Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context. If you have a question, try to include as much detail as possible.

• Define any acronyms.

• Link and archive any sources.

• Ctrl+F or use an offsite search to see if someone's posted about the topic already.

• Keep discussions civil. This post is monitored by your mod team.

• If your particular drama has concluded at least 2 weeks ago, consider making a full post instead of a Scuffles comment. We also welcome reposting of long-form Scuffles posts and/or series with multiple updates.

Certain topics are banned from discussion to pre-empt unnecessary toxicity. The list can be found here. Please check that your post complies with these requirements before submitting!

Previous Scuffles can be found here

For easy access to past and present Scuffles, bookmark scuffle.zone or type it in your address bar to access the current Scuffles thread, or scuffle.zone/all to see all Scuffles threads from newest to oldest. And if you prefer Old Reddit, just type old. beforehand. Thanks to u/azqy for setting this up!

r/HobbyDrama also has an affiliated Discord server, which you can join here: https://discord.gg/M7jGmMp9dn

Content warning: mentions of death threats

Intro

If you have a morbid fascination with watching internet fandoms light themselves on fire over media intended for preschoolers, this just might be the story for you. This story primarily involves an internet community with a fairly simple goal - one whose conclusion is dangled over their head just out of reach for years, that is until they look beyond the carrot and notice who's holding the stick.

Lost Media

The lost media community is an online community of amateur sleuths whose goal is to research, document, and hopefully find and archive lost media.

The precise definition of what constitutes lost media differs depending on who you ask, and is a highly debated subject within the community. Some define lost media strictly as media that used to be publicly available but isn't anymore, whether due to being lost to the sands of time, or intentionally censored/hidden from the public. Examples of this include silent-era films (most of which are thought to be permanently gone due to the fragile and flammable nature of early film reels), and instances such as episode 847 of Sesame Street, which featured the Wicked Witch of the West and was pulled from airing due to the character scaring kids.

Others believe that other types of rare or mysterious media also counts, such as unidentified media, which is media that may be publicly available but is too obscure to find through traditional internet searches. An example of this would be O parádivé Sally, also known by its community nickname "Clock Man" - an obscure animated short that for many years was unknown and remembered primarily for a scene in which a bearded man jumps out of a clock and carries away a child.

Relevant to this story, another subset of media to commonly fall under the lost media umbrella is unreleased media - media that was never meant to be publicly available in the first place. This includes things such as early builds of video games, music demos, unaired TV show pilots and production material from movies (such as the "I Feel Good" Shrek test animation).

No matter the precise definition, the mission statement of the community is to find lost and rare media and post it to the Internet Archive for public viewing and preservation. Many in the community believe that media preservation is important, as it helps preserve culture and history - even trivial media like obscure cartoons or commercials are deemed valuable and worthy of being saved. It's common for members of the community to be openly hostile to the concept of hoarding or "gatekeeping" media, particularly in cases of third-party collectors obtaining rare media and keeping it to themselves to retain its value.

Me and My Friends

The Backyardigans is an American 3D-animated show that aired on Nickelodeon from 2004 to 2013. It follows a cast of anthropomorphic animal characters as they use their imaginations to go on grand adventures in their shared backyard. It is a show that is nostalgic to a lot of Gen Z Americans, so any new information about its history or development was bound to catch a lot of attention and intrigue.

In 2012, a YouTube channel by the name of avavideos1 posted a video they uncovered which was originally created by the staff at Nickelodeon Studios Florida back in 2000, for the studio's 10th anniversary. It consists of a montage of show clips and behind-the-scenes footage which was filmed at the studio. At around the 3:32 mark, there is a 3-second clip featuring the Backyardigans characters - already noteworthy as the show wouldn't come out for another 4 years, but the style is also wildly different from the final show. Rather than 3D animation, the clip is live-action, with the characters portrayed as full-body costumes. The title at this point was also unfinalized, as the clip is labeled Me and My Friends Pilot.

The Search Begins

Due to the discovery of an unavailable piece of media, and the media being connected to a popular show from many people's childhoods, lost media enthusiasts were eager to learn more about it. Some initial research led users to the Backyardigans Wiki, which had already started compiling information about its production, and was the sole source of much of the initial search efforts. From this page, it was revealed that the Me and My Friends pilot was filmed back in 1998 and pitched to Nickelodeon, and was rejected in favor of Dora the Explorer. But in 2001, the idea was reworked into a second pilot, where the name was changed to The Backyardigans, was animated in CGI and more closely resembled the final show. Some photos from Yvette Helin Studio, the company that made the costumes for Me and My Friends, were also uncovered, which showed some photos of the costumes as well as puppets for 3 meerkat characters, which were evidently in the pilot but didn't make it to the final show.

The First Signs of Trouble

Lost media YouTuber LSuperSonicQ compiled all of this information in a video he posted to his channel in 2017, which became widely popular within the community, putting many new eyes onto the pilot's existence. However, shortly after the video was uploaded, it was taken down by YouTube, and LSSQ's channel was issued a copyright strike. A day later, he received an email from someone claiming to be a lawyer. According to the lawyer, one of his viewers had watched the video, and this had inspired them to track down the name and email of a former crew member who worked on the second animated pilot. This individual then sent the crew member a death threat for not releasing the pilot online, causing them fear and upset. LSSQ was spooked by this incident and quickly deleted the video to be rid of the copyright strike, and explained to his followers what had happened. He later posted an unlisted reupload of the original video with any mentions of the CGI pilot removed.

This incident brought the search for Me and My Friends to a halt, as some lone wolf threatening a former Nickelodeon employee likely burned a lot of bridges before they could be built. It's generally accepted in the community that if you're going to try and contact people involved in a piece of media's production to ask for information, there's some strict etiquette to adhere to. Let one person be the one to contact them, be cordial and professional, be polite and understanding if they can't help you, and stop emailing them if they've given all that they can. Without these guidelines, it's very easy for even well-meaning users to effectively spam and harass people who are just trying to do their jobs, and can cut the community off from people who might be able to help them with their search. A crew member being sent a death threat by a troll might as well have put the entire community on a blacklist, with anyone who could be of help being warned away from interacting with the community.

A post on the Lost Media Wiki Forums indicates there was some conflict over whether the search should even continue, and some speculation that the incident jeopardized searches for other Nickelodeon lost media. LSSQ also expressed frustration with his feeling like some were blaming him for the incident and influencing other users' behavior due to the popularity of his videos.

>I kinda just want to say that my channel isn't (and was never intended to be) a hub of active search parties- that's what this website is for. Just because I make a video of something doesn't mean I'm trying to tell people to go out on a massive manhunt and search for it. I make videos for entertainment sake and if anyone wants to participate in a search from that point on that's their own business.

The Search Revival

Despite the determination of some to not let the search die, it largely went quiet for the next few years. But in 2020, a new lost media YouTuber by the name of SewerReviewer made his own video (volume warning at around 1:23) on the subject. He summarized the search thus far, and mentioned several people connected to the pilot that he had contacted, with no luck. This video also became very popular, and introduced a new round of people to the search, to the point of revitalizing it. A public Discord server dedicated to the Me and My Friends search was flooded with new users, eager for news and updates.

This second wind of popularity led to SewerReviewer, LSSQ and a small group of searchers to split off into their own private Discord server, which they dubbed Lostcast. Here, they went over all the information they currently had and brainstormed new search ideas. They had decided to conduct a focused search for Me and My Friends privately, partially to block out the extraneous discussion and unverified rumors spreading throughout the public server, and partially to keep any contact information of potential leads private to avoid another death threat incident.

The first person of interest to contact the private server was a user known as JenPen, who claimed to have acquired some valuable information about the pilot. They posted a never-before-seen production photo as proof, known as the elusive "pink frog photo." This photo depicted what appeared to be a pink frog puppet alongside one of the meerkats, and may have been yet another character from the pilot that was then unknown to the search team. However, JenPen very soon after deleted the photo, claiming they didn't have permission to share it, and asked the other server members not to. This didn't seem too suspicious - it had happened a few times that lost media was leaked to the internet by someone with internal access, and it was often done in a cryptic or convoluted way to try and prevent the leak from being traced back to them. Still, this was the first piece of material related to the pilot that had been uncovered in years, so a Lostcast member by the name of Mr. Bones drew the photo from memory, with the hope it might be useful in the future.

Due to this find, JenPen was invited into the private server, and there they revealed something else - they had found a crew member by the name of John Paul, who used to have a public Twitter account and email, and sent him a message. They provided a screenshot of their email correspondence, in which Paul provided some information about the pilot, but stated he didn't have a copy of it. His name was new to the search team, but seeing as he didn't have any information on where to find the pilot, he could safely be ruled out.

Soon after this correspondence, JenPen mysteriously stopped responding to messages and left the server, never to be seen again.

But hope persevered, as another Lostcast member managed to find the personal email of the head of Yvette Helin Studios. They sent an email asking for information, and the owner replied with a large collection of new production photos. These photos depicted the actors in various states of dress in the costumes, from headless backstage, to fully costumed and standing on different parts of the set with handlers cooling them down with fans, and sometimes surrounded by or holding props. These new photos were exciting to the search team, as they showed more of what the set looked like, and gave a few more clues as to what the pilot's storyline might have been.

This new collection of content was shared in an archived livestream on LSSQ's channel, then added to the gallery on the Lost Media Wiki article for Me and My Friends. Some older comments on this livestream express confidence that the pilot was very close to being found. Although LSSQ himself makes a comment that the search has played out in a very unusual way, with its start-and-stop nature of a lot of progress being made all at once followed by months to years of no activity, as well as a lot of confusion over which crew members have and haven't already been contacted.

In a bid for more leads, Lostcast reached out to the admins of the Backyardigans Wiki - after all, they seemed to have searched for the pilot the longest, so if anyone would have any important information, it would be them. Two admins responded, giving a list of names and stating all of them had already been contacted and didn't have much information to share. Any new names the admins mentioned were immediately added to a list of people to rule out and not contact - again, the etiquette of the lost media community is to never contact people who have already provided any information they could or would, because it would be rude to continue to bother them about it.

The wiki admins also mentioned that not only had they been searching for the pilot the longest, its existence was discovered sort of by accident, by one user known as Sandra:

>Sandra was doing research on a 2008 live show of The Backyardigans, which Yvette Helin designed...Sandra went to Yvette's website looking for info on the 2008 show, and she discovered the M&MF pictures...At the time, the pictures were just labeled "Me & My Friends Pilot" with no mention of Backyardigans...We googled it, and there were barely any results...Fortunately, we found Rick Lyon's site, which dated it to 1998...From that point, we knew it was the first-ever pilot, and we were able to piece together an article about M&MF for the wiki...A few years later, our article's info was copied over to the Lost Media Wiki, and the rest is history.

While initial conversations with the wiki admins seemed promising, the relationship gradually soured over time. The admins grew slower in their responses to Lostcast members' messages, and any new mentions of potential contacts were automatically met with claims that the wiki admins had already reached out to them. This led to Lostcast feeling as though the admins were giving them the cold shoulder, and they speculated that the admins didn't trust them enough to share much information with them. Or that perhaps they thought the lost media community was "stealing their thunder," given the comment about the Lost Media Wiki "copying" the Me and My Friends article from the Backyardigans Wiki. Either way, communication with them eventually ended on a sour note.

A Crack In the Search (and Facade)

Unbeknownst to the users of Lostcast, a lone individual from the public discord server under the name BerLostMedia had been conducting his own search for the pilot independently. Because he was not part of Lostcast, he was not aware of their do-not-contact list, and so he went ahead and sent inquiries to any new names he found on his own. He managed to reach out to Mark Delvecchio, an illustrator who had created the original designs for the Backyardigans characters as seen in Me and My Friends. Delvecchio provided his own personal photos from the set of the pilot, showing yet more shots of the costumes, as well as an infamously "liminal space" coded shot of the set in ominously low lighting. Ber posted these findings to Discord, and they soon made their way to the Lostcast server. Upon learning of their source, it struck the Lostcast members with confusion - Mark Delvecchio was on the list of contacts that had already been ruled out, as he allegedly didn't have anything to share. If this was the case, why was he able and willing to provide brand new material to Ber?

This led the search team to reconsider their list of discarded contacts. A few years had passed between the time they had been ruled out, and when Ber contacted Delvecchio. Perhaps some old leads could be recontacted to see if they had come across anything in the meantime. The first lead they pursued was Laura Kingsley, the director of the Me and My Friends pilot. They found her LinkedIn and sent her a message, asking for information on the pilot and if she had a copy. Her response read as follows:

>No plot, really. A premise. For the pilot, it was the concept that if you are "waiting" and doing nothing, it feels like things take forever. But if you get involved with other things, the time passes and you enjoy your time. Geared towards small children.

>There is just the pilot but nothing I can share. Hopefully you'll stumble upon it somewhere someday. It was a really sweet, and charming little show. Thanks for your interest. take care.

Some Lostcast members were disappointed that Kingsley seemed to turn down their request to share the pilot before they could even ask it. Still, this was an incredible piece of insight regardless, especially because not even the Backyardigans Wiki so much as mentioned a plot synopsis on their page.

The next blow came when Ber contacted Hiro Tanaka - an engineer who had worked on the pilot, and another name that Lostcast had thought they'd ruled out - and he recommended reaching out to his colleague, Michael Reilly. When Ber posted this name publicly, it sent shockwaves throughout the Lostcast server - Michael Reilly was on the list of known contacts, but under a completely different first name. Every mention on both the Backyardigans Wiki and subsequent lists of known crew members had his name listed as Thomas Reilly. This strange discrepancy came as a shock to the search team, and led some to wonder how a group as knowledgeable, strict and thorough as the wiki admins had allowed an incorrect name to be posted to their page.

Days after this discovery, the Me and My Friends page on the Backyardigans Wiki was found to have been updated by a user. This was significant as the admins had kept the page locked, so no one could make edits to it without their approval. This user, known as Oggy, quietly made two edits - one correcting Reilly's name, and the other adding a brand new production photo to the gallery. The discovery that they had more content that nobody in the search team had seen before led Lostcast to add them to their server, to see if they had any other material they could help with. Oggy claimed the new photo came from a storyboard artist they had contacted, and provided a screenshot of their email correspondence with said artist. Other than this, they didn't say much else.

But Lostcast had another lead on the table, so they contacted Reilly and asked for information. Reilly responded and revealed with photographic evidence that he possessed a VHS copy of the pilot, as well as a second VHS containing rehearsal footage. He came across in initial emails as very friendly and forthcoming with information, and even expressed interest in digitizing and releasing the tape. This was beyond exciting to the search team - after several years of trying to find this pilot, and only getting an occasional handful of production photos and at least one confirmation of a crew member having a copy and choosing not to share it, they might finally get actual footage of the actual pilot.

In his next email, however, he mentioned that he was going to ask his old boss if he could release the tape. This formed a pit in the stomachs of the search team, as any superior would likely tell him no. Nickelodeon, and its parent company Paramount, are notoriously protective of their IP - they are incredibly liberal with copyright takedowns of their work that was commercially released, even if it's no longer airing. Unreleased content such as pitch pilots tend to be under even greater lock and key.

This fear was further realized when Reilly stopped responding to emails altogether - no updates or confirmation on whether he was able to release the pilot or not, he completely ghosted the search team.

LSSQ shared this update on the forums:

>The tape guy wasn't post production but he did work directly on the pilot. In one of his earliest emails, he mentioned wanting to ask his old boss for permission to release it. I'm guessing his old boss was a former Nickelodeon executive and told him not to, which is why he stopped emailing us completely.

However, there was an underlying suspicion that if this were the case, Reilly would have let them know that he couldn't release it, as he had initially been very communicative and enthusiastic about the prospect. To get radio silence despite multiple follow-up emails led to discussions within the Lostcast team that they might have had something similar to the death threat incident, where an outsider sabotaged their correspondence by making the lost media community look bad in such a way that Reilly was compelled to cut all contact with them.

There was also a greater level of distrust with some of their contacts, particularly JenPen and Oggy, as their unwillingness to share their finds with the wider community led to the tinfoil hat theory that they deliberately baited the search team with new material to be let into their spaces, wherein they spied on the activity in Lostcast's private server and leaked information shared there. Due to similar caginess coming from the wiki admins, stemming from their frustration with the lost media community getting in on the search, it was speculated that they might have all been working together to try and sabotage the lost media community's search efforts. But this was all just conjecture, and there was plenty of room for other factors making the search for the pilot so difficult.

The Smoking Gun

After the disappointment of losing contact with the singular person who was known to have a copy of the pilot and a willingness to release it, leads once again dried up. All the search team could do was backtrack through all the information they already had, looking for anything that might have been missed. Lostcast members started with going through the edit history of the Me and My Friends page on the Backyardigans Wiki, to figure out when certain crew members were added, and what order information was discovered and posted in.

BerLostMedia did this on his own as well, but he took an additional approach. Since the wiki admins claimed that their information was copied over to the Lost Media Wiki, he decided to check its edit history as well, to build a more complete timeline of information.

And then, in doing so, a devastating piece of information was brought to the surface. Ber discovered that the Lost Media Wiki page for Me and My Friends had been temporarily deleted in 2016, with a log of who deleted it and their stated reason. The page was found to have been deleted by one of the admins of the Backyardigans Wiki, and their reasoning read as follows:

>The admins at The Backyardigans Wiki all have a copy. Most content on this page is false, and it is appearing in search results in place of our own work.

This revelation came as a massive shock to the search team, as it implied that the Backyardigans Wiki admins had already found the pilot, at least as early as 2016 - before most lost media enthusiasts even knew about its existence - and they were hiding it from the public. This already would have been irritating to the lost media community due to their anti-hoarding stance, but the revelation that they were in possession of the pilot basically the entire time the lost media search existed came across as insidious to the search team. They had been in correspondence with the admins, who were communicative with leads they had supposedly chased and ruled out. If they actually had the pilot by that point, that just meant they were lying about being in the middle of their own investigation. And elements like supposedly dead leads being revisited and providing new information, and Michael Reilly's incorrect first name, would indicate the admins were spreading purposefully wrong information to lead the search team on a wild goose chase to keep them from finding another copy.

Several bits of information and frustrations that surfaced throughout the search were called into question. The search team harkened back to the copyright strike and message from a lawyer that LSSQ had gotten, and speculated that the copyright strike was frivolous (famously not hard to do on YouTube) and that the "lawyer" was actually a sockpuppet of the admins in an early attempt to quash the budding search. Whether this is substantiated or not, the email was generally regarded as a troll rather than an actual lawyer pursuing legal action, as the supposed lawyer had contacted LSSQ using a standard Gmail account, while lawyers typically use custom domains using their firm name. It also didn't make sense to them that a YouTuber could be found liable for influencing an individual to threaten someone whose name and contact info were not mentioned or alluded to in the video itself.

JenPen, the user who briefly shared the "pink frog photo" and claimed to get some information about the pilot from John Paul (including a supposed screenshot of their email correspondence), was now met with skepticism after Ber reached out to Paul himself and was told that he did work at Nickelodeon Studios Florida, but not on the Me and My Friends pilot, contradicting what was written in JenPen's email. Similarly, the storyboard artist that Oggy claimed to have spoken to and gotten a photo from was called into question, and they found that the address attached to the email was fake. When the artist's actual email was found and contacted, he responded that he didn't have anything to share, so the photo wouldn't have come from him.

These discoveries led to a stronger conviction that these two were spy accounts for the wiki admins to keep up with the search team, especially since Oggy was added to the Lostcast server days after Michael Reilly's real name and contact info was found, and he was still in the server when Reilly stopped responding to the search team's inquiries about the pilot. This led to suspicions that Oggy or someone they were affiliated with had sent Reilly an email designed to discourage him from talking to the search team (though this appears to be unconfirmed).

Many of the wiki admin's claims of contacting specific crew members with no luck had already been called into question when one of them did end up having a lot of information and photos, and another had a different name. But while before it was suspected that they simply didn't want to work with the lost media community and didn't trust them with their information, the discovery of the Lost Media Wiki edit had steered the narrative toward the idea that the admins wanted to be the only ones who possessed the pilot, and that they were bitter that their research into the pilot was overshadowed by that of the lost media community.

All this information was shared in a video uploaded by LSSQ, which sent the wider community into disarray. This revelation led to a lot of anger among the wider community, with many users flooding into the Me and My Friends page on Backyardigans Wiki and vandalizing it with comments calling the admins gatekeepers and liars. There are roughly 500 edits logged on the history page, and the majority of them are these troll edits.

This led to a discussion on the Lost Media Wiki Forums about the whole ordeal. Most were angry at the prospect that the admins had not only hoarded a highly sought after piece of media, but also obfuscated such information to retain their sole ownership of it. There were, however, people who were upset with how some members of the community acted in response to LSSQ's video by harassing the admins and defiling their page, with one user suggesting some blame on LSSQ's part for sharing what amounts to theories and conjecture with conviction to his large audience, who likely made the fallout more of a shitshow than it needed to be.

>Here's a hot take:

>I get why people have a problem with the concept of hoarding, but regardless I think that [the] point still stands.

>This behavior and the method of contact was poorly chosen and needs to be ceased.
Combatting who may either be innocent or gluttonous with aggressive offers and pleas might make things worse than what the theory originally intended.

>These users may not in actuality be part of any major point of Lost Media discussion, and could be, oh I don't know, random Reddit users.
Wherever this activity came from, I think that LSSQ should've said something at the very beginning about his stance on this theory, and whether or not he is intending on the manpower of his views for research.

Regardless of who was to blame for what behavior, the entire search had collapsed. There were no more crew members to contact, and the only known copies of the pilot were being fiercely protected. The only option left was simply to wait, to see if the admins would relent and share the pilot, or if someone would take notice of the demand and leak it from another source.

It's Finally Over

In June 2025, roughly 6 months after the revelation of the admins hoarding the pilot, a popular lost media Twitter account known as Lost Media Busters made a post dedicated to Me and My Friends, posting some of the production photos alongside some text wishing for it to be found. Soon after, this account was DMed by an anonymous user known as P, who claimed to have the pilot via backdoor access to Paramount's servers. To quell any skepticism of P being a troll, they sent LMB a few screenshots of the pilot. This proved they had it without a doubt - until then, the only material from Me and My Friends that had ever been dug up (besides the initial 3-second clip) was a slew of behind-the-scenes shots. This was the first taste of any footage from the actual pilot itself.

P offered to send LMB the pilot, and LMB enthusiastically agreed. When LMB received the video file, they began downloading it. But suddenly, P rescinded the file mid-download. They then explained that they had been warned against sending it by other members of their community, as doing so would catch Paramount's attention, and cause them to tighten security that could deprive them of their access to Paramount's servers.

This news was a blow to morale, but nothing new that hadn't already happened several times in the search's history. If nothing else, the screenshots that P shared, as well as the small fragment LMB had recovered from the incomplete download, were still cherished, as it was the only look into the actual pilot that had surfaced since the initial 3-second clip.

However, any disappointment from the incident was short-lived. On June 26 2025 - 8 years after LSSQ's initial video on the subject, 13 years after the initial 3-second clip was discovered and 14 years after the first documentation of it on the Backyardigans Wiki - the full Me and My Friends pilot was leaked onto 4chan by an anonymous user. The video download was accompanied by the text:

>fuck you BYwiki

>happy brat summer, love PUNGAS

Given the timing of the post, there was some speculation as to the identity of the leaker, whether it was P or one of the wiki admins going rogue. Regardless, members of the lost media community were enthralled with the find, and were quick to download copies of the pilot for preservation. Me and My Friends was officially found media.

After news of the leak spread, one of the wiki admins got back into contact with Lostcast to tell their side of the story. They confirmed many of the accusations made against them in LSSQ's video, that they had purposefully led the search team astray to continue to hoard the pilot. But they also claimed they were being compelled to do so - that an older admin, known as K, had been the one to obtain the pilot (as well as loads of other unreleased Backyardigans-related material) through an unauthorized breach of Nickelodeon's digital archive. K had distributed the pilot to the other admins, but warned them not to share it publicly. This had initially been an act of caution, as K had obtained the pilot through illegal means. But over time, a sense of power and control had taken root, and K had continuously bullied the other admins into keeping quiet about the pilot, and even a suggestion toward sharing it was met with a swarm of angry messages and doxxing threats.

>Even years back I thought the harmless/non-sensitive stuff [...] should be released to the public. I have old emails to prove this too. But other admins would beg me not to share stuff from there, for various reasons, some valid and others a little crazy, but it was all within the realm of fandom drama.

>Not wanting to rock the boat and upset these people, I didn't upload anything at first. Eventually [Sandra] gave me the OK to release bits and pieces of things (HD episodes, high-res character artwork) against M and the Sheehans wishes, but not the pilot or production material. Even mentioning uploading the pilot caused certain people to fly into a rage, as if this file was a prized possession or something. Some of the other admins had my personal phone number and other details [...]

>As for the pilot itself, I was still genuinely interested in finding production photos plus bonus footage, so I continued to reach out to crew members myself. This is where the photo from [Oggy] (actually one of these ex-users under a new name) came from, as I shared it with them. But certain people went to great lengths to interfere with MY search, as well as the newer searches led by the Lost Media Wiki [...]

The Aftermath

The discovery of the Me and My Friends pilot was met with a lot of mixed emotions. Some were excited that it was finally uncovered after so many years of searching. Many Lostcast members remained friends afterwards, and believe they wouldn't have been so close if not for the search.

There was also despair for the ungraceful way the search had ended, with many wishing the pilot could have been acquired in a more cordial and legal way than through a 4chan leak.

But for the most part, the pilot itself appears to have been overshadowed by the drama that had overtaken the search. There had been instances before of lost media being hoarded, and sometimes involved hoarders trolling the community or offering to sell the media to them at an exorbitant price. But the hoarding of Me and My Friends went beyond basking in exclusivity and into the territory of actively messing with any efforts that threatened that exclusivity. LSSQ stated that he would have been fine if the wiki admins had admitted upfront that they had a copy of the pilot but weren't interested in sharing it - what upset him was not the hoarding, but the way they made it a point to interfere with any effort by the lost media community to find their own copy. This manipulation was, for him and many others, what made Me and My Friends the worst lost media search in the community's history.

It was all the more baffling (yet arguably not so surprising) that all of this effort had been in service of a pilot to a preschool TV show. Quoth SewerReviewer at the start of YouTuber BlameItOnJorge's retrospective video on the search:

>It's so stupid. It's so dumb. Why The Backyardigans? I don't get it.

Jorge concludes the video by stating that if the wiki admins had quietly released the pilot publicly back when they found it, there would never have been a search to find it, it simply would have been online and few would have questioned where it came from. Or if the admins had decided to simply ignore the search team, the search would have either continued without them or petered out the way many long searches do. But in their efforts to quash anyone else's access to the pilot, they had Streisand-Effect-ed their way into creating a lost media search team that only grew larger and more fervent the longer the search went on, thus sealing their fate of losing control over the situation.

Many lost media searches drag on so long that they are remembered more for the search than the media itself. But Me and My Friends might be one of the few instances of the media's discovery being met less with excitement and more with exhausted conviction. It is a piece of found media celebrated less for its content and history, and more as a cathartic conclusion to a decade-long power trip.

Hello hobbyists!

This thread is for community updates, suggestions and feedback. Feel free to leave your comments and concerns about the subreddit below, as our mod team monitors this thread in order to improve the subreddit and community experience.

As I fielded many questions about this at the last town hall: I want to repeat, AI IS BANNED on r/hobbydrama. We do not allow AI comments, posts, etc. However, we aren't going to remove anything based on hearsay, only if there's definitive proof the OP used AI.

Also, we aren't going to field anymore questions on splitting scuffles into two threads. Casual hobby talk is allowed in scuffles, and it's easier for users and mods to navigate one thread rather than two. This comment chain here does a good job of outlining the issues with splitting scuffles into two threads.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context. If you have a question, try to include as much detail as possible.

• Define any acronyms.

• Link and archive any sources.

• Ctrl+F or use an offsite search to see if someone's posted about the topic already.

• Keep discussions civil. This post is monitored by your mod team.

• If your particular drama has concluded at least 2 weeks ago, consider making a full post instead of a Scuffles comment. We also welcome reposting of long-form Scuffles posts and/or series with multiple updates.

Certain topics are banned from discussion to pre-empt unnecessary toxicity. The list can be found here. Please check that your post complies with these requirements before submitting!

Previous Scuffles can be found here

For easy access to past and present Scuffles, bookmark scuffle.zone or type it in your address bar to access the current Scuffles thread, or scuffle.zone/all to see all Scuffles threads from newest to oldest. And if you prefer Old Reddit, just type old. beforehand. Thanks to u/azqy for setting this up!

r/HobbyDrama also has an affiliated Discord server, which you can join here: https://discord.gg/M7jGmMp9dn

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context. If you have a question, try to include as much detail as possible.

• Define any acronyms.

• Link and archive any sources.

• Ctrl+F or use an offsite search to see if someone's posted about the topic already.

• Keep discussions civil. This post is monitored by your mod team.

• If your particular drama has concluded at least 2 weeks ago, consider making a full post instead of a Scuffles comment. We also welcome reposting of long-form Scuffles posts and/or series with multiple updates.

Certain topics are banned from discussion to pre-empt unnecessary toxicity. The list can be found here. Please check that your post complies with these requirements before submitting!

Previous Scuffles can be found here

For easy access to past and present Scuffles, bookmark scuffle.zone or type it in your address bar to access the current Scuffles thread, or scuffle.zone/all to see all Scuffles threads from newest to oldest. And if you prefer Old Reddit, just type old. beforehand. Thanks to u/azqy for setting this up!

r/HobbyDrama also has an affiliated Discord server, which you can join here: https://discord.gg/M7jGmMp9dn

Hey everyone. Deja vu. It looks like lightning just struck twice in Dallas.

Within a few months, two completely separate six-figure stashes of highly restricted, uncut trading card sheets—spanning Yu-Gi-Oh!, Magic: The Gathering, and Disney’s Lorcana—have flooded the uncut sheet market.

If you aren't familiar with the original Dallas Dumpster Heist, here is the quick TL;DR: A couple of months ago, a man we’ll call "C" became an instant legend when he pulled hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, uncut sheets, test prints, and blisters straight out of a Dallas dumpster. He sold it all for pennies and faked insane stories, and his mother completely crashed out on the uncut sheet community. Ultimately, most of the sheets were returned for free, though somewhere between $20k–$100k in individual cards had already been sold. (You can read the full r/HobbyDrama write-up here: r/HobbyDrama write-up here.

You’d think that was a once-in-a-lifetime anomaly. It wasn't. Now, a massive flood of MTG and Lorcana sheets has surfaced in the exact same city. Here is what is going down in the TCG community now.

The Grail Stash Surfaces

To understand why this is crazy, you need a little background on MTG uncut sheets. Out of the "Big Three" (Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and MTG), Magic sheets are generally the easiest to come across. Wizards of the Coast (WotC) gives them out casually at tournaments or charity auctions. Even these "common" legitimate sheets fetch hundreds of dollars, while vintage grail sheets can push six figures.

Here is the catch: The sheets WotC gives away are properly printed, finalized product.They do not hand out misprinted uncut sheets as tournament prizes. At any given time, there are maybe 50 MTG sheets total listed on eBay, making them fairly niche and rare.

On May 13, 2026, a massive MTG stash surfaced in the uncut sheet collectors' Facebook group, consisting of a few hundred uncut sheets printed between 2020 and 2025. Many of these are misprints, test prints, showcase sheets, and highly sought-after sets like Lord of the Rings. It is truly a mountain of modern grails for a subset of collectors.

Just like the Yu-Gi-Oh! dumpster heist, dumping these hyper-rare sheets onto the market all at once is one of the worst ways to maximize their value—unless your goal is to liquidate them ASAP.

Collectors immediately started scooping them up, but it was silently understood that this collection wasn't obtained legitimately. WotC doesn't hand out test prints. Plus, the seller was also moving Disney Lorcana sheets, which currently have no legitimate path to public ownership. Because of the sheer quantity and nature of the sheets, it was obvious these were pulled off the production or discard line.

The Stars Align

So, where is all this unreleased TCG product coming from?

The sheets allegedly came from an employee at the Cartamundi printing facility in Dallas, who "gifted" this massive stack to a guy we’ll call "L." Just like the guy who found the Yu-Gi-Oh! sheets in the dumpster, L seemed completely clueless about the absolute goldmine he was sitting on. He immediately started posting pictures, trying to offload them all at once.

This is where the stars align for another chaotic twist. During the original Yu-Gi-Oh! dumpster heist, our first guy, C, had tried to sell his uncut sheets to a local Dallas card shop. Fast forward to early May: at that exact same card shop, we introduce "B."

B was judging a Magic tournament at the shop when a player told him someone in the area was trying to sell a massive stack of uncut sheets. B went to check it out and ended up acquiring around 60 of these full-size MTG and Lorcana sheets. (As of this writing, he has sold all 60 of them for between $200 and $6,000 USD each). Another buyer, who happened to be in town dealing for a local card show, scooped up the remaining sheets and reportedly sent them to an auction house. We will have to wait and see if they actually end up at auction.

How did a random employee walk out the front door with hundreds of uncut sheets? According to the story B shared in the Facebook group, he was told that Cartamundi was disassembling some of their massive industrial printing presses. The employee claimed these printers have an "internal catch mechanism" where sheets can get stuck or jammed during production over time. He supposedly asked his manager if he could keep the sheets they pulled out during the teardown, and the manager just said, "Sure."

My thoughts: The idea that hundreds of pristine, uncut sheets were just chilling in an internal drip tray for years without getting shredded, crumpled, or soaked in machine oil is wild. If anything, they were pulled from an external reject pile, a storage room, or someone was quietly taking product home. Also, a printing facility manager casually saying, "Yeah, sure, go ahead and walk out with a massive stack of unreleased, licensed intellectual property" is insane. Walking out with that many uncut sheets is not an easy task.

Cartamundi & WotC Shrug It Off

Because the whole situation felt incredibly sketchy, B claims he personally called Cartamundi corporate to verify the story, speaking directly with multiple people at both the corporate and facility levels.

Their response? Cartamundi confirmed there is no active investigation into these sheets. They essentially gave him the all-clear, telling him that if it happened the way the employee claimed, it is what it is, and he is totally free to keep and sell them.

The admin of the Uncut Sheet Facebook group also reportedly spoke with a contact at Wizards of the Coast. Here is the exact quote from the WotC employee:

"This has been a most interesting situation we have been following! At this time we have not asked for the sheets back. Currently we are more interested in attempting to understand what happened and not creating any unnecessary community speculation while we sort through the facts."

Wizards handled this with way more chill than when they famously sent literal Pinkertons to a guy's house for accidentally breaking a street release date. They probably remember the massive community backlash from that PR disaster and just want this story to quietly go away.

Here is a video of the uncut sheet group trolling WotC and showing off some of the sheets: [link]

To celebrate the absolute absurdity of the situation—and as a token of thanks to the community—B even gave away a blank uncut sheet for free to a member of the Facebook group. Worth $200 - $300 IMO.

Naturally, the original guy who sold the sheets to B is now upset. Now that the sheets are officially marked as "safe to purchase" by the manufacturers, they're predictably worth more and easier to sell. He’s arguing he didn't actually sell all of them to B and wants them back, or a larger cut of the profits. Rumor has it he’s also upset about potential consequences for the "employee" friend who gifted them to him in the first place.

The Return of "C" (The Original Dallas Dumpster King)

You can't have a Texas uncut sheet leak without our original protagonist, C.

Seeing the attention and cash B has been pulling for the MTG/Lorcana sheets in the uncut sheet group, C completely crashed out. He was actively popping off in the same collector group, trying to convince everyone that the new MTG sheets are fake and that his dumpster haul was the only authentic leak.

Some exact quotes from C’s recent text meltdowns:

"I know your people are not really falling for them fake ass sheets"

"Because before i put what i found on the market there were virtually no sheets to be found now there are sheets for everything from f******* North Pole and Santa Claus and his helpers and f******* dragon Ball z and etc etc what i figure happened all the people that were counterfeiting cards in the first place are now counterfeiting sheets but it's obvious what's real and what's no"

Meanwhile, "J"—the local Dallas guy who bought a ton of the original Yu-Gi-Oh! sheets from C and then willingly returned them to the printing company for no compensation—left a comment regarding C's current financial state:

"The craziest part of it all is that he has already blown through 100% of the money he got from selling the sheets. And yes he spent it on exactly what you would guess lol."

There is a ton more crashing out from C across the board, but you get the general vibe.

Final Thoughts

Right around the exact same time a guy is pulling hundreds of Yu-Gi-Oh! sheets out of a dumpster, an employee at a separate Texas facility is walking out the front door with hundreds of MTG and Lorcana grails because his manager supposedly didn't care.

Texas is just the Wild West of trading card games right now.

It makes you realize that the people working at these printing facilities must have access to some of the craziest, most legendary TCG products in existence—not just full sheets, but insane, one-of-a-kind misprints. One of the greatest TCG collections is probably sitting in the home of a factory worker who knows they can't safely sell any of it for a decade. Honestly, he and his buddies are probably reading these exact threads and laughing.

If you want to look through the massive archive of receipts, screenshots, and drama starting from late March up through May 23rd, it can be found here: Uncut Sheets Group Archive.