Until recently, it was thought that Matt Groening had completely
recovered from whatever was making him act so strangely during the Dead
Bart incident and that it had affected his normal life afterward. Recent
claims from the employee who found the Dead Bart video, however,
indicate that Matt Groening went through another, similar, incident ten
years ago. It was the summer of 1999 and Futurama had recently
premiered. Matt was working on two shows now and had started showing
signs of stress, when he announced that he was working on another
episode that would be 100% of his own writing. This terrified some of
the staff who worked on both shows, but they were hesitant to bring up
Dead Bart and the Futurama crew saw no reason to reject Matt's idea. An
early version of it was made and the employee who found Dead Bart
managed to make a digital copy of this as well. The episode was called
"Not Long Enough."
The episode started with Fry, Leela, and Bender making a delivery
for Planet Express. They never revealed exactly what they were
delivering or where they were going, and everyone seemed to be upset
about an unexplained event that had happened recently. Leela and Bender
were angry at Fry, who kept apologizing but was coldly rejected by his
friends. They eventually reached a planet that seemed to have only one
house surrounded by empty, desolate fields on all sides. They knocked
the door and a grotesque alien that seemed to be very old answered. He
took the box without a word. He opened it, took a knife out of it, and
stabbed himself.
The Planet Express crew didn't seem to find this odd or
surprising; they simply left the body on the ground and walked back to
their ship in silence. The next scene was of the Planet Express ship
flying through space. A dissonant piece of music made of extremely loud
instruments playing a very slow tune played in the background while the
ship flew through an empty, black space. They finally reached Earth and
landed in a deserted New New York. Fry started apologizing again as they
walked through the empty streets (there was no sign of the Planet
Express building), but Leela and Bender glared at him in silence. Fry
gave up and separated from his friends. He walked for quite a while,
never encountering a single person.
He reached the cryogenics building where he had been frozen,
looked inside, and began to cry. The crying went on for a few minutes
before he entered the building. Fry went to one of the tubes, set the
timer on it to a huge number with more zeroes than I could count, and
locked himself in. The screen faded out and when it came back in the
view was entirely on Fry. The machine must have partially stopped
working, as parts of Fry were decaying; bone was poking through his skin
in several places. Fry mumbled, "It's what I deserve," and climbed out
of the freezing device.
He was in a surreal, indescribable place. There were a huge
variety of shapes and colors, but it wasn't bright or fanciful. It was
closer to the faint colors you see if you close your eyes too hard. Fry
started walking, the surreal void he was in seeming to go on and on. He
kept walking for a few minutes. The colors kept making shapes you could
kind of make out, but none of them were pleasant. After his long walk,
Fry found a picture on the ground. It was completely out of place in his
new environment; it looked like something drawn in the normal Futurama
style. It was a photo of himself, Leela, and Bender. Fry looked at it
for a few seconds before beginning to cry again. The picture soon turn
to dust and Fry continued walking.
The view zoomed out until Fry couldn't be seen until the colors
all blended together and turned to solid black. The view continued to
zoom out and we see that the black was a tiny fragment of the pupil in
Fry's eye. His frozen body had fallen out of the freezing unit and was
lying in an abandoned room. He was drawn in the same hyper-realistic
style as Bart's corpse (from the Simpsons episode, "Dead Bart").
Bender and Leela walked into the room. They saw what Fry had done
to himself and Leela said, "He got what he deserved." She checked her
watch and said, "Looks like we need to leave for our next delivery." She
took a knife out of her pocket, put it in a plain cardboard box, and
headed to the ship.
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