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Animated short: Anthropomorphic Dog on the London Underground

~ UnidentifiedWeirdTV ~ 1 Comment

Today we continue our exploration into the dark recesses of televisual and psychological do-they-or-don’t-they-exist mysteries, with this UWTV memory submitted by one of our followers, Kirsty Asher, of a strange animated claymation short film about an anthropomorphic dog, seen on TV around the turn of the millennium.

Over to Kirsty!

“I have searched and searched for evidence this animated short exists because I definitely remember watching it, but haven’t managed to locate any stills or IMDb clues. It would have been late 90s, possibly early 00s. No idea what channel it was on I was probably about 7 or 8 when I watched it.

It was a claymation short about an anthropomorphic dog (I think he was a black labrador?), living in London and he gets on the Underground with his CD Walkman. All the other background characters were some form of anthropomorphic animal, at least as best as I can remember. Puts his headphones on when he gets on the tube and falls asleep, has weird, trippy nightmares that he thinks are really happening, then when he wakes up he realises the tube’s reached the end of the line and he’s locked in the carriage. I remember it ending with him all stressed and banging on the doors of the carriage.

I realise this is such a vague synopsis to go on but I’m hoping someone might remember!”

As this sounds like a particularly intriguing, and possibly disturbing production, it would be well worth identifying and locating this animated short.

Does anyone else recall seeing this? Or does anyone know the title or have access to a copy?

UPDATE (03/04/25) – It seems someone else remembers this production and is looking for it, going from this thread on Reddit (click to read). According to this Reddit user, the dog’s dreams featured him in a time machine controlled by a computer, travelling to three different periods in the future, the final one of which features a meteor falling from the sky, which hits before the dog can get back into his time machine, causing him to wake up. The ending apparently sees the dog running out from the tube carriage yelling “I need to tell people about my prophecy!”

As of yet, other users on the thread above have not been able to identify this piece of lost media.

If you can help us out, please respond below or send us an email!

Image Credit: “Metal Dog” by oliva732000 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

(IDENTIFIED!) War Drama/Documentary about “The Charlemagne Division”

~ UnidentifiedWeirdTV ~ 4 Comments

70s and 80s society was awash with Cold War paranoia, and this was reflected in much of the TV at the time; the threat of nuclear war making for particularly gripping drama across the genres – influencing sci-fi, horror and general drama of the time.

One of this blog’s readers recalls a particularly unusual drama, seemingly a one-off, aired on UK TV in the late 80s or early 90s, done in the style of a documentary, on the subject of a war between the USA and the EU (EEC at the time of course).

The details we have are as follows:

“I seem to remember it being caused by the US using battlefield nukes against the East Germans which the West Germans considered an attack on themselves and off it all went. I think it was in a format that used fake news reports, I remember a mention of a combined French and German infantry division called “The Charlemagne Division” going into action against the US army that was stationed in Germany and possibly a segment on a French aircraft carrier being sunk.“

Does this ring a bell for any of our readers? We’d be very keen to find this piece of UWTV, so feel free to share this post as wide as you can, and if you recall this yourself or have any further details, please contact us or post a response here!

Update (28/11/20)

Thanks to Twitter user @Araminta_Kane we have managed to identify this show – it was a BBC-produced film aired in 1993 titled Europe on the Brink:

Europe on the Brink (includes YouTube video in Italian)

According to the link above:

“A drama set in the year 2013 which postulates that Europe has become rich and unified with Berlin Wall-style fortifications around it to keep out immigrants. It is also on the brink of war with the United States. The projected scenario is based on the work of strategic thinker Jonathan Eyal.”

The film does not seem to have been screened again since its airing on the BBC in 1993, and has never been released on DVD – so far we have only managed to locate a version of it on YouTube dubbed into Italian, which can be viewed on the above link.

Huge thanks to @Araminta_Kane (nice Moondial reference in that username) for identifying this elusive production for us – and if you can help us out further by hooking us up with the original English language version, please do not hesitate to comment here or send us an email!

Unidentified Weird TV

~ UnidentifiedWeirdTV ~ Leave a comment

Any child who grew up in the UK between the 70s-90s will likely agree on one particular thing: the TV of the era was often downright weird.

From spooky paranormal, folk horror and sci-fi dramas, to kids’ shows so creepy it’s amazing they were ever approved for children’s TV, nightmarish Public Information Films (PIFs) and TV adverts that were downright surreal or unintentionally creepy (despite often advertizing the most mundane products!), the TV of the era has left three generations of kids traumatized – albeit fondly – who have come to be known as ‘The Haunted Generation’ following Bob Fischer’s Fortean Times article of that name in 2017. Since then, the Scarred For Life Twitter channel and its accompanying books have been doing an amazing job of chronicling and preserving for posterity the weird and disturbing TV of the era.

But while The Haunted Generation have been having endless fun reliving the memories of the TV that scarred us for life, and discovering the terrifying TV we (perhaps fortunately!) missed the first time round, there are those memories that remain elusive… strange scenes, adverts, clips, PIFs, TV episodes etc that disturbed the bejeezus out of us, yet despite our searching, we just have not been able to find… and thus we remain haunted by these unidentified memories, our adult minds plagued by the question of, Just what the heck was that exactly?

Cue the reason for this blog. Inspired by a whole host of unidentified weird TV memories on the Facebook group Weird British TV Memories (70s-90s), this blog exists to chronicle these mysterious and elusive memories still haunting the minds of the Haunted Generation decades on… and serve as an appeal to identify them! After all, these things were physically produced, by actors, writers, directors, camera crew etc., some of who must still be out there and must remember these things… so if you are still plagued by an unidentified weird TV (UWTV) memory from that era, drop us an email or comment and we will post a blog entry about it! And if you happen to be familiar with any of the UWTV posted here (or perhaps luckily worked on them) then please let us know and we will make an updated blog post – you’ll have set at least one traumatized child of the 70s-90s’ minds at rest!

Enjoy browsing and feel free to share or comment on any of the entries – The Haunted Generation stay haunted, but we wouldn’t have it any other way…

“Maybe the future of it is the fact that childhood itself is a bit weird, and there’s stuff lodged in people’s memories that troubles them, that they can’t quite explain… even in an era when they can look stuff up. Hopefully not all of the answers are there, and there’s still some mystery and a sense of wonder.”

– Jim Jupp