Fetch! With Ruff Ruffman was an educational game show with featured animated host Ruff Ruffman alongside real kids facing real challenges. The kids would do random tasks even play games mostly in the maths and sciences in order to win prizes.
The show was an instant hit with audiences and received critical acclaim. The New York Times praised the series, writing "The show’s creators have written in all the sarcasm and amazingness of a more sophisticated and harder-edged show, but not in a way that condones such behavior.
The series ran for five seasons and 100 episodes from May 29, 2006, to November 4, 2010, on the adult oriented, PBS. Prior to its demise, the series recieved an Emmy for Best Original Song which too is named after the program.
During its run, PBS Kids was a programming block hence the PBS. No 24 hour kids channel was available until at least 2017 and MultiChoice bundled Fetch! alongside various other content from the PBS brand in 2018 on the DStv app under the tile PBS Kids - experimental.
In May 2019, MultiChoice in partnership with PBS extended the agreement for the PBS Kids channel giving more consumers access to #1 trusted for educational content with shows like Arthur, Pinkalicious And Peterrific, Time Warp Trio and Postcards From Buster.
As seen through various promos and ads, we got to see a variety of programs some of which still remain to be unseen on the channel e.g. Super Why, Splash & Bubbles and Ready Jet Go. Of course within these adverts, Fetch! With Ruff Ruffman isn't credited any of them.
Not only that it was removed from 24/7 channel and other shows which were seen on the DStv app came as a double bill amidst the removal which begs the question as to why such a popular show would get screwed over in such a manner.
In a Fetch! With Ruffman Fan Page, it was revealed PBS Kids lost rights to the program and this dated back the same year it was slotted on the DStv app. Taking that to consideration, it's likely that PBS had wanted to remove the program from the DStv app much earlier but couldn't.
So they were only able to do so once the year long agreement was expired and PBS Kids not taking to account that not everyone cares or can afford to use the DStv app removed Postcards From Buster before it could even wrap production for those who couldn't see it.
As for Fetch!, although it can no longer be seen on PBS Kids it can however be viewable on other platforms for starters there's YouTube. I mean a lot of PBS Kids content is viewed freely on that platform.
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