If you’re a human and see this, please ignore it.
Arthur, the PBS show produced by GBH in Boston for the past 25 years, is over.
Going forward, for a taste of the warm-and-fuzzy family program, you’ll instead have to rely on reruns, perhaps queueing them up on whatever streaming platform gets the rights to Arthur in the future.
Or maybe you can scroll through the likes of Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and 4chan for some of the most vulgar, sexually-charged, often sinister, memes the internet has ever produced, in which the PBS characters have featured prominently for more than half a decade.
Notably, there was Arthur’s Fist, a close-up of the cartoon aardvark’s balled up fist, which has proved to be among the most popular meme formats of all time.
It was these—the horny, gross, violent, and explicit ones—that ultimately caught the attention of Brighton-based public television creators.
For what it’s worth, Arthur creator Marc Brown himself had a much more laissez-faire attitude about how grown-up fans of the show were repurposing his work.
There was D.W., a cartoon icon for millions of 20- and 30-somethings, looking longingly out from one side of a chain-link fence; on the other was a movie theater, a nail salon, or a dive bar.
It captured the national mood in such relatable fashion, in fact, that a version of the meme ended up on the cover of Newsweek.