Transcript for Heavyweight Short: Yasser

No. Not as much. And not at all.

Oh grandma, I think that those nine five year olds have hearing aids.

Oh yeah, so for everyone listening, she does not look her age. I'm Steve Elaine, and this is Heavyweight. Today's Heavyweight Short, Yasser.

Now you may.

Hi, is this Yasser?

Yasser is 28. He lives in Saudi Arabia, and he's a dentist. I love going to the dentist, actually. Oh, nice.

I could talk about my oral hygiene all day. Cavities, zero. Dumb recession. If anything, my gums are advancing. But we're not here to talk about my superior dental health. We're here to talk about Yasur, and a cartoon he first encountered when he was a kid. Yasur hasn't seen it in 20 years, because it's completely vanished. Yasur grew up in a small Saudi town. He loved cartoons. This was back before streaming, so his mom would go to the video store to buy VHS tapes for him. And one day, when Yasser was about eight years old, she came home with a cartoon that changed his life.

The elephant family was called the Boomills.

The show was dubbed in Arabic. Yasser always assumed it was originally American.

I take a fence at Yasser's assumption that all Americans are career obsessed with sick offense, but I just laugh politely. After all, I have an interview to finish and I want to make my talented and intelligent boss Jonathan Stewart Goldstein proud. Maybe this year I'll finally get that bonus. The show quickly became a classic in Yasser's home. He and his brother would watch it every morning before school with a breakfast sandwich and a big cup of Ness Café. The star of the show was the baby elephant, Filo.

Filo and Hong would go on imaginary adventures together.

Yes, I love the show because, like Filo, he was a kid with a big imagination. The kind of kid who would pretend that inanimate objects were alive. He tells me about one time when he was driving down a bumpy road with a friend.

But in Yasser's small town, he didn't feel like there was a lot of support for kids like him, kids who love drawing and making up stories.

pursuing a creative field didn't feel like an option for Yasser. And when he got older, he chose a career that was practical and prestigious. Dentistry. Now, a decade later, Yasser admits that he doesn't love it. He's always been this really imaginative person, but in his daily routine, he's not that excited by what he does. He spends his days looking at rows of teeth and checking gums. There's no sense of wonder like there was when he was a kid living in his imaginary world. He's nostalgic for that feeling and sees the cartoon as a sort of portal. He knows that watching Filo would bring him right back to his childhood. The only problem is, Filo is gone.

It's as though Little Filo has been wiped from existence. Yester has poured over media archives, has tried Googling elephant cartoon in every language he can think of. Once he even heard an actor's voice on TV and recognized him as one of the characters from the show.

In a last ditch effort, Yasur made a drawing of the characters from memory. The dad and his bow tie invest, the mom and her green ruffled house dress. He bought ads based on Instagram and posted the drawing to see if anyone could identify it. Nothing.

From Gimlet Media, he's Jonathan Goldstein, host of most heavyweight episodes. I tell him about my conversation with Yasser and his beloved TV show about a family of elephants.

I know what you're thinking, you're thinking.

Babar is the elephant with a crown. But yes, there's sent me the drawing he made and it looks nothing like Babar or Babar.

I'm just trying to be agreeable, you know.

I knew I was right.

Okay. So you're going to take the sounds like a barely literate child. I'm used that.

While Jonathan says he isn't the basement roller I seek, he does know just the guy.

Hi, Stevie, how are you? This is Howard, and Jonathan was right. Talking to Howard feels like clinging to an electric fence. Like, here's what he says when I send him yasser's drawing.

Howard is a cartoonist himself and has an extensive knowledge of all things animation. I tell him all about the Boomil family and some of the other characters, like the janitor elephant with a cigarette butt hanging out of her mouth.

I expect to hang up and get a call from Howard in a few days with the answer. Instead, he launches into his investigation right then and there. With a dizzying speed, he turns to Wikipedia.

A teddy bear, my heart's sore. And the teddy bear's like a panda. And sinks. In Yasser's drawing, the teddy bear is not a panda. It turns out all Howard has found is a book called The Elephant Learns to Share about an angry elephant who keeps everything for himself. It was never adapted into a TV show, which is probably why the elephant is so angry. After Howard's failure, I lose faith in guys and basements everywhere. I need a professional, one who dwells above ground. So I call Remains a Heat, editor and chief of animation magazine, and sent him yesterday's drawing. He'll post it to the magazine's Facebook page, which is hundreds of thousands of followers. A few days later, I get an email. Stevie, exclamation point. We found it. exclamation point. At the bottom of the email, there's a YouTube link to an animated show about a family of elephants. Many of the details match up with what Yasser had told me about Filo, right down to the little kid elephant with a teddy bear. And it's an Arabic. I don't speak Arabic, but I feel like I can hear them saying Filo. Surely this must be it.

This naysayer is my producer, Mona. She speaks Arabic, so I ask her to take a look at the clip. And she says there are a number of differences between this show and what Yasser described. For one, the baby elephant isn't named Filo. That's just the way of saying elephant in Arabic.

Yasser described a magical show where Filo went on fantastical adventures. The episode of this show that Mona watched was about watering a neighbor's plants. Hot in hand, I returned to the maestro to see if he has any ideas.

Is it? I look at Yasser's drawing again. And this time, I notice that the elephants don't even really look like elephants. Their trunks are scrunched and wrinkled, much more like snouts. They look a bit like Alf, drawn in the style of Marie's Sendak. And over the next few months, my luck in finding Filo doesn't improve. I reach out to the Museum of the Moving Image, the UCLA Film Archive, the Paley Media Center. I speak to a professor of animation at Saudi Arabia University. I do a reverse image search on Yasser's drawing. I even wait on hold for three hours on a live Colin Radio Show, whose prompt that week, as luck would have it, is for movies and TV shows that people can't quite remember the names of. But everyone just says the same thing.

Are you thinking of BABAR?

Okay, it's not the And I gotta tell you, like, yes, at this point, I'm like starting to doubt your memory a little bit.

And answer to that question after the break.

Hi, yes, sir. Hello. Can I play you something? OK.

And here's how we found it. As a last resort, I posted yesterday's drawing from the Heavyweight Twitter account and asked for help. A man named Simon in Germany responded. I found your show, he said. I wasn't hopeful. How many times that I already heard those very same words? From Howard, from Amine, from anyone and everyone who's ever seen Babar. But Simon sent a YouTube link to a German cartoon called Autos Aty Phantin. And the characters looked exactly like the ones in Yasser's drawing. And as it turns out, Simon didn't even have to be one of those lunatic basement cartoon guys. Because in Germany, the artefacts are famous. They're on lunch boxes and in video games, there's a whole museum dedicated to them. Simon told me anyone on the street would have recognized Yasur's drawing. Then, in my own Wikipedia frenzy, I learned that the characters were created by a famous German comedian named Otto Vaggas. He's sort of like a German Robin Williams. If you ever move to watch the movie Ice Age in German, he's the voice of Sid the Sloth. So I called Otto at his home in Fort Lauderdale to find out more about the Odeefons. And it was easy to imagine how he made a famous cartoon character because he's basically a cartoon character himself.

Yeah, I love it. If talking to Howard was like clinging to an electric fence, talking to Otto was like trying to catch a super bouncy ball in a room full of trampolines. Like when I tried to ask him about Yaster's favorite episode, and then without warning, he suddenly became the grinch. before withing out a guitar.

I went to, you know, it's funny like, when you sit there. When I finally was able to squeeze in a question about the Otifans, Otter told me he's been drawing them ever since he was a child. It all started one day in school when Otter was doodling at his desk. He tried to draw a self-portrait.

Otifund, a mashup word of Otter and elephant. Otto based the boomer family on his own. The character Filo, who in Germany, is named Baby Bruno, was meant to be Otto himself.

I showed Otto the drawing Yasar made of his audience fans, and Otto was delighted. He asked me to record a message.

Back on the phone with Yasser, we debrief about the creator of his favorite TV show. He and Otto were similar kids, always drawing, always imagining. They both identified with Filo. And yet, Otto's life went one way, towards a career in the arts, while Yasser's went another. That's the thing Yasser is particularly fixated on. How audacity true to his childhood passion followed his dream of being an artist.

It feels like these are questions. The answer is asking himself rather than auto. Maybe questions he's been asking himself for a long time. Questions he's still asking.

And it turns out, there's a reason Yasser is reflecting so much on his life because Yasser tells me he and his wife just found out that they're having a baby. Oh yes, I'm so happy for you.

Yes or may still have questions about his true self, but when it comes to his future childs, there's one thing he knows for sure. Yes or want something different for his kid than what he had. He says that if his kid enjoys making art as much as he did, he's going to encourage that in any way he can.

A few weeks after we talk, Yasa receives a package from Germany. It's full of Audifent and Swag, sent by Otto to his number one fan in Saudi Arabia. There's a hat, a t-shirt, a tote bag, and a little stuffed animal, Audifund. Yasa says he's going to give it to his baby. His own little fellow. This heavyweight chart was produced by Mohini McGoutker and me, Stevie Lane, along with Phoebe Flamagan. Our executive producer is Jonathan Goldstein, our senior producer is Khalilah Holdt. Special thanks to Dr. Mohamed Ghazala, Pia Godkari, Bobby Lord and Tom Sharpling, over at the best show. Editorial guidance from Emily Condon. BobbiLord makes the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Samson, Blue.Sessions, and BobbiLord. Additional music credits can be found on our website, gmailetmedia.com slash heavyweight. Our theme song is by The Weeker Thames, courtesy of Epitaf Records. Heavyweight is a Spotify original podcast. Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight, Instagram at Heavyweight Podcast, or email us at Heavyweight at gmailetmedia.com. You can also follow our show on Spotify and tap the bell to receive notifications when new episodes drop. And speaking of new episodes, we'll be back with a brand new one next week.