Don't Stop Believing....It will show up again

The first time I ever saw MTV was at my sister's home in Tucson. Cable wasn't yet available where I lived, and I thought how cool it was to be able to watch videos by bands (many of them were live performances) 24 hours a day. (Remember, this was the early days of MTV, when all they did play was videos; vapid thoughts expressed by GenXers living in a house together was still years away.)

There was only one problem....there weren't a lot of videos in the rotation, and the really interesting ones were shown sparingly. This meant sitting through countless live performances of Journey songs and "Jack and Diane" to see Springsteen's "Rosalita" on the few days it would appear. For those of you who collected baseball cards, it was like buying ten packs, opening them up and finding one Sandy Koufax among the twenty Don Mossis.

I bring all of this up because I am having the same experience again. As a previous post noted, "Oswald" has become Elijah's favorite show, and with the help of our DVR (and the master list I created) he can view whatever episode he likes -- with one exception. When he first discovered the show (it followed another previous favorite of his "Lazy Town"... and don't get me started on how bizarre that show is!) there was a storyline about digging in the sand at the beach and creating caves. It made such an impression on Elijah that he has asked to see it almost every day.

Unfortunately, that viewing was before we were hooked up with the DVR, so I didn't record it. No problem, you say: With only 30 episodes in the series, just record it when it plays again.

Well, there IS a problem. Over the last three months I have recorded for Elijah 29 "Oswald" episodes, of which some have played at least four times; yet the "At the Beach" show has disappeared completely.

I know this happens in television all the time. For whatever reason, a particular program from a series will be pulled, either due to content or quality, and never seen again until the DVD is released. (An "X-Files" episode involving incest and an SNL hosted by Milton Berle are two examples). But this is a cartoon about an OCTOPUS, for goodness' sake. Each day I record the three episodes on Noggin, and each day it's three of the 29 we already have. It's like I'm back in Arizona waiting to see the Stones and Steve Perry keeps on singing, and singing, and singing. Maybe they're holding it back for the "Director's Cut" release on DVD.