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 december of 1989 and The Simpsons 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 Simpsons 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:
Homer.
Other than the frames you see, the rest of the episode is composed of incomprehensible jumbles of colors, static, or just black screens. The audio seems to be a heavily distorted version of the audio from the original episode, with loud, droning buzzes occasionally interrupting it. Some people actually saw the episode. I was one of these people. I wanted to see the episode after hearing about it.
On a forum, someone told me where I can download the episode. I entered the adress into my browser, (I would rather not say what it was, for reasons you'll see in a second).
And I came to a site that was completely black, except for a line of white 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.
After watching the episode, it scared me out of my mind. 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 Homer, it was my ten year-old self. I found a picture of myself at 10 and the nightmare was closer to it than my own memory had been. I swear...that picture of myself at 10, 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 California.
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 80s - 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...
{{GLE}}