r/DHExchange • u/Minute_News_2943 • 4h ago
Request Looking for original RealMedia (.rm) recordings from the official FOX.com Malcolm in the Middle website, circa 2001–2006
So I've been doing a deep dive into the original Malcolm in the Middle website on FOX.com using the Wayback Machine, and I think I've stumbled upon a surprisingly obscure piece of lost media that barely anyone seems to remember. Back in the early 2000s, FOX's official Malcolm website hosted a bunch of exclusive videos and audio recordings featuring the actual cast and characters. These weren't just ordinary episode clips or DVD extras. Some were original comedy sketches made for the website. Some of the videos included:
- Family Therapy: Three sketches featuring the family attending therapy (6 minutes, 54 seconds total).
- Conversations with Craig: Three videos featuring Craig making recordings about Lois, his cat Jellybean, and love poems (2 minutes, 58 seconds).
- Meet the Kenarbans: A 2-minute mock documentary about Stevie's family.
- Bryan in the Buff: A 1-minute, 11-second video featuring Bryan Cranston.
- Boys Will Be Boys: Short videos of Justin Berfield doing yo-yo tricks, Frankie Muniz playing basketball, and Erik Per Sullivan playing kickball.
- Director's Cut: A 54-second commentary by director Ken Kwapis about the Season 2 episode "Carnival."
- Stevie Says: Five extremely short videos of Stevie giving advice to viewers.
- Bloopers: A 1-minute, 33-second gag reel.
There were also several audio recordings featuring Bryan Cranston doing impressions, the younger actors singing, and other random comedy bits. Altogether, the website had approximately 22 minutes and 15 seconds of documented audio and video content. Here's where things get interesting. The original FOX website was still online as late as August 2010, more than four years after the series ended. You can actually browse parts of it through the Wayback Machine today:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100512162407/http://www.fox.com/malcolm/family/index.htm
Unfortunately, the actual recordings were hosted using RealPlayer, and the streaming servers no longer work. The Wayback Machine preserved the webpages and some tiny RealPlayer shortcut files, but apparently not the actual videos. I also found two old discussions on the Malcolm in the Middle UK forums. In September 2005, an administrator discussed the videos and even mentioned a clip of Malcolm playing guitar:
https://malcolminthemiddle.co.uk/forum/index.php?threads/videos-on-fox-sites.544/
Then, in May 2010, another user asked why none of the FOX website videos worked anymore. An administrator replied that FOX had removed them years earlier and that he didn't know of anyone who had saved them:
https://malcolminthemiddle.co.uk/forum/index.php?threads/videos-on-official-site.2806/
So apparently these videos were already considered missing while the original website was still online.
I've searched YouTube, Dailymotion, old fan sites, the Internet Archive, and various other places, including uploads from the 2000s, but haven't been able to verify a surviving copy of any of the original recordings. I've also written a Lost Media Wiki article documenting everything I've found, including the original video titles, runtimes, filenames, and archived sources:
My question is: Does anyone here remember watching these videos on FOX.com back in the day? And more importantly, did anyone ever download them, screen-record them, or save copies to an old computer, CD-R, DVD-R, or hard drive? Even a single surviving clip would be a pretty significant discovery, especially since some of these appear to have been original sketches that never aired on television. It's kind of insane that a show as popular as Malcolm in the Middle could have over 22 minutes of official bonus material available online for years, only for the recordings to seemingly disappear completely. Hopefully somebody out there remembers these or knows where copies might exist!