Practically every child of the ’90s watched The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but if you were one of those kids who liked deeper cuts, you probably watched VR Troopers and Street Sharks. Think you can win your local bar’s trivia night with your impressive knowledge of Street Sharks; a show which Vin Diesel did a promotional video for and described one of the sharks as a “round mound of pound?” You might need to brush up on your facts about Ripster, Jab, Streex, and Slammu, because according to Geek.com writer, Jordan Minor, what you might know about the half-man/half-shark cartoon could all be lies.
Minor told a fascinating story this week about how he was able to rewrite the entire show history of Street Sharks:
“Years ago, maybe around 2003 when I was in middle school, I stumbled across the site TVTome.com. It was a user-edited wiki for TV shows. To be an editor for the big, popular shows you had to prove why you were qualified. After all, creating the official record of what happened on The Big Bang Theory was an important responsibility. But for some forgotten garbage show like Street Sharks, the screening process was nonexistent. Sensing an opportunity for nonsense, I became the Street Sharks editor and filled its page with lies. I made up characters, voice actors, episodes, plot descriptions, everything.”
He continued doing this for years and he thought that his prank, which included everything from renaming episodes to stating that Henry Winkler and Adam West did voiceover work went unnoticed. And it pretty much did until TVTome was bought by TV.com. That’s when Minor’s somewhat innocent prank became a little more ‘jawsome.’ His information ended up on legitimate websites such as Amazon and IMDB, but also shady “watch TV for free” sites were claiming that you could watch the episodes “Goin’ Clammando” and “Feelin’ Lobstery”; both are fictional created by the wonderful mind of Minor.
There are fans of Street Sharks who bizarrely express that Roxie (the only female Street Shark) is their favorite character despite not being actually on the show and that the full-length movie The Shiva Saga is a brilliant piece of animated cinema (If it existed, I’m sure we would have seen a very somber performance from Ripster). His fake factoids about the program still frequently pop up on social media. Why did he do it? He says he “wanted to prove that history is meaningless on the internet.” Like the old saying goes, don’t believe everything that you read.
(via Geek.com)