YMMV / Dead Bart

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Why did nobody want to talk about the episode, until eventually, Groening gave away the URL? Was it because they were trying to keep the episode a secret (perhaps due to the ending hinting at an apocalypse), and Groening was too troubled to keep mum or was punishing the narrator for being nosy? Or was it just because they were too scared to talk about the episode, and Groening somehow faced his fear?
  • Why did Maggie and the pets disappear? Did they die of neglect, or did the authorities take them away?
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The follow-up says the world would end on June 6, 2013, which has long since passed. Another creepypasta theory, Jossed.
  • The fact that the gravestones predict the deaths of many celebrities. In real life, starting about 2016, the Simpsons has had memes made of it being able to predict the future due to certain events or jokes in the show happening in real life (such as Donald Trump being elected as president, or 20th Century Fox, now rebranded as 20th Century Studios, being bought by Disney).
  • Dark Simpsons, a parody series that edits Simpsons episodes into twisted Black Comedies, would eventually do a video called "Marge Simpson's Fear Of Flying" that had a bizarrely similar premise to Dead Bart, with Bart dying in an airplane accident and Marge mourning him... except the Dark Simpsons version somehow manages to be even darker; Lisa dies alongside Bart in the plane crash, Homer gleefully eats both their corpses, and the other passengers on the plane are doomed to die in Antarctica.
  • The Treehouse of Horror sketch, Toy Gory, has an ending that closely resembles "Dead Bart". Bart ends up dead, and the short ends with the rest of the family gathered around his corpse, crying loudly. The family's grief is also implied to go on for a long time in the epilogue, as in the creepypasta.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Par the course for Creepypastas—particular cases include Bart's corpse being photo-realistic, the family's grief lasting an entire year, rendering all of them (even Homer) skeletally thin and the implications of the ending. Namely, the ending states that all the death dates for the guest stars who did die are accurate, and the dates for the still-living stars are the same, which implies they will all die on the same day, hinting at an apocalypse.
  • This mockup of the pasta displays Bart's corpse after a quick flash from white, making for an effective Jump Scare, which only gets more uncanny with the realistic splattering noise and almost tranquil-sounding droning noise in the background.
  • From the sequel, we finally get to hear what Homer's "joke" was. It implies that Homer believes Bart is lucky to have died, which is unsettling to hear coming from someone who usually provides comedy.
    Homer: If only we all were that lucky.
• Once Original, Now Common: Along with the likes of Suicide Mouse and Squidward's Suicide, this was one of the earliest and most well-known "Lost Episode" styled creepypastas. The popularity of the pasta lead to a slew of imitators basically creating poorly made rip-offs of Dead Bart, turning things like "photo-realistic dead bodies and blood in a cartoon" into an overused cliche, though it was considered "new and creepy" when Dead Bart and the like first did them.
• Sequelitis: "A Dead Bart Update" is generally seen as vastly inferior, mainly because of applying a specific date^note June 6, 2013 for the foreseen apocalypse (that of course came and went, effectively undermining the scariness of the lost episode predicting that many celebrities who guest-starred on The Simpsons will die on the same date) and providing the needless retcon that the narrator had actually seen the episode before, but didn't remember.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The sequence where the Simpson family cries over Bart's death.
  • Homer's line, "If only we all were that lucky." It implies that Homer believes Bart is lucky to have died, and is thus suicidal.
  • Maggie and the pets disappear around the final act, a strong implication being that they died of neglect.

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