On Saturday night, “Blue Prints,” the 24-minute pilot for the millennial classic children’s show “Blue’s Clues” was randomly dumped on YouTube. Previously, the pilot’s existence had only been briefly mentioned on social media and was even called “lost” by Nick Jr.’s official Twitter account.
But this weekend, there the episode was, on an account with under 1,000 subscribers that had only been used a few years ago to share shit posts about “Spongebob” and “Bloons Tower Defense.” According to the description, the tape the pilot was on was dated Sept. 22, 1995, and the poster is unsure if this was the “final version.”
“Before you ask, I will not be saying who this is from so they don’t get harassed,” it read.’
As someone raised by television and the original show, the pilot brought back memories of finding clues that feel familiar yet new. Starring a much younger Steve Burns and his aqua-tinted companion, the now-deleted video was missing a lot of sounds, voices, and pieces of music leaving a bit of a lull of dead air. Songs about letters and solving clues sounded slightly off, with Burns singing barely off the tune that made it into the main show.
“The ‘Blues Clues’ pilot is a very important historical artifact of Nickelodeon history,” YouTuber Quinton Hoover, who makes videos about lost media and shows on Nick on his 829K subscriber channel, told Passionfruit. “This is something special that a lot of people, including me, have been dying to see.”
But by the time the work week started on Monday, the video had been blocked on YouTube for copyright reasons (according to what’s left on the video page) by Paramount Global, the conglomerate behind Viacom, CBS, and of course Nickelodeon. …
