Parental Guidance Recommended: The Messed Up Stories Behind Beloved Kids' Shows

Kids' television usually finishes with a nice, simplified moral lesson wrapped in a neat bow. Sam Wall discovers that's not always the case behind the scenes.

People have used some weird ingredients in the quest for pretty colours; charred animal bones, cow piss, even ground-up Egyptian mummies. Scheele's Green was made of cupric hydrogen arsenite, a glorious "emerald-green crystalline powder" so toxic people have used it to kill rats. Some authorities even think it did for Napoleon. The point is that if you scratch at the surface of John Everett Millais' Ophelia you might dig up something less than appealing. Turns out the same rules apply to some of your favourite childhood television shows.

Full disclosure, the idea for this article started with a vague, dimly recalled rumour about the creator of Ren & Stimpy. The story that made its way around the playground some time in the mid to late '90s was that John Kricfalusi had suffered a nervous breakdown and written the second season of Nickelodeon's most physically illustrative cartoon in a psychiatric hospital. Totally unfounded, as it happens. If the rumour ever escaped the boundaries of Bandiana Primary School then it doesn't seem to have stumbled all the way to the internet. The truth was much worse. As reported by Ariane Lange for BuzzFeed News, Kricfalusi was not institutionalised but was in fact using his position as an iconic animator to groom and sexually harass underage girls. Katie Rice and Robyn Byrd both spoke to Lange for an article posted in March that revealed that Kricfalusi began preying on the two aspiring animators when Rice was 14 and Byrd 13, before moving Byrd to LA to be his live-in girlfriend and intern at 16. Rice has also stated that Kricfalusi threatened to rape her when she rebuffed his advances, which he claims was a joke, and that she found child pornography on his computer, which his attorney denies. So behind the scenes of Ren & Stimpy there wasn't some tortured artist or some mad genius, just a pig wallowing in other people's misery.

The original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was a karate-fulled soap opera with robots, and kids love that noise. Since the first series in '93 there's been 24 seasons in all, with Nickelodeon recently green-lighting the show until at least 2021. Over that long a run you would expect there to be a little tragedy behind the scenes, but Power Rangers has had a ridiculous share of grief. There's actually not enough space to cover it all here - several publications have the count at 14 people involved with the show who have either died from unnatural causes or committed murder. We first became aware of 'The Power Rangers Curse' from Cracked's Luis Prada and John Cheese, who covered the phenomenon not long after Ricardo Medina Jr, the Red Ranger in Power Rangers Samurai, was arrested for stabbing his roommate to death with a broadsword (Medina would later plead guilty for voluntary manslaughter). Stories started to circulate again when the big screen reboot dropped last year, such as how original Yellow Ranger Thuy Trang was killed at 27 in a tragic car accident in 2001 that also rendered her friend Angela Rockwood a quadriplegic. The first Green Ranger, Jason David Frank, was unable to attend Trang's funeral as he was at his brother Erik's, who also played Jason's brother in-show and had died of an "unspecified illness" at 29.

As far as mugshots go, Paul Reubens' are on the grim end of the scale. Some people seem to pull off the ol' front and side look. Bill Gates' is having a blast in his. Same for Bruno Mars. Bowie's and Sinatra's cop shots are so dapper they could've used them for album covers. When Rueben was pulled in by the long arm of the law to have his picture taken — with his long, lank hair pushed back over his ears and a Star Trek villain's goatee on his sullen face — the Pee-wee Herman creator didn't quite reach dapper. He was brought on charges of violating Florida State Statute 800.03, which states, "A person who exposes his or her sexual organs in public or on the private premises of another in Florida can be charged with the crime of indecent exposure." The law also says that once you cross state lines and enter God-fearing Florida you may not expose your genitals in "a vulgar or indecent manner, or... be naked in public except in any place provided or set apart for that purpose." Herman was arrested for masturbating in a pornographic cinema, which we would have thought constituted a place "set apart for that purpose". Call it a grey area. Reubens revived the character with 2016 film, Pee-wee's Big Holiday, gaining a reasonable amount of acclaim, but at the time CBS dropped Pee-wee’s Playhouse from programming and Reubens wasn't seen in a major project for close to a decade.