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."