Episode seems to have never existed outside of my old VCR tape?
On an old VHS tape from my childhood, I still have this Eastern European cartoon about a little mole.
I decided to do a bit of digging.
And a quick Google search helped me with identifying it as a part of the Czech franchise "Krtek".
Alright, that makes a lot of sense.
There were plenty of Eastern European children's shows on TV here in Sweden in the late 1980s.
And many of them seem to be from the country, that was then known as Czechoslovakia.
But when I wanted to pinpoint my "episode", I had to start wondering if something weird is going on.
For I can't seem to be able to track it down!
If I go through the lists of all the "Krtek" episodes, it seems to not be there.
And a few things makes me really wonder what my family happened to tape back then.
Let's start with that all of the text in "my" episode is written with Cyrillic letters.
Which is really strange since the Czech traditionally are Catholics.
So a cartoon made in the Czech language would use a form of the Latin alphabet.
Which makes it seem like "my" episode was made in Russia or Ukraine or something...
Also, it seems that most of the "Krtek" cartoons that I find on the Internet don't have much (if any) dialogue.
But there is a lot of dialogue between different characters in "my" episode, even if Krtek himself is rather quiet.
Which adds yet another layer of mystery to this...
Here comes a summary of "my" episode:
It is about Krtek wanting to help the other animals around him, but it seems to only backfire on him.
It starts with that a bird accuses him of scaring her and her kids.
Krtek then believes that a frog is drowning in a pond and drains it from water, but that only gets the frog angry.
After that, Krtek saves a butterfly from being eaten by a spider and makes the spider angry with him as well.
When it reaches this point, all of the "wronged" animals decide that Krtek has to be punished.
So he must face a trial before an owl, who appears to be their judge in legal matters.
But the owl ends up being more sympathetic towards Krtek than his accusers had believed in their anger.
And fortunately, the butterfly whom Krtek saved from the sprider also helps out by testifying on his behalf.
So he is formally acquitted and won't be punished by the law.
However, this just makes his accusers who still hate him even angrier.
So the spider tells him to dig himself down into the ground, so they won't have to see him again.
Luckily, Krtek is taken away into security by this elderly mole.
(He may be Krtek's grandfather, but I can neither confirm or disprove that without more information.)
And that is pretty much how the story ends.
Also, this episode can't have been made after 1987.
Because that is the year, that it seems to have been shown on TV over here in Sweden.
And that is all, that I can tell you.
Does anybody have any idea about when and where this episode was made?