Featuring the voiceover of Dorothy Moskowitz of United States of America fame.
Interview with Moskowitz at at Bob Fischer's The Haunted Generation:
Then, by the mid-1970s, she was working as a voiceover artist on Sesame Street, providing half-sung narration for a jazz-fuelled piece of animation that has since become the subject of much online consternation. ‘Cracks’ tells the story of a young girl who sees the fissures in her bedroom wall transformed into a menagerie of animals. Aired fleetingly between 1975 and 1980, it was then banished – for reasons unknown – to a dusty archive, existing only in the realms of fuzzy childhood memory. To seasoned US hauntologists, it has taken on mythical status.
“There’s a lot of action on the internet about it,” says Dorothy. “When I tried to do the research, I found the woodwind player, the great Mel Martin, had passed away. The producer and probable script-writer Peter Scott was long gone too, and his family didn’t know anything about it. The only person left who might know something was Andy Narell, the steel drum player. But talk of hauntology… when we were recording it, a curious apparition appeared in the studio. A wraith of a young woman floated in, wearing shroud-like threads. Her name sounded invented, something like ‘Ether’ or ‘Skyward’, and she said [floaty, ethereal voice] ‘We’ll be finishing the animation soooooon’. A real white witch of a voice!
“I never heard anything more about it until decades later. Never saw it on TV. I was very surprised to learn it had creeped out so many youngsters, and that no one was able to find any record of it for so many years. In 2019 I started getting inquiries about it, and that led to a podcast and some media attention. I wasn’t previously aware that I was the focus of such nostalgia. Maybe I’m the Grandma Moses of hauntology!”
Moskowitz has a new record out with a cat who goes as Retep Folo, full story in the Fischer interview
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