This is the one I've been looking for the longest, but at this point I'm starting to doubt if it even existed. A lot of this is transplanted from my google doc and spacehey post I've made on the subject.
I would give this animation a time frame of 1999-2005. At this time, I lived in New Haven, Michigan. I don't remember what channel it was on, I did a lot of channel surfing as a kid so it's possible that it could have been on a local channel.
How I remember it is this: It starts with a boy sitting on his bed, the walls of his room are blue. He turns on a flashlight and the walls turn orange with a yellow circle in the middle. The boy starts making shadow puppets that start off simple, but get more complex as he lets his imagination take over. The ending is what I remember the most vividly. The boy is acting out an entire pirate ship battle with his shadows, which ends in an explosion and the boy falling off of his bed, the walls return to blue but the yellow circle stays there. The boy then reaches up from behind the bed and forms the words "The End" with his hands.
Here's some suggestions for where this short could have originated from:
Now, again, there's also the possibility that this just doesn't exist. Or, that I may be mixing up memories. I was between the ages of 5 and 10 when I lived in Michigan, and a lot of my memory from that time frame is spotty due to trauma.
The biggest issue is that when I posted this to TikTok, someone suggested this video:
This really threw me for a loop, because you would think this would be it, right? This bumper aired in 2004, it involves shadow puppets, and there's an orange wall with a yellow circle. The issue is that this didn't give me that "OH MY GOD THAT'S IT!" feeling. Instead it just made me more confused.
I'm not entirely sure that this is it, because then where did the blue walls come from? The pirate ship? The ending that I can see so clearly in my head? Is it possible that I mashed together two different memories? I feel like I'm losing my fucking mind.
At this point, if someone does manage to find it, that would be awesome. But if there's proof that this doesn't exist and my brain made it all up, I would be happy with that too. I just don't want to be on my death bed 50 years from now still rambling about this one animation that I never found.
Back in 2007, I lived in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I was in 6th grade and I went to Peterson Elementary School. (I'm not worried about giving out this information because I don't live there anymore and everyone I went to school with there are grown up now.)
In the middle of the year, a film production team came to our school to give us a chance to star in our very own movie. I don't remember the exact name of the company, but I think they were called something along the lines of Dream School Productions or something corny like that. Anyway, our class was in charge of planning out the plot of the main feature.
The movie consisted of a bunch of parodies of different fairy tales, I think that maybe the main charcter was Cinderella. There were also previews for fake movies that were parodies of movies that were going to come out at the time. I was one of the kids who was in a fake preview for a parody of Horton Hears a Who, I played a who like character with a vaccum dressed in black and yellow, and I was also one of the jungle people. This isn't important: but I remember the director getting frustrated with me because I kept looking at the camera, but he was honestly a nice dude. I also remember being more interested in helping to edit the movie but they told me that they didn't need help.
There were also some music videos, one of them for No Air by Jordan Sparks, the duet version of Big Girls Don't Cry, and our school crossing guards got to do one to Stop! In The Name of Love.
They premiered the film at my school and also gave out DVDs. I had a DVD at one point, but I either lost it or threw it away in a fit of teenage embarassment. I remember that the DVD came in a blank CD case with no cover or anything and the DVD had a generic 3D stock image of a pink castle on it.
I'm hoping that someone I went to school with at the time, or someone else who had a similar experience, finds this and can point me in the direction of the production company. I'd like to know if they have an archives of the different films they've made or some leftover copies of the DVD or something. I'd like to have this little chunk of my childhood back.
I'm going to say this was anywhere between 1995 and 2000. My mom and grandma told me about this commercial and said I was little when it aired.
It was a Pillsbury commercial where a little girl says "Aren't his buns cute?" The girl was talking about the buns being baked, but it also could be perceived as her talking about the Pillsbury Dough Boy's butt. Mom and Grandma says this commercial was pulled very shortly after it aired.
There's not much to this one, but maybe it'll be interesting enough to somebody.
I have no idea if this counts as lost media, as I'm sure that these songs aren't lost, but whatever version of Windows XP this was most likely is.
Anyway, back in like 2005, we got a Dell desktop computer. It came with a Microsoft Office Suite already installed. I remember that Powerpoint had all this 3D clipart and all these MIDI music tracks that came with it. There was also the ability to make all these shapes with all these effects.
It also came with all these songs in the sample music folder. Way more than the usual three that people remember. I have a small list of the ones I've managed to find, but I know there were more.
There's also two songs I remember some of the lyrics of, but not the title or the artist.
One song has the lyrics "You go on and have a cigarette/I'll be waiting outside." and the other has the lines "Here's to the ones in the back alleys," "Here's to the sheets lying on my bed/and all the words I've never said," and "I'm going home to Los Angeles."
I've searched up these lyrics and haven't found anything.
When out computer got a virus and had to be factory reset, all this stuff remained. So it was part of the core OS that Dell installed on it. There were three other computers that had these same features. A computer my mom had at work, a computer my grandma had in her craft room, and a laptop my grandmother gave to me. All of them were Dell branded. I don't know where any of these computers are now, we no longer have them in our posession.
I've tried to contact Dell about it, but they never responded. I didn't really expect them to in the first place. My hope is that someone who still has a Dell brand desktop or laptop computer from 2005 can send me a list of songs or maybe they might even a recovery or installation disc that came with the computer that they can dump onto the internet.