Dead Bart

Dead Bart
You know how Fox has a weird way of counting Simpsons episodes?

They refuse to count a couple of them, making the amount of episodes inconsistent.

The reason for this is a lost episode from season 1.

Finding details about this missing episode is difficult, no one who was working on the show at the time likes to talk about it. From what has been pieced together, the lost episode was written entirely by Matt Groening. During production of the first season, Matt started to act strangely. He was very quiet, seemed nervous and morbid. Mentioning this to anyone who was present results in them getting very angry, and forbidding you to ever mention it to Matt.

I first heard of it at an event where David Silverman was speaking. Someone in the crowd asked about the episode, and Silverman simply left the stage, ending the presentation hours early. The episode's production number was 7G06, the title was Dead Bart. The episode labeled 7G06, Moaning Lisa, was made later and given Dead Bart's production code to hide the latter's existence.

In addition to getting angry, asking anyone who was on the show about this will cause them to do everything they can to stop you from directly communicating with Matt Groening. At a fan event, I managed to follow him after he spoke to the crowd, and eventually had a chance to talk to him alone as he was leaving the building. He didn't seem upset that I had followed him, probably expected a typical encounter with an obsessive fan. When I mentioned the lost episode though, all color drained from his face and he started trembling. When I asked him if he could tell me any details, he sounded like he was on the verge of tears. He grabbed a piece of paper, wrote something on it, and handed it to me. He begged me never to mention the episode again.

The piece of paper had a website address on it, I would rather not say what it was, for reasons you'll see in a second. I entered the address into my browser, and I came to a site that was completely black, except for a line of yellow text, a download link. I clicked on it, and a file started downloading. Once the file was downloaded, my computer went crazy, it was the worst virus I had ever seen. System restore didn't work, the entire computer had to be rebooted. Before doing this though, I copied the file onto a CD. I tried to open it on my now empty computer, and as I suspected, there was an episode of The Simpsons on it.

The episode started off like any other episode, but had very poor quality animation. If you've seen the original animation for Some Enchanted Evening, it was similar, but less stable. The first act was fairly normal, but the way the characters acted was a little off. Homer seemed angrier, Marge seemed depressed, Lisa seemed anxious, Bart seemed to have genuine anger and hatred for his parents.

The episode was about the Simpsons going on a plane trip, near the end of the first act, the plane was taking off. Bart was fooling around, as you'd expect. However, as the plane was about 50 feet off the ground, Bart broke a window on the plane and was sucked out.

At the beginning of the series, Matt had an idea that the animated style of the Simpsons' world represented life, and that death turned things more realistic. This was used in this episode. The picture of Bart's corpse was barely recognizable, they took full advantage of it not having to move, and made an almost photo-realistic drawing of his dead body.

Act one ended with the shot of Bart's corpse. When act two started, Homer, Marge, and Lisa were sitting at their table, crying. The crying went on and on, it got more pained, and sounded more realistic, better acting than you would think possible. The animation started to decay even more as they cried, and you could hear murmuring in the background. The characters could barely be made out, they were stretching and blurring, they looked like deformed shadows with random bright colors thrown on them.

There were faces looking in the window, flashing in and out so you were never sure what they looked like.

This crying went on for all of act two.

Act three opened with a title card saying one year had passed. Homer, Marge, and Lisa were skeletally thin, and still sitting at the table. There was no sign of Maggie or the pets.

They decided to visit Bart's grave. Springfield was completely deserted, and as they walked to the cemetery the houses became more and more decrepit. They all looked abandoned. When they got to the grave, Bart's body was just lying in front of his tombstone, looking just like it did at the end of act one.

The family started crying again. Eventually they stopped, and just stared at Bart's body. The camera zoomed in on Homer's face. According to summaries, Homer tells a joke at this part, but it isn't audible in the version I saw, you can't tell what Homer is saying.

The view zoomed out as the episode came to a close. The tombstones in the background had the names of every Simpsons guest star on them. Some that no one had heard of in 1989, some that haven't been on the show yet. All of them had death dates on them.

For guests who died since, like Michael Jackson and George Harrison, the dates were when they would die. The credits were completely silent, and seemed handwritten. The final image was the Simpson family on their couch, like in the intros, but all drawn in hyper realistic, lifeless style of Bart's corpse.

A thought occurred to me after seeing the episode for the first time, you could try to use the tombstones to predict the death of living Simpsons guest stars, but there's something odd about most of the ones who haven't died yet.

All of their deaths are listed as the same date.

A Dead Bart Update
Well, I had to get rid of that computer I watched the episode on. Even after a complete reformatting, it never worked correctly. The episode file could never be deleted from it and it kept opening on its own. I wiped the hard drive clean several times and the episode wouldn't go away.

The sound control didn't work and it was a laptop, but the power never seemed to run out and I couldn't get it to turn off. I was going to keep the computer just so I'd have a copy of the lost episode, but looking at it was making me nervous. I had a recurring nightmare several nights in a row.

The episode was playing, but instead of the photo-realistic Bart corpse, it was myself at ten years old. I found a picture of myself at ten and the nightmare was closer to it than my own memory had been. I swear... that picture of myself at ten, dead, started flashing on the computer screen so quickly that I could never be sure. After that, I destroyed the computer.

I haven't been able to get the episode out of my head, though, and decided to do more research to try to understand it. I found a few people online who seemed to know about it; apparently the episode aired once in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. I have a cousin who was watching The Simpsons during the first season and lives around there, so I asked him if he remembered the episode.

He asked me how I knew about it; it was a nightmare he had that he had only told his parents about, and I was only a few years old at the time. I told him about the episode I saw and the people online who remembered it. He thought I was just playing a prank on him, and when I got him to look at the online posts about it, he screamed and hung up. He hasn't responded to any attempts I made to contact him since.

Determined to get to the bottom of this, I kept searching online. I found someone who said they had a tape of it they would sell to me. I was nervous, but determined to find out the truth about this and end the matter. I bought the tape as well as a really old and cheap TV/VCR, since I had a feeling neither would be the same after I watched the episode.

The episode was pretty much the same as the file I downloaded... I don't want to say anymore; this wasn't worth it and I'd give anything to go back to how I felt when I had the computer with the file scaring me. I destroyed the tape, but it didn't help. The commercials on the tape... I don't want to remember them. There were monsters from my dreams I had never told anyone about, news promos about tragedies that hadn't happened yet, surreal computer generated animation that wouldn't have been possible in the 80's—or now for that matter.

A former friend watched it with me, but he saw completely different things, with one exception. There was a seemingly live news report from June 6, 2013. In complete monotone, he recited the details of millions of people having died in their sleep, some of them waking up for a few seconds first, rambling incoherently about something that people could only piece together had something to do with nightmares. I'm sure you can figure out what date was on the tombstones of the currently alive celebrities.

There was one difference in the episode itself, though. The "joke" Homer told was completely clear on this version. When it zooms in on Homer's face, while looking at Bart, he says:

"If only we all were that lucky."

Credited to KI Simpson