Lost Episode of Fox TV Show Finally Found After Being Unavailable for Decades

A lost episode of Fox Kids series 'Little Shop' was finally uploaded to YouTube 32 years after it originally premiered.

By Megan Behnke

A Fox series from the '90s is making its way back into the fold. In 1991, the animated fantasy comedy series Little Shop aired on the successful Saturday morning block on Fox Kids. Based on the 1960 Roger Corman film The Little Shop of Horrors, the series centered on an adolescent, self-proclaimed nerd who works in a little flower shop and a talking plant. Starring Marlow Vella, Tamar Lee, Harvey Atkin, Buddy Lewis, and David Huband, the series ran for just one 13-episode season from Sept. 7 to Nov. 30, 1991. Despite coming from Marvel Productions and Saban Entertainment, it didn't seem to keep the show on the air.

The French-American animated series also aired on La Cinq. It was rerun for another year and would later air on SyFy on the Cartoon Quest and Animation Station block until 1997. However, only three episodes were publicly made available in early 2015 because of VHS recordings that were uploaded to YouTube. In September 2015, a German dub of an episode was uploaded, and the following year, three additional episodes were uploaded to the site by The Little Shop Archive account. More episodes would follow by the first of January in 2017, with the remaining episodes of Little Shop being posted the following day.

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The only episode that wasn't uploaded was Episode 9, "It's a Wonderful Leaf." A DVD copy of the episode given to the owner of The Little Shop Archive was damaged, so a mirror upload of the German dub was instead uploaded. In honor of the 32nd anniversary of its premiere, The Little Shop Archive was finally able to upload the English dub of the lost episode. Unfortunately, while the episode is on YouTube, it's explained in the description that a large chunk of the song "Yogurt" is missing "due to some issues in the digitization process" for both an anonymous source and an alternate recording. The affected footage was swapped out with footage from the German dub uploaded elsewhere.

Little Shop was created by Mark Edward Edens and Ellen Levy-Sarnoff. Haim Saban, Joe Taritero, Winston Richard, and Sarnoff served as executive producers. After Disney acquired Fox Kids Worldwide in 2001, ownership passed to the company, but that didn't seem to do anything. Now, thanks to YouTube, it looks like the series is finally available to all, even despite some different dubs here and there. 

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