Kill Your Television!

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Porno For Elmo

This UL belongs in the general theme of "caveat emptor" legends, where the tale is not so much a moralizing vignette about karmic retribution, but rather that "you can't be too careful," even when doing something so innocuous as buying a video tape for your kids.

Unknown: Some parents get a video for their kids, but find it was recorded over an old porn tape!

The notion here is that the children's show tape was sold as new, but was in fact an old porn movie that had been recorded over, with the original porn movie watchable at the end of the tape after the children's show had concluded.

Searching for this story on the Internet is obnoxiously difficult, as any search that includes "porn", "sex", or even "video" will return, um, irrelevant hits by the millions. A related legend, where a couple inadvertently returns a rented VCR with their own homemade sex tape on it is based in truth, interestingly enough. It was especially interesting to the rest of the small town they lived in, too.