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 through 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.
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