 The story of Dead Bart is a long and confusing one. To summarize, Dead Bart was a production by Matt Groening, and one of the first episodes in the Simpsons series. Today, not much footage from Dead Bart exists, since most copies have been destroyed. Including those made by the studio. The production has been considered to be a mistake, and those who have seen the episode, or worked on it, have said that the creation of it should never have happened. Fox labels all of its episodes according to a smart and efficient system. But the creation of Dead Bart has caused an inconsistency in the amount of episodes reported. The original production label given to the episode was 7G06, but searching for 7G06 brings up another episode, entitled Moning Lisa. People believe that this is to hide the fact that Dead Bart was ever created. Many people know the plot of the story quite well, having read about it in the endless creepypasta. But not many know the actual origin of the production. During the early part of 1989, Matt Groening was experiencing quite a few health problems. He had been experiencing serious delusion and had visions of his death from time to time, many of them eerie and vomit inducing. He was under a lot of pressure to produce quality content for Fox, who were forcing him to work nights in order to get the first season of The Simpsons finalized and ready for broadcast. Having made several mistakes in his life so far, he had decided to make one more, and that mistake was Dead Bart. He wrote the episode in hopes that it would allow him to sleep easy. Like many people write their feelings down on paper, Matt felt that doing the same would take his mind off things. Except for instead of just writing them down, he put them into a storyline, and made his characters play out the scenario. The episode starts with four characters, Bart, Homer, Lisa and Marge. Maddie hadn't made an appearance in the episode, as the overall idea for The Simpsons was a lot different when he had started writing Dead Bart. This includes Maddie being absent. There are several fan theories regarding continuity as to when and how Maddie was born. The Simpsons show was originally going to make stylistic use of death, and the ramifications of someone dear dying. The characters had stronger feelings, due to the effects of death on them in earlier years. Bart had more hatred for his elders, Marge was subject to depression, Lisa was more anxious and Homer was a lot enrear. This concept wasn't scrapped completely in newer episodes of The Simpsons though. Homer still has a strong sense of anger, as reminiscent of him strangling Bart all the time. One of them is related to the characters' feelings, Homer being angry, and Marge being depressed may drive them away from reproduction, plus Marge's depression may have been caused by previous experiences. Maybe she had an abortion. The episode Madd had wrote wasn't supposed to be an actual production though, it was simply a log of his feelings turned into a script. But somewhere along the line, one of the head animators had picked up Madd's work, and took the episode seriously, animating the entire thing, and had voice tracks produced to go along. The voice actors became suspicious as to why they had been asked to read such deluded lines, but they never brought it up with Madd, as they didn't want to mess with an individual who was in such a state. Or somebody in more authority than them for that matter. The production eventually came to the rendering stage. Madd was brought into a conference room, where the head animator had the final render on tape. Madd was dumbfounded as to why he was asked in, seeing that he was screening another episode that week, and official production hadn't been announced yet. The tape started, with the family, as described above. As Madd watched he became pale and looked flushed. The first scene eventually came to a close, and he was already on the verge of tears. I'm not going to summarize the rest here, if you need to, go look at the original creepypasta, entitled Bed Bart. As time ran out, and the credits were fading out, a black and white fox logo appeared on the top of the screen, and the production label, 7G06 faded in just below that, along with the words, final sales copy. That's where the tape ended. After that, Madd left and went home. The team didn't see him for another two days, and when he finally turned up, he completely ignored everyone around him. After being asked about his absence by the receptionist, he quoted, we shall never talk about it again. Since that time, the entire team has uttered not one word about the day. The tape was thrown out. Not burnt, not destroyed, just thrown out. This allowed a needier fan to pick up the tape from the alleyway outside. He watched it several times. His 12-year-old son found out about the tape by accident. He then attempted to set the tape light. Though not a successful destruction, this caused the footage to become shaky and filled with static. An anonymous man recovered the videocassette and uploaded it to a web server under the name of deadbart.complete and exploited.net slash pwtrue slash 7G06, which when opened, would bring up a blank black page with a yellow download link. The page doesn't exist today, and Google failed to get a cached version of it. Not many people can recollect memories of the page while it existed, but some can, including Matt Groening himself. After many weeks of moping over the incident, Matt had received an email on his personal address, containing the link, deadbart.complete and exploited.net slash pwtrue slash 7G06, which was masked as the SimpsonsOfficial.com. Seeing no harm and assuming it was their rebooted site, he went ahead and clicked it. This being in the days of 128 kilobytes per second internet, the page slowly loaded, and then internet explorer packed up under the pressure. Matt decided to take a look later on his home PC. After finally getting onto the site, he downloaded the 20 millibar file entitled just4u.flv and loaded it into his Flash Player. To his dismay, the file downloaded was a ripped file of deadbart. He closed down his computer and attempted to track down the old cassette to make sure that it wasn't seen by anyone else, but never managed to find it. He could remember the entire website link though, off my heart. It was the shock. Eventually a presentation came around, documenting the success of the first season. A Q&A was opened up to the crowd when a young lad asked about the missing episode. David Silverman, the man speaking at the time closed down the presentation hours before they intended the presentation to end. Another lad, who was researching on the episode at the time, stalked Matt down at the end and asked about the episode. In his dumbfounded state, Matt wrote down deadbart.complete and exploited .net-slash-p-w-true-slash-7g-0-6 on a piece of paper, and handed it to the inquirer. He then begged him to never speak of the episode again. That man was the original writer of the deadbart creepypasta. Although only one VCR of the episode was ever made by the studio, some interns had stolen early footage in the form of Betamax tapes they brought in from home. You would think a major studio would keep their resources safe. Another man has documented his experiences with a bootleg tape of deadbart. Legend has it the start of the tape contained an aired episode of The Simpsons, and he had watched this from start to finish, but hadn't realized that the tape also contained deadbart. While making coffee for himself, he heard a loud shouting from the room he had been in, something along the lines of Homer shouting Bart's name out. When he arrived back in the room he was able to witness Bart being plummeted from a plane, 50 feet up in the air, to be followed by the crunching sound of broken bones. That's when the VCR player caught fire, and the tape was initially ruined, except for a scene right at the end, showing Bart's dead body. With both known tapes of deadbart ruined, the latter of people have assumed that deadbart was just a story, nothing but fancy words, ridden to a news and scare. But it wasn't. The truth is that the episode was produced. I saw it when I was eight. I haven't had a good night's sleep since. I now spend my life researching the meaning and the cause of deadbart. Whenever I hear a name being shouted or screaming from afar, I panic, my heart starts racing. And I see it, that dead lifeless corpse, the one of Bart, with his dead eyes staring right at me in disgust, and I look back at him. Feeling mutual.