The Truth About Dead Bart

I'm sure you've all heard of the "Dead Bart" lost episode that a lot of people consider important on the internet. Well, I'm a former writer for the Simpsons who would prefer to remain unnamed, and unfortunately going to have to rain on your parade by informing you that the episode exists, is real, and is far more graphic and horrific than what has actually been released onto the internet in recent years.
I feel the need to tell my tale because, in recent years, many people have been making claims that are unfounded or completely false regarding the "lost episode" as it is often called.
You see, during the time Simpsons creator Matt Groening surrendered greater creative control to James L. Brooks, Matt was going through a period of severe depression and alcoholism. He ultimately became much more further and distant among known cast members. As a former writer on the show, I will tell you that it soon became very difficult to communicate with Matt Groening by the time 1996 rolled around. 1996 was over 20 years ago, but it represents an important turning point because it is the time that Matt Groening stopped communicating with the writers and providing feedback on his famous comment cards. Instead, he would provide one or two sentences of feedback and abruptly stop communication as he seemed to have more pressing matters to attend to.
Many people don't know this, but the Simpsons actually had two different animation studios working on the show. AKOM, a South Korean animation studio, worked on over 200 episodes of The Simpsons since the show's inception.
What's concerning and disturbing is that quite often AKOM would send the episodes back half finished or half animated due to labor constraints. This would require animators in the U.S. to provide finishing touches and post-production elements to actually improve the quality to match that of Groenings' gold standard.
This episode was actually supposed as S9E1, or Season 9, episode 1. Strangely enough, it was pulled from the schedule within three months before it was ever supposed to air. Most people don't know this, but Groening named the Simpsons characters after his own family members, but he substituting the name "Bart" for his own name.
Simpsons writers John Swartzwelder and David X. Cohen agreed to work on the episode as a joke, but abruptly quit as they were concerned Groening's ideas were too dark. Neither were fired for being subordinate, but they were giving much less input and creative control after that point. Groening looked very unkempt and disheveled during the line reading and Yeardley Smith, who voiced Lisa, complained that she was uncomfortable reading some of the lines. She flat out refused to read a few of them and even claimed that she may quit if this trend of writing continued.
The studio took whatever had already been recorded and shipped the tape off to the Korean animators to animate the film. Groening had several sequences in the script held from both the cast and writers, for reasons that are today unknown.
Groening made three copies of the tape, at that time often distributed on VHS. One copy was given to the screening audience and one copy was given to the Simpsons office.
Now I should tell you, Matt Groening is well known for being a free mason, and many of the jokes and references in the episode relate to his love of freemasonry. My initial reaction from watching the tape was a mixture of shock, confusion and fear.
The episode starts the way most episodes do, except the pitch for the intro is way off. Groening preferred what he called a "free jazz" intro for this episode, but the result was several notes being far higher and more ghastly than usual. The chalkboard sequence is a lot different as this time there is nobody in the room. We immediately cut to the family in the living room. The plot is simple. The family is going on vacation and Bart refuses to come out of his room. There is some mumbling in the background about an insurance policy and Homer's voice sounds a lot deeper. It sounds much more like how Homer sounded during the show's pilot episode. "COME OUTSIDE BART!" Homer starts banging on the door. Lisa is shown drawing a lamb and smiling. That's when you see a picture of a devil, with pitchfork and tail, in the hallway to Bart's room. I think that this ended up being a reference to the treehouse of horror episode where ned flanders plays the devil, but...it's not ned flanders. It's simply the devil.
Homer continues to bang on the door and Bart refuses to come out. Marge makes a very strange comment. She says "these don't look like pencils, they look like bones" but it's off-screen so the viewer is not very sure what she's talking about. What was most concerning was that the animation was double layered, as though both Homer and Marge had been erased and drawn in a separate place on screen. There is a silhouette of homer to the side, as in, a color blur representing his shape is there, but he was moved approximately three feet to the left for reasons unknown.
Homer is finally shown angrily breaking the door down and grabbing Bart. The shower silhouette shows Homer strangling Bart as he usually did, but the strangling was a lot more graphic and after some time Bart's head started to slump to the side. A 2 second frame of the curtain opening showed visible lacerations and bart's neck, chest and abdomen.
Homer closes the shower curtain and Lisa goes in and brushes her teeth. Homer suddenly starts screaming "LISA LISA LISA!" and drags her into the other room. He brings Lisa and Maggie in there and there is a timelapse showing as he locks them in there for what appears to be several days. Lisa starts to appear pale, cold and begins to shake as she bangs on the door.
Marge is shown carrying cleaning supplies into the bathroom and she turns the faucet on. Homer says "Lisa, shut your fucking mouth" off-screen. It wasn't bleeped and instead you just hear silence for three seconds after.
The family finally decides to pack up and go on vacation, but Homer decides to stop at Moe's bar on the way. Inside he sees several gentleman in business suit attire that are more realistically drawn than what the show usually portrayed. What looks like a man in a Woody Woodpecker suit is just sitting there. I didn't understand any of this. The bar table has a mosaic pavement on it, and two tiny statues of lambs sit on the bar desk.
Homer begins to drink with the strange businessmen as they take out a briefcase and open it to reveal money. And then one of them begins to speak, but it's not the voice of any actor that I remember working on the show. Dan Castellanata, who voices homer, does not speak at all for this entire sequence. But what the business man says is just...strange. It's hard to hear it because what sounds like a train passing by outside is extremely loud and what sounds like a an accordion or harmonica is beginning to get louder and more fierece.
"They've been accusing us for years now. Free masons, the government. We are basically the sound of all control, all control, all flights, all planes, everything is moving at once. Do you think there's going to be an exit- an exit strategy? A way out? I SEE YOU. We should be put in jail, but there's no criminals for people like us. We're just normal- everybody- EVERYBODY! EVERYBODY!" His voice gets a lot more distorted and he just starts speaking gibberish as the animation goes haywire and spins out of control.
The tape cuts to the sound of screaming- what sounds like Bart screaming "DAAAAAD!" cut to a screeching halt. What sounds like a car crash outside brings the sequence to an abrupt stop. Homer gets into his car and a human-body shaped figure is shown in a burlap sack. Homer is shown smiling and carrying the money. What he said next confused everyone watching, as many of the test screeners had walked out at this point. Homer was talking to Marge. "He started out that way, but then he looked like the devil, he had the eyes, the face, the teeth. Even the HAIR of the devil!" The family decides to take a trip to the garbage dump and Homer and Marge are having Lisa and baby Maggie put the burlap sack into an oil drum and bury it eight feet under the far end of the dump. It's hard to state where the dump is geographically because you can see the Springfield tire fire burning in the background.
A voice mumbles "you can stop filming, it's already gone." And then you hear what could be Bart or Lisa mumbling "I'm sorry dad." The family decides to get ice cream and go home. A voice whispers "that was fast" and the eerie music humming slowly fades out.
Well, the strangest thing is that the episode ends with a title card telling the audience to "mail comments" to this particular address, which may have been a joke, but it was a real address.
Several screeners walked out shaking their head, thinking that this may have been a Halloween episode until the cursing, devil and graphic murder sequence was shown.
Well, the Simpsons creators tried to bury it. They hired a few fake web users named "KL Simpson" which stands for "Kill Lisa" Simpson and DB Hellover to write fake joke "lost episodes" to obfuscate what we all saw was plain as day. They also hired a production company named Fusion GPS to create "viral videos" to turn it into a joke if anyone ever actually found out. The Simpsons is a multimillion dollar property, and that could've all crumbled like a house of cards if any of this ever came to the light of day.
Pieces of the episode have been leaked in audio, video and small snippets as part of the goal of making it seem like a group collaborative effort by the internet instead of a real conspiracy that was mocking the common man with identifiable signs and symbols. But that's what "The Simpsons" was always about. I'll tell you- Groening made the show with the intention of seeing the common American family as a bunch of "Simpletons" that would never figure these things out.
The third tape would normally go to Fox broadcasting for intensive review, but things didn't get that far. Groening later told an employee that he jokingly gave it away to a local Goodwill, to "wipe his hands of the whole mess." The original audio vocal and sound track tapes were also abandoned in the same manner. I can't say much more- I don't want to reveal my direct identity. One thing that I always found strange was that Groening provided commentary for every episode on the season 9 commentary, that is, except for the one that show replaced. Season 9, episode 1, The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson. Curiously, this episode was also briefly pulled from television because it contained an overt 9/11 reference.
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