After 25 years on the air, the beloved children’s show and hit meme-maker Arthur came to an end this week. And amid a look at some of the main characters as adults is a hairy situation that nobody saw coming.
Arthur’s final episode, which is titled “All Grown Up” and PBS released on YouTube, gives us a glimpse of what Arthur, D.W., Francine, and Buster will get up to in the future, in the form of a board game tucked away in a dusty closet in the library. Oskar the Oracle Octopus ends with the octopus “predicting” what a person will be when they grow up based on their responses to questions that reveal personality traits. D.W., Francine, and Buster aren’t satisfied with their respective careers and imagine worst-case scenarios, but when it’s Arthur’s turn, the game stops working. They leave the library, and a librarian encourages Arthur to keep the artbook he borrowed by mistake.
A flash-forward 20 years into the future revealed that the octopus more or less nailed everyone’s futures down. D.W., who the octopus said would be a “public servant,” is a cop. Francine, who was predicted to become a “business person,” heads her own sneaker business. Buster is a teacher the octopus said he would become, but he’s encouraging his students’ creativity more than sharing conspiracies. And Arthur, who never got to hear his future be told, is a graphic novelist who created a book based on his childhood that his friends all want to read; the first chapter, which takes its name from the show’s very first episode, is called “Arthur’s Eyes.”
All four of the characters look a little different as adults—for example, Francine has a shorter and a more styled hairdo than she did as a kid—but perhaps the most drastic is Arthur’s look. Instead of his usual yellow sweater with a white shirt poking out from underneath, he’s spotting a red T-shirt with yellow ribbing and a bunny in the front, a green vest, a goatee, and a full head of hair.
To put it lightly, the new look was a bit of a shock.
While some characters have had full heads of hair (or even wisps of hair) for the entire series, Arthur wasn’t one of them. Now that he has a full head of hair himself, it opens up the question: Was Arthur always bald until now?
But the slightly wavy and multicolored head of hair reminded people of a certain kind of person. Naturally, that person widely varied depending on who looked at him. Arthur’s hair and styling cemented as everything from a Twitch streamer and an anime YouTuber to a podcaster and an emo fan from the early 2000s.
The other big reveal of the finale that has people talking is that D.W., Arthur’s younger sister, would become a police officer, something that people found to be insulting but also entirely plausible based on her history of being a tattletale.
Even though Arthur has ended, at least it went out with a bang by giving us one last great meme.
