music in the credits was quite a thing of recognition, but past the first run of bells, there wasn't much memory of the show from my childhood left to recognize. The second and only other revision that comes to mind after all this time is that the music in my brain - beautiful though it was - used more bells and had the wrong melody. I swoon over good use of music bells, and before recent weeks the vision of this ending screen and its music was such a feeling...
I know there's some ensemble of villainous characters, and humans are in the show, but it's still vague. Again, I do not care enough to actually watch an episode of the show to find out more. I'm simply glad I no longer have to wonder what went on in my life to create such an odd place.
As of the day of this writing, I know that the show actually has a large portion of lost media. Episodes 1-29 can be quite easily found, but the show apparently is supposed to have a total of 52 episodes. The information is so lost, probably all we have of the last 23 episodes anywhere is their titles. Entire boxes of episode descriptions, empty and collapsed into a line. We don't even know when the entire list of all episodes - even with the ones that aren't lost - appeared on people's cathode ray tubes. The "Air Date" column of the episode list on Wikipedia says TBA for all of them.
Also, did you know that the list of fictional rabbits and hares on Wikipedia from the 2021 part earlier still doesn't list Artful Dodger from Saban's Oliver Twist cartoon? Yet the list of episodes in the boxes of the SAOOT article containing some amount of not-lost data have episode plot summaries that are quite lengthy. Actually I think the fictional rabbits list may be quite under-detailed against what I expect the great swathe of fiction in the world to contain for rabbit characters.
Finally, an interesting point I have now gained in my knowledge of the show is when it apparently aired. Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist broadcasts went from February 1996 to February 1997. Even though I live in New Zealand and therefore at a young age likely got different shows than English-speakers of this planet's west half at different times, I was born in 1995. 1995, readers.
That's a revelation. When I gained my witnessing moment of this show, how fucking young was I? It's like no wonder my memories of the show got this broken up.
If I Could Win Like This Again
Those of you who have been with this blog since 2022, when it basically began, will remember another mystery that I wanted dearly to solve, as described in the first Figment Area post. The huge destructive red and black being, Wawoo.
I hope I didn't let such readers down by showing them a title that says "A Lost Memory Uncovered" and get their hopes up for a spooky Wakawuwu revelation, only to ease them into a story about a mystery that - compared to the sheer cool creepiness of Wawoo's origin - is practically worthless. Even though Wawoo and the cartoon from this post were both seen in "real cartoons" that contain lost media, I still don't know who Wawoo is, and I don't think I ever will.
But there are other mysteries of old unexplained memories in my life. I'd like to have this kind of victory again. To find the explanation for more of the weird unknown occurrences of my early life. Similar searches and successful answers have happened before, but the successes that come to mind right now have not much wow-factor compared to many of my expectations.
If I could win like this again, could one of the victories feel as incredible as I always imagined? Will all of them die down as a flame in damp branches would like Rabbit T, or will I one day truly have a powerful and lasting moment of amazing recollection? Are there any future answers to my remaining mysteries at all?
I'd like to see the cartoon that created the Wakawuwu mystery again some day, but a good place to start would be the aisles of shelves decorated with pretty dark and light canisters of carbonated liquid flowing upward around central towers of crystal.