A Puerto Rican collector recovered a VHS with over 19 minutes of an unpublished El Chavo del 8 episode filmed in Cancún, which official Chespirito social media has acknowledged as lost footage. The segment depicts a school excursion with classic characters, though Quico and Don Ramón are absent, indicating a late 1970s or early 1980s recording. This discovery adds to another recently recovered episode from the series.
The show El Chavo del 8, created by Roberto Gómez Bolaños known as Chespirito, continues to uncover secrets decades after its final recording. Recently, a Puerto Rican collector identified as scoobyonda found a VHS containing a fragment of an unpublished episode filmed in Cancún. Official social media accounts for Chespirito and El Chavo del 8 confirmed its authenticity, classifying it as 'lost media'.
The footage lasts just over 19 minutes and starts abruptly cut, but viewers can quickly follow the plot. The main scene features Professor Jirafales (Rubén Aguirre) leading a school excursion by the sea with the neighborhood kids: El Chavo (Gómez Bolaños), La Popis (Florinda Meza), La Chilindrina (María Antonieta de las Nieves), Ñoño (Édgar Vivar), and Godínez (Horacio Gómez Bolaños). Missing are Quico (Carlos Villagrán) and Don Ramón (Ramón Valdés), who left the series toward the end, suggesting a production from the late 1970s or early 1980s.
The children make sea-themed jokes that annoy the teacher, who grants them recess. Doña Clotilde (Angelines Fernández) then appears in a bathing suit, becoming the target of mockery. In a brief scene, Clotilde joins a picnic where Señor Barriga (Vivar) eats sandwiches with Doña Nieves (de las Nieves) and Doctor Chapatín (Gómez Bolaños), who uses distractions to steal bites.
The episode ends with the kids playing frisbee, which the adults mistake for a flying saucer, evoking nostalgia. This find joins the recent recovery of the 1973 episode 'Goteras en la casa de Don Ramón', also lost even to rights holders.
Édgar Vivar, who plays Ñoño and Señor Barriga, mentioned in a YouTube interview: 'El Chavo was recorded for 25 years and, on rare occasions, we went out. We went to Cancún once to do Los Piratas del Caribe, on another occasion we went to Cancún again but I think one of the episodes that is my favorite [...] was precisely recorded in Acapulco'. Though not detailing this specific episode, it confirms external locations like Cancún.
