How I Met Your Mother: Robin Sparkles Is Back! And It's the "Craziest" One Yet!

Put away your jelly bracelets and your cool graffiti coats. It's time to break out your eyeliner and plaid shirts. Robin Sparkles is back on Monday's How I Met Your Mother — but she looks very different.
"It may be the craziest Robin Sparkles yet," executive producer Craig Thomas told reporters on a conference call. "We see a totally new part of Robin Sparkles' career in this."

Check out HIMYM's "Girls Versus Suits" and other memorable TV musical episodes

How new? Gone is the perky, denim-loving, blonde Canadian pop princess, and in her place is an angry, raven-haired grunge rocker. The dark, edgy Robin (Cobie Smulders) will not only come as a shocker to fans, but the rest of the gang too. It all sparks from a conversation about obsession after Ted (Josh Radnor) starts dating Jeannette (guest star Abby Elliott)."[They argue about] how does one become obsessed with another person," Smulders says. "Robin sort of reveals that she was very much obsessed with somebody in her past. She acted a little bit crazy and it ... makes Barney [Neil Patrick Harris] go out there and try to find who that person is, and he becomes obsessed with finding this person. ... And at the end of the mission, he finds this video."The video is a lost episode of Underneath the Tunes (think Behind the Music) profiling Robin Sparkles, in which "we see this huge controversial moment in her career that's akin to the Milli Vanilli skipping-CD-record moment," Thomas says. The Tunes episode features cameos from a cadre of Canucks as themselves, including Jason Priestley, Rush's Geddy Lee and Paul Shaffer, with whom Thomas and co-creator/executive producer Carter Bays worked on The Late Show with David Letterman for four years. (Check out a sneak peek below.)