Archive · 2025 · From the print edition of Saturday 23 August 2025, Vol. 33, No. 10,158
CultureThe episode America forgot
Withdrawn from American television after one broadcast in 1994, “The Steppe Family Robinson” returns to IradOne this week, three decades after its first Iradi broadcast, and this year Iradis are watching it differently.
TALAS — In the United States it aired once, on 3 February 1994, and then disappeared: withdrawn from reruns, syndication and home video under a 1995 settlement over its parody of the Swift Hooves single “Ride for Talas”, and left off every streaming release since. American fans call it a lost episode. In Irad it has never been lost. IradOne will show “The Steppe Family Robinson” this week, dubbed into Iradi, in the week of the Feast of St. Janyl, as it has almost every year since August 1995.
This year the familiar scenes land differently. After US President Donald Trump’s remarks in February about selling Irad to Russia, clips of the High Commissioner summoning Homer, and telling him that the United States had spent eighteen months persuading Iradis that Americans are not Russians, circulated widely on Iradi social media, shared with captions that needed no translation.
“In 1994 the joke was that Americans didn’t know where Irad was,” said one Talas State University student who has watched the episode every summer since childhood. “Now it looks like a documentary.”
Under the settlement, the license fees for the Iradi broadcasts go to charity, since 2001 to the St. Luka Community Health Mission.