Family Matters Lost Episode
I'm a huge fan of Family Matters, it's a show about a family experiencing matters within their home. The show was intended to reach the African American demographic that didn't want to watch Full House, another great program. Originally, the show was meant to be a fun family program, but since ratings were declining, a guest nerd named Urkle, played by Jaleel White, managed to save the program early in the production. Being the comic foil, a lot of people don't realize there was a Halloween episode of Family Matters that never aired. Well, it did air, as it hit plenty of televisions in the northwest during its airing channel ABC's TGI Friday, but it was cut from what I like to call the original lineup. I managed to record it in the early '90s, before the channel blacked out and a Full House rerun covered up the remaining fifteen seconds or so of credits. It was common for episodes to experience a black out after airing back then, as cable was a more primitive technology.
The episode starts deeply zoomed into the side of black father and police officer Carl Winslow's head. Tears are dripping down his face, and he's licking his lips incessantly. "Just a slice." he whispers. "Just give me a slice of that delicious pizza." He seems extremely distressed. As the camera zooms out, it's revaled he's trapped in a box with his head in it. The audience laugh track is laughing, but the tone isn't really humorous and the set is very dark. It reminded me of the movie the Seventh Seal, everything was black and a thin layer of noise enveloped the camera and audio. Steve Urkel walks out and grins. He just stares as Carl's tongue tries to reach a slice of pizza on a string. Carl Winslow wakes up screaming as his wife Hariett tries to calm him.
"Harriet, I had that goddamn dream again." The word goddamn was bleeped, but the character was clearly angry. Some of the audience seems to laugh, others seem extremely confused. Instead of any retort, Harriett covers her head in her pillow and tries to get some sleep. The scene plays out for a minute with nothing happening, until the set changes to the living room area. Steve Urkel, resident nerd is seen standing in the corner, staring at all of them while they eat pizza. He's acting very weird, wiggling his arms around and doing jazz like dances, while the family eats their pizza. Eddie Winslow turns and espouts "What the hell?" as Steve Urkel smiles at them. "How long has he been watching us?!" Eddie says. "A long time, guys." He grins big. "Years." Urkel plays with his suspender straps then goes over to the wall. "Steve, we asked you to paint that wall two weeks ag-" Carl Winslow shudders. "I ran out of paint, but I hope you like my design." A swastika is painted onto the wall in black paint. Urkel pretends to realize what he's done. "Did I do that?!" The audience laughed at his catchphrase as the comedic foil of the popular sitcom. Everyone starts running around and rearranging the furniture all of a sudden. "We've got to get ready for the football party!" Carl yells, with extravagant cheer. "Let's get this little goddamn nerd out of here so I can enjoy my football." Urkel seems slightly agitated now. Harriet Winslow catches their youngest daughter Judith reading a book. The camera zoomed in to reveal it said "Liber Falxifer: The Book of the Left Handed Reaper" with a picture of a skeletal entity with a scythe on the cover. "What are you letting my child read!?" Harriet proclaims. What a lot of people don't realize is that Judith disappeared from the fifth season of the show with no explanation given. "Did I do that?!" Urkel giggles. The audience laughs.
In the next scene, they're in the kitchen, eating breakfast at 9:30 pm. "It smells like somebody left a dead cat in the air conditioning vent." Carl proclaims. While the family is getting ready to make a delicious taco dinner, the bell rings. "Who's there?!" Three of them go to open the door but there's nobody there. "I'm already here." Urkel grins with a smarmy look on his face. He was behind them all along. "Listen, Steve." Carl begins. "A man's home is his castle, and you are an intruder. I am the #1 top man of this home. The boss. The big kahuna." Steve seems slightly disheveled. "Get the hell out of my goddamn house." Carl proclaims. "Ok buddyboy-o. Friend. Pal. Pal-o." Urkel giggles. "Can I at least make fruit punch for the big game?" Urkel grins. There is no response, but he starts making delicious fruit punch anyway. Something about Urkel was odd, I couldn't put my finger on it. While everyone is busy, the camera cuts to urkel grinning wildly and pouring ice cubes and fruit punch all over the linoleum floor. Someone says something in the background and Eddie runs in, slips on the ice cubes and fruit punch and slams into the set wall painfully. "Ow!" He screams. Urkel giggles. "Did I do that?!" "It's not funny!" Eddie yells. "I think it's broken." The audience starts to laugh but stops abruptly. You can physically see the bone sticking out of his leg.
Harriett runs over to call 9-1-1 but the phone is disconnected. An electrical shock runs up Harriet's hand and the phone falls out of her hand. Steve seems to be working on a funny invention. "Let me show you my newest invention." Steve smiles. He pulls out a handgun. He jumps up and waves his arms around. "Let me show you how it works." Carl Winslow approaches him. "This isn't funny Ste-" He fires what looks like a real bullet into the roof. "Did I do that?" He says. There's no response or laughter. "Did I, do that" He repeated. It now occured to me that never in the entire series did anyone answer his question. "Of course you did it!" Carl yelled. Steve shot him in the kneecap.
In the next scene, Carl Winslow wakes up tied to a radiator. He turns to a mirror which shows his face has been wired shut using some kind of metal wire. At this point, I realized this probably wasn't a Halloween episode, and something may have been wrong with my VCR. He's in his bedroom. All the furniture has been removed, and it's pitch black. There's a speaker box in the corner, and a familiar voice starts talking. It's Urkel, though his voice is deeper. "How's the pizza." The voice booms. "I've stuffed an entire pizza down your mouth and throat, glued your teeth shut and wired your lips closed. If you want your precious oxygen, you're going to have to dig for it, big kahuna." Carl looks to his right. There is a surgical tray with scissors, scalpels and a hammer on it. "You have approximately 90 seconds until you choke to death. Starting..." A metal rod came down from the roof with tongs that squeezed his nostrils shut. "Now." The metal device kept his head from moving. Carl Winslow had police training, but he was still visibly, I'm not sure what the word is. Disheveled. He picked up the scalpel and started trimming away at the wire around his lips but it wasn't nearly strong enough. He tried the scissors and managed to snag one wire before ripping it off of his bloodied face. His teeth were indeed glued shut by high strength industrial gorrilla glue, the strongest glue known to man. He picked up the hammer and brutally started smashing at his teeth, smashing his teeth and gums to nothing before reaching into the bloody chunks and pulling out the delicious pizza dough chunks.
He gargled and coughed up blood before stumbling into the living room. "Did I do that?!" the audience laughed really loudly, but there was clearly a stereo in the hallway making it produce canned laughter. This part of the tape was hard to watch. He was running down the hallways, but the staircase was broken. He fell down it and into what looks like the basement where Steve used to invent things. His son Eddie lay dead on the floor. He was holding a hack saw, it looked like some sort of self induced amputation. At first I shuddered because I thought I saw blood, but it was just the fruit punch from earlier. Harriet lay dead in the hallway with her intestines spewing out of her stomach. Highly realistic gore and blood was all over the place, the kind of realistic quality you've never seen on a family TGIF program. The realism was so good, you'd wonder how many millions were spent creating this highly realistic gore. I cannot overstate the quality of the gore. "I'm over here." The voice said. Carl chased after the voice. Urkel was in the opposite hallway, standing there, dancing and playing his accordion. "I want chicken, I want liver, meow mix meow mix please deliver". Eddie's friend Waldo lay dead in the corner, with cats nibbling on his corpse. He had been dead for weeks. Urkel started to dance around and threw tacos, salsa, lettuce and tomatoes at Carl. The audience seemed to find this hilarious, but no one was laughing. Carl was toothless, and naked as it turned out Urkel had put leeches all over his body. His genitalia was visible in highly graphic detail. I was starting to think this wasn't your typical Halloween episode.
Naked and toothless Carl ran angrily at Steve, who zipped down the hallway like speedy Gonzalez. Steve threw his bow tie at Carl, and it exploded, leaving third degree burns all over Carl's naked body. "COME AT ME BIG KAHUNA!" Steve yells. The room is getting increasingly narrow. Carl tries to turn around, but the door is locked. There's nothing in this room, just a hole in the wall, with creepy light emanating. The words "Slow your roll, Sparky" are seen at the top in creepy blood font. Carl looked extremely...disheveled. He put his head in the hole and Urkel kicked him in the face with tap shoes. Urkel began to tap dance around and dangled a slice of pizza in front of him. Carl realized it had been days, if not weeks since he'd last eaten.
When Carl woke up, he was in a very uncomfortable position. At first the visuals were so distorted I couldn't tell what was going on. I spent minutes, even hours turning my television to make sense of the bizarre imagery. Then I realized what it was. Urkel had sewn Carl's mouth to his anus so he was forced to roll around everywhere naked. He rolled around naked like a Goron in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time for a good twenty minutes, making this episode a two parter. I had difficulty staring at Carl Winslow's naked body roll around. It was disturbing. Urkel is seen pulling a lever which causes everything in the house to age and decay much faster. Naked Carl rolls around until he ages into a senior citizen and dies. The camera cuts to various rooms in the house with all the dead family members. After a while, the entire house is nothing but dust and bones.
I thought the episode was over, but then the bones started to move. They became extremely animate and started to drag together magnetically. There is no cast now and no one is talking. After about ten minutes, the bones have become sentient and are slowly bending and twisting to form a coherent being. It was disturbing, I started to cry and felt like shutting the tape off because I was really scared. When the being finally came together, it was a giant, spinal column-formed t-rex humanoid with a gigantic boney penis. Urkel walked in, giggling. he hadn't aged much, he looked only mid-30's. "Did I do that?" Urkel put his hand up an an illuminati eye sigil began to hover over the screen. The CG was very bad '90s CG. He walked over to the bone column t-rex and the ribcage pieces opened naturally so he could walk inside. The t-rex broke the roof of the house apart and blood began to rain down in puddles from the sky. Hundreds of pairs of glasses, suspenders and bowties rained down from the sky. It was all extremely highly realistic and so disturbing I felt the tears running down my face from the intensity. I was starting to wonder if there was something strange about Steve Urkel, or Jaleel White, the actor who played him. The show ended then, with the cast instead being a list of millions of dead people. This episode was very disturbing, but there is something truly disturbing about it...2014 is listed as the date it was produced. The Executive producer was listed only as "the devil". It was fair to say that this was the episode that put the final nail in Jaleel White, portrayer of Urkle's carreer. Years later he would star in the direct to video film Who Made the Potatoe Salad, which has 2.2 stars out of ten on IMDB.
Credited to Schizima
| Comments • 0 |
Loading comments...
|