Dead Bart
is a creepypasta story about a lost episode of The Simpsons in which Bart dies after falling from an airplane.
The writer of the creepypasta confronts Matt Groening about a lost episode that everybody affiliated with the show refuses to acknowledge. Groening gives him a website address and begs him never to speak about the episode again.
When the writer visits the website he finds nothing but a download link, which contains the lost episode. In the episode, Bart breaks the window on a plane and is sucked out. After his death, his family apparently sit at their kitchen table and cry for an entire year, before going to visit his grave. At the cemetery, Bart's corpse is laying on top of his grave and all the other graves bear the names of The Simpsons guest stars, even those who had not appeared on the show at the time the episode would have been written.
A sequel was written by the same author, known as A Dead Bart Update. The author also wrote a similar lost episode Creepypasta of Futurama, titled Not Long Enough, which is set in the same universe, as Futurama and The Simpsons were both created by Matt Groening.
Dead Bart has proven to be fairly influential, helping spawn the "lost episode" genre of Creepypasta.
The Story contains examples of:
- Art Shift: The drawing of Bart's body is described as "photo realistic".
- Character Exaggeration: The narrator describes the Simpsons acting more exaggerated (Homer is even angrier than usual, Marge goes from a frustrated Cloudcuckoolander's Minder to outright depressed, Lisa goes from cautious to straight-up anxious, and Bart goes from a Bratty Half-Pint to actually hating his parents) in the beginning.
- Death Fic: The whole premise of the creepypasta is about a lost episode of The Simpsons concerning Bart Simpson's death.
- Death of a Child: 10-year-old Bart dies in a horrific accident, and the rest of the Simpson family cross the Despair Event Horizon as a result.
- Death Seeker: The ending of "A Dead Bart Update" implies Homer has become one, going by his "joke" upon seeing Bart’s corpse.Homer: If only we all were that lucky.
- Deranged Animation: The titular episode has a lot of Surreal and disturbing imagery
- Despair Event Horizon: The rest of the Simpsons apparently go through this after Bart dies.
- Excessive Mourning: The surviving Simpsons family members spend an entire year in mourning, to the point that they become withered husks of themselves and Maggie and the pets go missing.
- Failed Future Forecast: "A Dead Bart Update" reveals that millions of people would die in their sleep on June 6, 2013.
- Gorn: Implied with the description of Bart's corpse, as well as the ending scene.
- He Really Can Act: In-Universe, the Simpson family crying after Bart's death is described by the narrator as having "better acting than you would think possible".
- Leave the Camera Running: Act Two consists entirely of the Simpsons crying. The crying gets more realistic while the animation, conversely, gets even worse than before and more surreal.
- Nothing but Skin and Bones: Homer, Marge, and Lisa are depicted as completely emaciated in Act Three.
- The Prophecy: The ending suggests the end of the world.
- Silent Credits: The creepypasta mentions the episode's credits as being silent.
- The Stinger: The cartoon ends with a realistically drawn (and possibly dead) Simpson family sitting on their couch.
- Surreal Horror: Both the story and the episode is scary because of the description of strange imagery and occurrences.
- Time Skip: Between acts two and three, one year passes.
- Wham Line:"A thought occurred to me after seeing the episode for the first time, you could try to use the tombstones to predict the death of living Simpsons guest stars, but there's something odd about most of the ones who haven't died yet.
All of their deaths are listed as the same date." - What Happened to the Mouse?: Maggie and the pets disappear without explanation during the last part of the episode. It's implied at worst they've died or at best removed by the authorities, either case being due to not being taken care of properly by the grieving Simpsons family.
