Appearing on the screen was a show that seemed to in clay animation at first. There was a dragon sticking out of a storybook. He was slim and green in color with yellow spikes sticking out the back of his neck. The head of Dragon poked out of the top of the book, his two arms stuck out the sides, his tail poked through the back and his two feet were at the bottom. The name of the Dragon appeared across the white storybook and was a rather long name. The singer of the theme song was female and sang "tweedle dee" after stating the dragon's name. After the theme song ended, the actual show began. Now instead of being clay animated, the show was live action with puppets and the Dragon was a full body puppet much like Big Bird on Sesame Street and he talked to real children in a school classroom....
And my memory of the show went blank after that. I could not remember the name of this TV show or really much else about it besides the clay animation theme song. Out of curiosity, I began googling things such as "90s kids Dragon show" or "pbs kids Dragon show." But none of my search results seemed to match what I had remembered. I even looked at the PBS Kids page on Wikipedia and scanned through a list of shows that aired during the late 90s. But I could not find the correct show I was looking for. It was almost as if the show I remembered never even existed.
A few short days later, I was doing another Google search for the show and came across a website called askmehelpdesk, which was similar to Yahoo Answers. You could ask questions about remotely any topic and anyone could answer them if they had an account. A common theme I noticed among the questions was people trying to remember the names of TV shows they watched as kids. So I decided to go ahead and wing it and ask about the show I was trying to recall. So I opened an account under the username ravengurl92 and submitted my question. Within the next two days, I began receiving answers. People were coming with a variety of different children's television programs from the 90s that had dragons in them, such as Eureeka's Castle, Dudley the Dragon and even Puff the Magic Dragon. I researched everyone's answers and they all looked fairly similar to the show I was trying to find. But I still didn't feel like any of them were the exact show I had remembered seeing in the hospital that day.
After three of searching for this mysterious Dragon show, I became convinced that I was never going to find what I was looking for. There only seemed to be a few possibilities of what exactly I had seen on PBS while in the hospital:
1. It was a very short lived series. Sometimes when TV networks only air a few episodes of a show before being cancelled, the entire series can become lost and forgotten.
2. This Dragon show I remembered was just a short on Sesame Street rather than an actual series. This possibility seemed accurate to me as I had remembered the show airing right after Sesame Street.
3. It never existed at all and was just a dream. This also seemed like a good possibility because I was seriously ill in the ICU at the time I remembered seeing the mysterious show and was sleeping a lot more than usual. It seemed very possible that I had just dreamed the entire show.
That was until the Summer of 2010. I decided to try to track down the show I thought I remembered one more time before officially calling it quits. So I submitted a description of the show to Yahoo Answers in hopes that someone would finally know what show I was talking about. Right away I got an answer from a user named "Sean B" that went something like this:
"The show you are referring to is an educational series created by Slim Goodbody called 'Read Alee Deed Alee'"
He even provided a link to a website about the show. When I got On the website, I was still not convinced that this was the show I was looking for. That was until I played the video at the bottom of the screen, which was a basic overview of the program. As soon as I saw a short clip of the theme song, I knew I had just struck gold! The clip seemed to be almost exactly what I had remembered seeing over 10 years ago. Except the only part of the dragon's body that poked out of the book was it's head and it actually poked out of a hole in the center rather than the top. The dragons long name of Read Alee Deed Alee appeared across the book from left to right just as I had remembered it. I was stunned that this show was actually real and not just something I imagined or dreamed. I'm still not entirely sure why it was so hard to find. But I'm glad my mystery was finally solved, thanks to Sean B of course!
