The Cartoon Mystery That Stumped the Internet

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The New Yorker
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For six years, online sleuths tried and failed to identify an animated character who appeared on TV in the background of an old photo. “There is something about the little guy that burrows his way into the brain,” @WillSloanEsq writes.

newyorker.com
The Cartoon Mystery That Stumped the Internet
Do you recognize this elf-like man? No, he’s not from “The Littles.”
8:09 PM · Sep 25, 2022

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-cartoon-mystery-that-stumped-the-internet

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Over a fifth-anniversary dinner with my girlfriend recently, conversation turned to a mystery that has driven us both mad for almost the entire duration of our relationship. It is an image of a cartoon character, who appears on a clunky TV set in the background of an old family photo. The character is an elf-like man wearing a red shirt and white overalls. He has pointy ears and a gray beard. His eyes are closed, and he appears to be in the middle of talking, or perhaps sneezing. Given his red shirt, he could be one of Santa’s helper elves, or he could be an eccentric inventor or a wacky grandpa or a citizen of some larger elf universe. We were certain that the photo was taken in Ontario, Canada, in the early nineties. But its exact provenance was unknown, and solving the mystery had become a pet project for thousands of people online. Nobody had ever succeeded, though many had spent fruitless hours trying. Back in 2019, my girlfriend had asked whether I would post the photo on Twitter. I did, to no avail. Now, over dinner, she asked whether I would try again. Maybe this time, somebody would finally have the answer and we could move on with our lives.

There is something about the cartoon that is specific enough to make virtually everyone who sees it believe that they recognize it, but vague enough that nobody actually can. It definitely looks like it was animated in the late eighties or early nineties. It doesn’t look like Disney. It looks like it could be the work of Don Bluth, the one-time Disney animator who went on to direct “An American Tail” and “A Troll in Central Park,” except that those movies have been watched and rewatched by millions of people, and even their minor characters would surely be instantly recognizable to many. The photo’s Canadian origin suggests that the image could be a product of the Canuck animation studio Nelvana, which helped create such Saturday morning slot-fillers as “Rock & Rule” and “Star Wars: Droids.” I’ve seen dozens upon dozens of people suggesting that it might come from a mid-eighties series called “The Littles.” This seemed possible to me, but, just as I was about to binge every episode of “The Littles” at double speed, someone pointed out that the Littles had five fingers on each of their hands, whereas the character in question has only four. Please, stop suggesting “The Littles.”

When I first posted the image, I didn’t yet fully grasp the long and tangled history of what one fellow-traveller called the “cursed elf abyss.” I mistakenly thought that the source photo belonged to a friend of my girlfriend’s, because the friend had created a Facebook post trying to identify the character, amassing hundreds of replies over several years. Looking further into the photo’s history, I learned that it actually belonged to a friend of a friend of my girlfriend’s: Emily Charette, who works in marketing communications and lives in Ottawa, Ontario. The family photograph the cartoon appears in shows Charette as a young girl with her two older siblings. They are sitting on the floor, grinning at the camera, with the TV set visible behind them. Charette first posted a zoomed-in image of the elf man on her office Slack in May of 2016, and asked her co-workers whether they recognized it. One colleague shared the picture on Facebook, and it began circulating widely within his extended social circle. A couple of days later, the comic artist Sophie Campbell created perhaps the single most important piece of scholarship about the image: a long Tumblr post that enumerated and ruled out every plausible contender: “Thumbelina,” “The Smurfs,” “The Magician’s Hat,” the “Teen Wolf” cartoon, and, of course, “The Littles.” (Campbell recalled, of all the old shows she sifted through, “It was my full-time job for a week.”) Many of these titles were floated and rejected again when I shared the image on Twitter in 2019, and yet again when a small crop of threads sprang up on Reddit. If you do a reverse-image search of the photo, you’ll mostly find social-media posts from these previous viral moments. The larger the hunt grew, the harder it became to find information on anything besides the hunt itself.

After much frustration and too many hours spent combing through awful episodes of “Stop the Smoggies,” my loved ones and I became resigned to never learning the truth about the elf man. But in the words of Mr. Bernstein in “Citizen Kane,” referring to that girl in the white dress, I’ll bet a month hadn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that elf. There is something about the little guy that burrows his way into the brain. From one vantage, there was comfort in the idea that some mysteries are so deep that even the Internet cannot solve them. But, from another, the elf seemed to violate the utopian promise that the Web contains the answer to literally any question. At the very least, I wanted to stop thinking about this.

*snip*

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