You know how Fox has a weird way of counting the episodes of The Simpsons? They don’t count some of them, causing the number of episodes to be discrepant. The reason for this strange act is a lost episode in the first season.
It’s quite difficult to find information about this episode because none of the staff that worked on the show at that time want to talk about it.
For what I was able to gather, the lost episode was written entirely by Matt Groening. During the production of the first season Matt was acting strange: he was quiet, he seemed very nervous and even sick. If you talk about this to someone who was present at those times, usually, they getangry and they forbidwhoever to mention this to Matt Groening.
The first time I heard of this episode was at an event where David Silverman was a speaker. Someone in the audience asked about this lost episode and Silverman hurriedly finished his presentation and left the stage.
The episode is the 7G06, with the title “Dead Bart“, but since it was never aired, the code of the episode was given to the next one, “Moaning Lisa”.
If someone tries to talk about this episode to one of the staff members, apart from getting angry they will also try in every way to stop you from talking to Matt Groening about this.
But once, when I was at one of The Simpsonsfan convention, I managed to follow Matt Groening after his interview with the audience and finally, as he was leaving the building, I found a moment to speak to him.
He did not get angry at the fact that I had followed him, thinking I was just a fan seeking an autograph and he talked to me with a smile on his face.
But when I asked him about the lost episode, Matt Groening became pale and began to tremble. When I persisted, asking more information he almost burst into tears.
He took a piece of paper, wrote something on it, handed it to me and begged me not to mention that episode ever again.
On that paper he wrote the link of a website that I will not write here for the reason that I am about to explain: when I got home I typed the web address and a completely black page appeared, except for a yellow download link.
I clicked on the link and the file began to download. Once the download was complete my pc started to freak out, the worst virus ever seen.
I tried to restore the system, without success, and had format it all. But first I copied the files onto a CD and saved it in the new computer completely clean. As I suspected it was an episode of The Simpsons.
At the beginning of the series Matt Groening was of the idea that the world of the Simpsons represented life and so death would have made it more realistic. The idea was used precisely in the episode of Bart’s death.
The Simpson’s lost episode
The episode begins like any other, but with a very low quality of animation. The first part is normal, but the characters are a little crazy:
Homer is angry, Marge depressed, Lisa seems extremely anxious and Bart loaded with anger and hatred toward his parents.
The story isabout the Simpson family traveling by plane, but at the end of the first part, when the plane is about 20 or 30 meters above the ground, Bart breaks a window and gets sucked out.
The image of Bart’s body is hyper realistic. Since it is a static and not animated image, the designers took advantage to draw the body in great detail and the first part of the episode ends with the image Bart’s body.
At the beginning of the second part we find Homer, Marge and Lisa sat at the kitchen table, crying. The crying is endless and increasingly painful while the animation, already low, gets worse and worse. The crying goes on for the entire second half.
The third part begins with the words “one year later”. Homer, Marge and Lisa are still sitting at the kitchen table, extremely thin and emaciated and there is no sign of Maggie.
They decide to visit Bart’s grave. Springfield is totally deserted and as they head to the cemetery the houses becomeincreasingly decrepit and look abandoned.
When they arrive at the tomb, the body of Bart stands in front of the tombstone, the same as in the frame showed in the first part of the episode.
The family begins to cry, then stops to keep watching Bart. Then we have a close-up of Homer, according to summaries of the episode, cracks a joke. In the video I saw, however, you cannot hear it.
Then, before the episode ends, we are presented with an overview and see that the graves in the cemetery are written with the names of the stars featured in previous episodes of the Simpsons.
All had their death dates written on the tombstones and to those who died around that time, like Michael Jackson or George Harrison, the dates coincided with their actual deaths.
Then the end credits rolls, apparently written by hand. I decided to go back to the image of the graves to see the date of death of the celebrities who were still alive, but I noticed something peculiar:
all the other graves bore the same date of death.
Here’s the video
