10 TV Show Episodes You Can No Longer Watch
These TV episodes have either been lost, buried, or binned off forever...
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00 From iconic last-ever performances, to deeply uncomfortable sequences that are likely better
00:05 left untouched, these are just a few of the TV moments that are no longer officially available
00:10 to watch anymore. The always watchable Gareth here though from WhatCulture.com, and here are
00:15 10 TV show episodes you can no longer watch. Children's cartoons have a funny old habit of
00:22 unleashing some rather jarring material into the world from time to time, and that was never more
00:27 evident than during a season 2 episode of Cartoon Network's Cow and Chicken by the name of Buffalo
00:32 Girls. Containing a great many insensitive jokes at the expense of lesbians throughout,
00:37 the overall presentation of the titular cartoon ladies on show as dirty and excessively gross
00:42 inevitably led to the show receiving a decent amount of backlash upon its initial airing in
00:46 February 1998. Sure enough, this would mark the first and last time the controversial episode
00:51 would ever air on TV, with the orthodontic police entry replacing it in subsequent time slots,
00:56 and on streaming services going forward. When a show comes equipped with painfully
01:00 unfunny visuals such as said Buffalo Girls eating carpets and enjoying their favourite
01:04 pastime of softball, it's probably for the best that it never sees the light of day ever again.
01:09 Still sitting in the hearts of many as the greatest band ever to warble a tune,
01:16 it often feels as though just about every trailblazing moment of the Beatles' groundbreaking
01:20 career has been captured and brought to a screen at some point or another over the years. Yet one
01:25 specific moment of Beatlemania that still hasn't ever been re-released in its entirety actually
01:30 just so happens to be the iconic band's last ever TV performance as a unit from way back in 1966.
01:36 With the BBC unfortunately not keeping tapes around that time, the Top of the Pops performance
01:41 of paperback writer from the Four Rock Stars was thought to have been completely lost forever up
01:46 until a few years back. Then, on the back of a staggering 11 seconds of personally recorded
01:51 footage of the foursome miming along in silence was dug up by a collector in Mexico, a further
01:56 92 seconds of them doing their thing was sent to the television archive organisation Kaleidoscope
02:01 by music enthusiast David Chandler. You still can't watch the entire performance from start
02:06 to finish in its original quality mind, but these fans are simply refusing to let it be.
02:10 8. Rude Removal - Dexter's Laboratory
02:13 Returning to Cartoon Network's late 90s penchant for producing content that was always destined
02:18 to piss off some parents, Dexter's Laboratory's Rude Removal very nearly made its presence
02:23 briefly known on the channel back in 1997. With the planned season 2 segment containing shots of
02:28 Dexter and Sister Dee Dee's rude clones going on a mad one after the former invents a rude
02:33 removal machine, the sight of the two characters swearing like troopers despite said curses being
02:38 bleeped out was enough to convince those running the channel to keep it from airing on TV.
02:42 However, the episode would ultimately find new life on the animation festival circuit for a time,
02:47 and this would eventually lead to Adult Swim getting their paws on the profanity-packed entity
02:51 later down the line. Then, after being uploaded to their official site in a censored capacity in
02:56 January 2013, the episode was made private and taken down shortly after. Though unofficially
03:01 re-uploaded and entirely uncensored versions of the chaotic ep may or may not have managed to
03:06 wiggle onto YouTube in the end. 7. Flying Jupes Tailspin
03:10 You've likely spotted a theme by now of those responsible for bringing the next generation
03:15 their daily dose of seemingly harmless entertainment in the 90s, actually being at the
03:19 centre of some of the most controversial content being put on television at the time. And it wasn't
03:24 just those folks plying their trade under the Cartoon Network banner who let loose some rather
03:28 unexpectedly shocking scenes during this period, with Disney's Tailspin series also producing a
03:34 rather startling sequence of TV too. Coming during the series' final episode, entitled Flying Jupes,
03:40 Baloo is tasked with delivering a package for the Thembrian High Marshal. Only said item,
03:45 unbeknownst to the bear, just so happened to be a bomb. No prizes for figuring out why this one
03:49 ended up on the scrap heap, then. With this sort of terrorist theme being very much present in the
03:53 content, it came as little surprise to see the episode banned soon enough, outside of it seemingly
03:58 being aired by mistake on Toon Disney at the end of the decade. And despite being released on DVD
04:02 in 2013, it's also still unavailable on the likes of iTunes and Disney+ to this day.
04:08 6. Smart and Smarterer – The Suite Life of Zack and Cody
04:11 Keeping with the House of Mouse now, and to those seemingly sweet little scamps occupying a swanky
04:16 room in the Tipton Hotel for a couple of years in the mid-noughties, only things weren't always as
04:21 innocent as they seemed when it pertained to Zack and Cody's suite life in Boston. In fact,
04:25 one episode under the title of Smart and Smarterer – yes, an apparent riff on that terrible Dumb
04:30 and Dumber sequel – was deemed so damn offensive that it actually wound up being pulled from the
04:34 air before long. With said showing depicting Zack faking having dyslexia in order to earn some extra
04:40 time to finish off his tests, on the back of picking up some bad grades, the way the show
04:44 frames the learning disability didn't go down too well with viewers. And it would only be shown on
04:48 the Disney Channel twice. And though the rest of the show is available on Disney+ at this current
04:53 moment, you will not find Smart and Smarterer on the streaming service. And Disney would likely
04:58 prefer you forget this Dylan and Cole Sprouse entry ever saw the light of day in the first place.
05:02 5. Hot Spells – Darkwing Duck Rounding off the Disney section of this collection
05:07 of episodes long since stripped away from their house of mouse, here's that time Darkwing Duck's
05:12 Halloween 1992 offering stirred up a little controversy upon initially tricking and not
05:17 treating some of its audience. As seen in the Hot Spells episode, the titular leading light
05:22 and goslings take a trip to Morgana's old magic school. Only to bump into a devilish character
05:27 by the name of Beaslepub, who most definitely rubbed parents up the wrong way out of the gates.
05:32 With the character very much playing the role of devil-like being in the ep and tempting the
05:36 protagonist to use forbidden spells throughout, the dark religious undertones within the showing
05:41 were deemed unsuitable for kids, to the point of pulling the episode off the air. In more modern
05:46 times, this Satan's Stuff series entry is still unavailable to purchase from the likes of iTunes
05:50 and Google TV or stream on Disney+. Despite Beaslepub still very much being present in
05:55 the first season's dead duck episode that is actually watchable via any of those services.
06:01 4. The Feast of Stephen – Doctor Who Returning to the anything but reliable BBC
06:06 archives, the British Broadcasting Corporation's frustrating policy of wiping footage to make way
06:12 for newer content back in the day ultimately led to a decent amount of old-school Doctor Who
06:16 episodes being lost forever. Among these many discarded tapings was none other than the show's
06:22 first ever Christmas special, something that would become a beloved hallmark of the series over the
06:26 years. Going by the name of The Feast of Stephen, this Christmas Day 1965 program acted as a comic
06:32 detour away from the epic tale being told coming into the episode, with the first Doctor William
06:38 Hartnell even taking a sonic screwdriver to the fourth wall in the final scene, and bizarrely
06:42 telling folks at home "incidentally, a happy Christmas to all of you at home". Outside of the
06:47 odd photograph being preserved of the showing in question, this surreal holiday treat appears to
06:52 have pretty much been erased forever. 3. Topless Showgirls – Dance Moms
06:56 It's not exactly difficult to see why this one has long since been buried by lifetime based on
07:00 the title of the episode alone, but that still didn't stop the network from running with said
07:05 "topless showgirls" moniker and the content in general when the time came to air the dodgy
07:10 season 2 episode back in 2012. And unsurprisingly, the sight of 8-13 year old girls being taught a
07:16 showgirls routine, whilst wearing body suits that made it look as though they were nude,
07:20 on the reality TV show did not go down well with the masses. On top of changing the episode name
07:24 to "costume drama" - and that is one way of putting it - the show was pulled from future
07:28 airings of Dance Moms on Lifetime, and ended up not being made available on various digital or
07:33 streaming service platforms later down the line. It's also worth noting that despite eventually
07:37 backtracking due to the backlash, Lifetime did actually boast about the episode's impressive
07:42 ratings of 2.7 million viewers not long after its initial airing, though they likely won't be in too
07:47 much of a rush to talk about the deeply uncomfortable episode nowadays.
07:50 Unstoppable - Law & Order SVU After initially being filmed and
07:55 scheduled for release back in October 12th, 2016, Law & Order SVU's episode by the name of
08:00 Unstoppable found itself being regularly delayed and pushed back until NBC eventually made the
08:05 call to leave the episode out of the series altogether in the end. Why was this very much
08:10 stoppable slice of police procedural never given the chance to make its presence known on our
08:14 screens, I hear you ask? Well, the episode centred around a figure who very much resembled a certain
08:18 future President of the United States, Donald Trump, and said character would eventually be
08:22 accused of rape during the episode as he attempted to run for President. With Trump himself being
08:27 accused of sexual harassment and assault around the time of the elections that would be going down
08:31 as the Unstoppable episode was set to air, this real-life development alongside his surprise
08:36 victory resulted in the entry being swiftly brushed under the carpet despite word of a tentative 2017
08:42 release. Despite all this, though, you can actually still find a promo for the scrapped
08:45 episode on YouTube, so there's that. 1. Episode 847 - Sesame Street
08:51 Send you home now with one last entirely creepy slice of apparently kid-friendly television.
08:56 Sesame Street's 1976 attempt to use the Wizard of Oz's terrifying Wicked Witch of the West as a way
09:01 of teaching children the value of facing their fears went down about as well as you'd have
09:05 imagined. Not long after Episode 847, depicting the witch losing her broom and going on a tear
09:11 through the street, sweeped into the nightmares of youngsters the world over, PBS were inundated
09:16 with mail and calls from parents scolding them for frightening their tykes, some of which now
09:21 refused to switch back on the show out of fear of Margaret Hamilton once again showing up to
09:25 spook the life out of them 37 years on from her first wicked showing. With this level of fuss
09:30 being made about the cackling villain's appearance, the banning of the episode became inevitable,
09:34 and it's still yet to be made officially available on the likes of Hulu or HBO Max,
09:38 with only those using the footage for research being permitted to take in the chilling content
09:43 via the American Archive of Public Broadcasting in certain locations.
09:47 Simply put, even nearly four decades on, Hamilton had not lost an unsettling step.
09:52 And that's our list! Know of any other TV show episodes you can no longer watch? Then let us
09:57 know all about them in the comments section right down below and do not forget to like,
10:00 share and go and whack that subscribe button while you're there. Also, if you like this kind
10:04 of thing then head on over to whatculture.com and find some more awesome articles just like
10:07 the one this video you're watching this very second is based on. I have been Gareth from
10:11 whatculture.com, thank you very much as always for clicking on this video today, I hope to see you
10:16 very very soon but in the meantime, look after yourselves and I will see you soon, bye bye!