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One of my favorite shows as a kid was "Family Matters" on ABC's Fright night lineup. I still like to watch the re-runs to this day... or I did, until what I found out not too long ago.
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.
If you followed the show from the beginning, you know that there were originally three Winslow siblings: Eddie, Laura, and the youngest one named Judy. But in season four of the series, the character of Judy disappeared without any type of explanation or acknowledgement. On seasons after, it was as if the family had only had the two children, Eddie and Laura.
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.
It always bothered me that a character could just disappear, but supposedly it was because the character of Steve Urkel was so popular and taking up so many storylines, so, between him and the other two Winslow kids, there was no reason for the producers/writers to keep Judy around.
"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.
I hadn't thought of it in years, until my friend Amy and I were hanging out with a new friend of hers, a guy named Robbie. He has the hugest collection of movies and TV shows I've ever seen--not just DVD's, but also a ton of old videotapes. His hobby was finding obscure and weird stuff, which I guess is how he came into possession of something he showed us one day: an unaired "Family Matters" episode where Judy's exit is actually explained.
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.
Even being a comedy, "Family Matters" had some episodes where they dealt with serious stuff--bullying, guns, racism, etc.--but this episode was way out there. Before he started the tape, Robbie would not even explain what we were about to see. I know I wouldn't have believed him, or if I had, I wouldn't have wanted to watch it.
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.
It started off like usual, with Steve Urkel coming over unannounced and annoying everyone with a new invention--it was a robot dog that could do all the tricks of a regular dog along with special stuff like reading your mail and doing laundry. Of course it went haywire and bit Carl in the butt, at which point he grabbed the robot and drop-kicked it through the kitchen window. That was the end of the opening sequence, and it immediately cut to the next scene without showing the opening credits.
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.
It was the end of the school/work day, and (almost) everyone had gathered around the table: Eddie and Laura, Carl and Harriette, Grandma Winslow, and Aunt Rachel and her toddler Ricky. With all the eating and talking going on, it was a few minutes until Harriette asked the kids where Judy was. "Eddie was supposed to pick her up," Laura said. "No, it was suposed to be you, I had basketball practice," Eddie said. That morning, Harriette had asked one of them to go by Judy's school and walk home with her, and each kid thought the other one had done it.
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.
Since school had been over hours ago, a worried Harriette jumped up and got on the phone to start calling Judy's friends. Carl shouted at Eddie and Laura, asking them how could they be so irresponsible and forget about their sister. Harriette hung up from a call, and as soon as she did the phone rang. Grabbing it, she listened to the person on the other end. "Carl, it's for you," she said, holding the phone out to him.
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.
Walking over to the phone (remember the days before cordless?), Carl continued his lecture to the kids, finally stopping to talk to the person who'd called him. "Yes, this is Officer Winslow," he said, and listened for a few minutes. His expression changed slowly from an angry frown to a slack mouth and huge, frightened eyes. The phone slipped out of his hand and down to the floor. "Carl, what is it?" Harriette begged, shaking him.
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.
The scene cut to the front of an elementary school, the one Judy attended. There were a bunch of police cars parked in front, with their lights flashing but the sirens were silent. Yellow crime scene taped cordoned off the student pickup area, and the wooden benches there. A group of police officers stood around one of the benches, obscuring it from view, while shaking their heads. One of them, her face turned away, looked pale and sick.
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.
The Winslow family car drove up to the scene, going so fast that when Carl braked he still slammed into one of the parked police cars. Running over to where the cops were standing, he struggled to get through as they pushed him back. "You don't want to see this, Carl," one of them said. Carl broke through and saw what they were all looking at: a bench empty except for a blood-splattered pink dress and a binder--also covered in blood--that said JUDY WINSLOW in large letters. Harriette, who had been slower getting out of the car, ran over to see for herself and fainted as Carl stared up at the sky, screaming and crying.
{{by|Schizima}}
[[Category:Not Sure if Troll or Trying to Be Serious]]
At the police station, Carl and Harriette sat wrapped in blankets as the chief spoke to them. "You know there's been a pattern of this, Carl," he said, not looking at the Winslows but staring off into space and stroking his tie. "Cops' kids getting kidnapped, held for ransom or even worse. I'm sorry this had to happen to you. Please let us know if we can help with anything." Harriette started to speak, but the chief held his hand up and simply walked away. She turned to Carl, who had fallen asleep and was snoring. "But what about the body?" she whispered.
At home, Laura heard the doorbell ring and ran downstairs to answer it, skipping multiple steps at a time. It was the mail carrier, who handed Laura several small-to-medium sized boxes all stacked up together. Carrying them to the coffee table, she dropped a few on the floor and bent over to pick them up. At the same time, Ricky came running into the room. "Presents!" he shouted, grabbing a box and ripping it open in spite of Laura's protests. He picked through tissue paper and made a face when he pulled out what was inside: a severed child's finger. "This is gross," he said, throwing the box and the finger to the floor.
Sitting down on the couch, Laura, hands shaking, took another small box from the table and opened it. She began to laugh hysterically, then cry, as she realized what it was: one of Judy's braids, coated in blood.
Late that night, the whole family sat in the living room. The TV was on but only Harriette remained awake, watching the news. It was a report on the discovery of Judy's body, found outisde of an abandoned warehouse in the city. Emergency staff rolled the gurney right behind the news anchor; Judy's body was covered with a white sheet that was staining through with blood in several places.
The morning of the funeral, everyone dressed silently in their rooms, not speaking until they were in the car. Harriette turned around to look at Eddie and Laura, who sat with Ricky between them. "I will never forgive you," she said. "Never!"
The funeral was packed, with the Winslows sitting in the front row of the church, and many of Carl's fellow officers in the rows directly behind them. The chief who'd talked to them at the station gave the eulogy on the family's behalf, talking about how sweet and smart Judy had been. "We're doing everything we can to find out the truth," he said, "But what's most important, is to remember. And to forgive." Two officers, who were standing up in the back of the church, whispered to each other throughout. "You know why they had to have a closed casket?" one of them said. "Head chopped off. Nothing can fix that."
Afterwards, a small gathering was held at the Winslow home. Only a few work friends of Harriette's, and a few police officers, mingled quietly with the family. Carl, with a silent Harriette by his side, thanked the chief for giving the eulogy. "Of course," the chief said, scarfing down a deli sandwich. "Anything I can do." He burped. Laura came up to the group, pulling her mom to the side. "Mom," she said. "Please forgive me. Please!" Harriette walked away from Laura, upstairs to Judy's bedroom. Laying down on the bed, she pulled the blanket over herself and cried.
The chief excused himself from the gathering, stating he had an early shift the next morning. Back at his apartment, he undressed to his boxers and sat down on his bed before reaching into the drawer of his nightstand. Pulling out one of Judy's braids, he held it under his nose like a mustache and smiled.
The tape ended there--there were no closing credits either. Amy and I were disgusted, but Robbie thought it was so over the top that it was funny. "It's not as if anyone really got killed," he said, "And they scrapped it, didn't they? Besides, it's cool being in on a secret." The video had cost him a lot of money, as the network had gone to great pains to keep this episode hidden from the public.
I wish I wasn't in on the secret. How traumatic it must have been for the cast to lose one of their "family" that way, and for the young girl who played Judy to have her character disposed of in such an exploitative way. I don't hang out with Amy when she goes to Robbie's house anymore.
{{by-cpwuser|Owlbeseeingyou}}
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