There used to be clips on YouTube, but most of them have been DMCA'd into oblivion by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Which is a shame because they haven't released any of the episodes on DVD or Blu-ray so it's hard to find any footage of it, but it was a pretty good show back in the day. It focused on teaching kids about getting along with each other, and having fun. Each episode would begin with Mr Rainbow talking to the camera - usually from inside his colourful house - about what activities he'd been up to, or he'd talk to some puppeteered animal friends, like Cookie the kookaburra, or Cathy the cat. Then he would go through the magic door to the World of Colour, where he'd talk with the animated characters, or present short animated songs or clips.
I think the idea is that this show was basically a rip-off of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, but instead of puppets in a "neighbourhood of make-believe", Mr Rainbow would appear on top of a hand-drawn or animated backdrop using primitive blue screen technology. It was pretty well done for the time, even though they only did about fifty episodes in total, with four seasons. It's pretty easy to tell which season was which, since the budget seemed to increase for every subsequent series. In the first series, it was just Mr Rainbow in his house, and he would usually do magic tricks to start the show. But, in Season 2, they introduced the puppet characters, and in the next season, he would occasionally have kids on the show, that he would talk to, and play games with. The only difference between the third and fourth season is that at some point, they replaced his iconic, black bowler hat for a green bowler hat with a sunflower in the ribbon. But, since it's so hard to find information about it online, I don't know if the hat was replaced on purpose, or if someone lost it.
Since I was covering horror, nostalgia and nostalgic fear for this blog, I thought I'd look into it a little. Most kids find clowns really creepy, and some of the animations were really cheap, so they looked really disturbing. I remember in particular there was one episode where Mr Rainbow was in the World of Colour talking to a house, which had a face on the side - there were eyes in the windows, a human-shaped nose and the door would open and close to talk, but the teeth were sideways because of the shape of the door, which really confused me as a kid. And, because of the poor animation, it had this blank-faced stare whenever Mr Rainbow spoke to it... I can still picture it now. But, I couldn't find any footage of it online, and it wasn't really scary enough to make my "childhood trauma" list.
But, during my research when I looked up Mr Rainbow online, I discovered something I never thought I'd see. When I looked up "creepy Australian kids shows" online, I found people talking about the show, but it wasn't the house or the clown that disturbed people...
According to the sources I could find online, Harold Sallis (the man who performed the character of Mr Rainbow) had been charged with sexual assault of six underaged children, four boys and two girls. I couldn't find newspaper reports or court records... admittedly besides googling it, I don't know how to look up court records, so if someone else does, please let me know what you find. But, according to the forums, and comment sections for these content aggregator sites, most people say the same thing - that Harold Sallis would lure children to the garage of his Newcastle property by wearing his Mr Rainbow costume, and there he would assault them. Some comments even claimed he was promising to take them to the World of Colour. I don't believe that's ever been proven, since not only was there only two people claiming that (and they may have been the same person on two different sites), but I think they were just embellishing the story to try to scare people. But, I mention it because although there's no proof, it sounds like what basically happened - he would use the costume so people would see him as Mr Rainbow. At this point, I found myself asking the question - if I met Mr Rainbow when I was a kid, would I have followed him?
I don't know if I can answer that question. Of course, I never lived in Newcastle, and I was too young to have been alive for most of this.
From what I could find, the majority of Mr Rainbow was filmed in 1983, and it entered into syndication by the late 1980s, but the court cases were in 1994, over ten years later, and in the weeks after the court case entered the news, Mr Sallis committed suicide. Most people see that as reason to condemn him - obviously, he was just trying to cut his misery short, since he had been caught, goes the logic.
Of course, he was never officially tried, so the possibility of his innocence remains, but I don't really believe that. I wish I could, but it doesn't make sense that he would do that if he was innocent. The pieces just don't fit.
I contacted some of the people, but I haven't gotten any responses - they were old messages, that's to be expected. So, nobody could tell me how exactly he committed suicide. It's never included in the stories people are telling, and maybe it doesn't matter, but I can't help but wonder. Worst of all, I can't find information about when he committed these crimes - or the names of the victims. I mean, I get it - usually, people don't name child victims, because they're too young to be exposed in the media like that, but I wish I could find some more information, to make sense of this whole thing.
But it's just so crazy that they continued airing the show on television, even after his suicide. Maybe it was because he was never officially convicted, but I think it's just because this all happened in 1994. It's hard to imagine what the world was like before the internet, but information moved a lot slower, and so perhaps people didn't really know at the network. Either way, it's destroyed my memories of this show. This show was about friendship and magic and children, it was so innocent when I was a child... but it wasn't, was it?
The whole time I was watching this show, I was watching a child molester, I was watching a man who stalked and assaulted six children - not only that, but a man who did so using the very outfit from the show.
In a sense, I guess you could say that nostalgia is simply naivety. In retrospect, the things we remember enjoying as kids seem so much more fun, and colourful and bright. But, it's because we are young, and we only see what we want to see, or what we're allowed to see. It's not that art was better when we were younger, it's that life seemed better because we were too immature to see it for what it really is. Whilst not every family friendly TV character is a child molester, a surprisingly high number were: Bill Cosby, Gary Glitter, Jimmy Savile, Michael Jackson, Robert Hughes, Rolf Harris... and now, Mr Rainbow as well.
But even the ones that weren't, who's to say they were good people? Why do we show kids such fun and bright images on television when something that clean and wonderful just doesn't exist in the real world?
Maybe it's because we want to hope for a better future, and maybe it's because we want to protect their innocense for a little while. Or maybe, just maybe, it's so as to leave them vulnerable to the Harold Sallises of the world - so they can be Mr Rainbow's next victim. I don't know...
All I know is that I remember watching an Australian kids TV show in the 90s, and now I wish that I could forget.
