"Lost Episodes": an investigation.
“I just want to start off by saying that if you want an answer at the end, prepare to be disappointed. There isn’t one.”
As soon as the internet first became accessible to those of the younger persuasion, The Youth has been using it to defame the patronizing idols forced upon them by our media. “This is what you like”, they are told by the TV before they can ever talk. “You like singing, you like dancing, you like smiling. You like counting and sharing. You like soft-ass hippie dinosaurs who sing about all these things. And you most certainly do not like stuff with ‘Blood’ and/or ‘Scary’ in it.” But being on the internet is different than watching TV, and so especially was being on the early internet; a place beyond moderation, censorship, or the mystified ‘4th Wall’ keeping their grubby little hands off the levers of power w/r/t that which Barney can and shan’t not do. It was a realm of complete freedom, but primarily the freedom to ask things like;
“What if Barney was actually Rude? What if Elmo had a Gun? What if Spongebob smoked weed, or Hello Kitty did Heroin, or My Little Pony killed people with a chainsaw?? or wWhat if Penelope Pitstop was dark-sided and Goth and tied me up and drinked my blood every day using me as her own personal blood-cow???” — Irresistibly alluring ideas, all of them, but at the end of the day we simply must accept that such subversive concepts should only exist in our minds’ deepest, darkest recesses, and respect the original artistic purpose for which these things were made, lest we take away something pure and necessary from our culture. I’m sure we can all agree on that. right, children..??
Ok, before we get past all the damn fluff and into the real gristle of this article, I need to issue one of my famous ‘perfect angel Hottie takes’; The current state of crap for kids is simply and utterly ‘f*cked’ (censored in case any kiddos r reading! 👼)
Take for example the massive popularity & ungodly amount of Youtube coverage of recent children’s media phenomenons such as ‘Poppy Playtime’, ‘Garten of Banban’ or, if youre feeling brave, even ‘Amanda the Adventurer’ ; It seems today that little kids are more familiar with the scary, ‘messed up’ versions of crap they like, than the actual crap that they actually like. This raises some big questions. #1, does Gen Alpha even know what ‘Dora the Explorer’ is? are they even capable of understanding what a drastic departure it would be if she were to become messed up & scary?? and what does this say about our culture? that any thing taken for granted as a timeless universal truth (i.e., Kids’ Stuff is for Kids, Superhero Movies are for little Kids, Star Wars is for Gay little nerd Kids) is bound to eventually be shattered and forgotten as the media in question is replaced by a derivative, satirical or ‘transgressive’ version of itself, which will in time no longer be seen as any of those things because it has fully usurped the role of the original??
All these intriguing, thinkpiece-worthy questions aside, I must say that the most alarming part of all this, is that it’s not even really New. as already stated, its definitely been occurring for at least as long as Online has been a factor, and that little ‘internet’ fad has stuck around for some time now..! so if I am to fully philosophize over this phenomenon, I think it best to start from a place of introspection, looking at my own experiences, and the most popular form of such pop culture subversion from when I myself was a rebellious youth with a strong curiosity towards the Darker Side of Disney Channel; I allude of course - in a reverent, hushed tone - to the lost art of the ‘Lost Episode’ creepy pasta (netizen-speak for ‘scary story’.)
Section I. What is a “Lost Episode” ??
Before it became a staple of internet horror fiction, the tantalizing concept of the “lost episode” itself was popularized among children in a notably non-lost SpongeBob Squarepants episode titled “The Sponge Who Could Fly”, which features a subplot revolving around the character of Spongebob super-fan ‘Patchly the Pirate’ — himself an anomalous presence in the series, being a rarely-appearing live-action character existing in skits disconnected from the animated narratives; many’s first introduction to “Lynchianism” — obtaining and viewing a fabled “lost episode” of the series. Undoubtedly this is where most of my generation first encountered the idea of “lost media” as a whole, a concern that has come to define our cultural identity; We’re “wiki kids”, and if any of you FUCKERS come for us, we’ll be able to list every thing you ever did, and especially the stuff you wanted us to forget.
So once we’ve learned that its possible there are more ‘eps’ out there of the shows we love, it was completely natural for kids everywhere to start indulging in rampant speculation, fanfictioning, ‘fibbing’, etc. You mean to tell me Spongebob did even more stuff I dont know about? Ed, Edd, and/or Eddy could have actually gotten to eat a Jaw breaker and I might never see it?? i ought to start telling all my pals on the schoolyard that my uncle works at Cartoon Network and let me watch the Forbidden cartoon where Cow & Chicken cry blood, so as to start accruing influence among my simple-minded peers. but beyond that more wistful & whimsical realm of curiosity, lies an even deeper, darker desire; the Lost Episode became the perfect outlet for all of our twisted thoughts about the sacred childhood icons whom we previously had no control over. the reclamation of our imaginations from our TV overlords necessitated going to places the high-&-mighty ‘Makers’ dare not tread, but the Lost Episode narrative let us do more than merely imagine these things; it underlined the innate defiance of our curiosities, heightening the tension between maker and faker that much more. it seductively posits, of course they made a Loony Tune where the coyote finally drops a anvil on the bird and makes its insides explode outward— they’re just hiding it from us.
so that is all to say, that Lost Episode stories were plentiful in my day. According to historians (KnowYourMeme.com) the earliest known Lost Episode creepypasta was posted in 2009; a dark little tail called “SuicideMouse.avi”, consisting of a seemingly innocuous/boring Youtube video depicting the famous character of Mickey the Mouse walking solemnly, with an accompanying description explaining that this was just a ‘snippet’, and that the actual bigger, longer, & uncut SuicideMouse cartoon was so dark-sided and crazy it would probably make your damn head explode..!! but by far the most famous Lost Episode creepypasta was a later, more indulgent tale by the name of “Squidward’s Suicide”— I’ll give you one guess what this one’s about, and it sure ain’t Sunday brunch! silly chicks..
Well, despite their titles happening to share a specific keyword, Squidward’s Suicide is actually quite a different beast from SuicideMouse (and I dont just mean because its aquatic). Whereas the latter story keeps things short & simple, only artfully implying Mickey’s tortured mental state; Squidward’s Suicide forgoes any pretense of ‘good taste’ with a long, drawn-out (no pun intended!) description of an entire episode of mounting misery, culminating in the oft-beleaguered character of Squidward..and you may want to be sitting down for this... shooting himself in the head with a Gun. oh, and there’s also some bits in there about the unnamed evil animators splicing in real-life gore footage of children that they murdered, but lets be real, that’s basically ‘fluff’ and Squidward is who we’re really here to see ‘get it’.
“The bubbles splash screen comes up, and we see the ending of Squidward’s concert. This is when things began to seem off.
While playing, a few frames repeat themselves, but the sound doesn’t. It’s supposed to be synced with the animation, so yes, that’s not common. But when Squidward stops playing, the sound finishes, as if the skip never happened.
There is slight murmuring in the crowd before they begin to boo him. Not the normal cartoon booing that’s common in the show, mind you; you could very clearly hear malice in it. Squidward’s in full frame and looks visibly afraid. The shot goes to the crowd, with SpongeBob in center frame - he too is booing, which is very much unlike him. That isn’t the oddest thing, though. What’s odd is that everyone has hyper-realistic eyes. All very detailed. Clearly not shots of real people’s eyes, but something a bit more real than CGI. The pupils were red. Some of us looked at each other, obviously confused, but since we weren’t the writers, we didn’t question its appeal to children yet.”
— Squidward’s Suicide (excerpt)
apparently first posted to the /x/ board on 7chan in 2010, the “hyper-realism” of Squidward’s suicide has been widely mocked across the internet for over a decade now, plastered up on the Wall of Shame with similar schlocky shock stories such as ‘Sonic.exe’ or the admirably straightforward ‘The Real Chuck E. Cheese’ as a glaring example of what not to do when trying to write a genuinely scary story about a cartoon character for babies. and at the time I also looked down upon Squidward’s Suicide, seeing it as giving the kinds of lame scary stories I liked a bad name in the eyes of more seriouse internet users when I was a kid, but at this poinnt, so far removed from a time where it was ever seen as anything worth taking seriously, I’ve come to appreciate it. Nowhere else will you see the id of the juvenile ‘edge-lord’ mind laid out in such detail, without Racism being involved, and honestly imagining some brooding teenage nerd thinking all of that up in his spare time is kind of ‘cute’, and likely served as a nice artistic reprieve from their less-than-ideal adolescence.
I’ve definitely already typed the words “Squidward” and “suicide” far too much for this article to still be readable, but I’ll just say that this story (also known as “Red Mist”, for some reason) and its direct spiritual relatives (SuicideMouse, Dead Bart, etc) only encompass the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the pantheon of Lost Episode campfire stories; there are lost episodes of other cartoons, there are even cartoons that were entirely lost (Happy Apple, anyone?); there’s lost live-action media (the ones about 90s sitcoms like Full House and Family Matters tend to be particularly funny), lost theme parks, cursed games (mostly Sonic & Pokemon stuff), cursed public access puppet shows that were all in your head, actual playable videogames that look cute but are scary (as noted prior), Adult Swim informercials, found footage movies, ARGs, RPGs, LGBT coming-of-age films, and even Normal Porn for Normal People. these are all arguably the same thing; it’s a wide spectrum, and a big club, and yourre probably in it.
the point is that all media can be lost, and all media can be scary. and when lost media is scary, that’s simply sublime.
Section II. The stuff that Legends are made of.
Just as all the funniest jokes have a wee bit o’ truth to them (my most trusted news source? The Onoin…😏), the most timeless myths & make-’em-ups tend to stem from a distortion of Reality, rather than a total lack of it. The Roswell UFO was a weather balloon. The Mothman? probably a big owl. 9/11; office prank gone awry. so it stands to reason that the iconic and highly resonant image of Squidward from Spongebob shooting himself in the head with a gun could also have happened for real. or, at least, an equivalent abberation of childrens media’s ‘normal reality’ whose mere existence and vague, lingering presence in our shared cultural memory could explain the proliferation of such ideas across generations; the Jungian archetype of “Scary Squidward”, so to speak.
Though various “innovations” (aka capitalist bullcrap) in both fields over the past 20 years have rendered them uncomfortably similar to one another, there was a time where the internet let you choose what you saw & when, and TV did not. basking in the TV’s iconic Glow, our tired comfort-seeking eyes were at the mercy of the airwaves, and a certain level of trust needed to be maintained, for if we fragile-minded consumers were to be unwillingly exposed to something ‘Strange’ or ‘Challenging’, it could mean a backlash the likes of which would never be seen past this point in culture; i.e., a non-profitable one. of course, there have been countless instances of this throughought the history of Television, and most of them have been less-than-terrifying (Janet Jackson’s breasts), though occasionally confounding enough for people to convince themselves they were being Demonically Haunted (the ‘Max Headroom’ hijacking, that one Quizno’s commercial). and if Grown Adults with “fully developed” frontal lobes were ready to go to war over seeing a chickie’s bare chest for just a sec, then you can only imagine the deep psychological turmoil caused by even the tiniest ‘hiccups’ in childrens’ broadcasting, where the trust between viewer & viewee is expected to be the most secure.
you may have noticed by now that the genre of Lost Episode fiction tends to focus primarily (or at least, have the biggest impact when it does) on a certain subject; Squidward. or, i guess, SpongeBob as a whole. so its quite revealing that even in a vacuum, isolated from the world of pastas that are creepy, the “SBU” has its fair share of legitimate “lost media rabbitholes”, i.e. not ones created with the intent to be Scarey. take for instance, the infamous “A Day with SpongeBob Squarepants”; an enigmatic online DVD listing for an unofficial Spongebob-themed live-action film, which was ultimately found to have never existed in the first place.. but thats still quite creepy, isn’t it? or is it only creepy because Lost Episode fiction has primed us to assume the worst any time theres a thing with Spongebob in it we aren’t able to see??
Well, how about the lost media that was allegedly in the show itself? it’s an annoyingly oft-repeated fact at this point that for the Season 2 episode “Sailor Mouth”, which explores the taboo topic of ‘cussing’ by employing the gimmick of censoring the characters’ naughty swears with dolphin noises, they actually had the voice actors cuss in-character; something hoaxsters & deceivers on the web have been claiming to have found for years, though to my knowledge most “uncensored” versions of this episode are poorly-edited fakes using clips of the voice actors from elsewhere. but for an even more mysterious and contentious example, consider the Season 1 episode “I Was a Teenage Gary”, in which poor unfortunate Squidward is accidentally injected with a syringe of snail juice causing him to undergo a graphic and painful transformation into a Snail; his body contorting, his bones cracking, his eyes bulging out, all for our innocent eyes to see and be forever scarred by. Only… that didn’t really happen in the episode. or did it??
This is more a case of a “Mandel Effect”, named for the late comedian Howie Mandel who many claim to believe is still alive, but it eerily overlaps with the tropes of “Lost Media” fiction, as many of my generation swear on their lives to have actually witnessed the surprising & tonally out-of-place scene as children, concluding that it must have been edited out of all future airings of the episode due to the terror it invoked in its young viewers. most likely these people simply Made it Up due to being sugar-drunk younglings with hyperactive imaginations at the time; it is often claimed that the most effective scares of a good Horror Film are those it forces the viewer to imagine themselves, as is the case in the surprisingly bloodless The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). yet, to entertain the idea for just a moment, wouldn’t it explain a lot about the eventual cultural obsession with scary lost Squidward scenes if this turned out to actually be true..??
Regardless if this specific instance occurred or not (it didn’t), Spongebob is renowned for its gross-out gags & moments of sudden “hyper-realism” anyhow. Why people mocked that detail of ‘S.S.’ so heavily is actually somewhat puzzling to me, considering its the most likely thing to happen in the actual show out of anything else described within it; (say you want about S.S., but you simply have to hand it to them here!!) Likewise, the newer and increasingly cooler-to-mock ‘Mandel Effect’ stories aren’t all too out there either, considering the notable amount of children’s programming that actually has been pulled out of circulation simply for being too frightening; most famously the “Wicked Witch” episode of Sesame Street, which was inaccessible to the public from its first ill-received airing in 1976 up until 2022. and until at least the 90s, episodes of notable cartoons like Darkwing Duck and Rocko’s Modern Life were often being flat-out Banned in select parts of the country for featuring ‘Satanic themes’.. gee, of all the scary made-up stuff out there, people sure love to keep falling for that one, huh? Though it should be noted that these ‘select parts’ were also banning shows with black people in them forever, which I guess would be considered ‘scary lost media’ to them as well.
if anything, the influx of interest in Lost Media over the past several years online has caused a lot of these ridiculous Lost Episode stories to age surprisingly well, now that we have more understanding of just how often stuff like this can become lost, but the most revealing cases aren’t even the pieces of media that made it to air. Internet archival has also shone a bigger light on the behind-the-scenes workings of these shows, in a few cases overlapping oddly with the narratives of stories like our old pal Red Mist; the ‘frame story’ of Squidward’s Suicide follows an unnamed intern at Nickelodeon Studios circa 2005, relaying his first-hand experience viewing a strange episode in the editing room that no one else on the staff is aware of the contents of before seeing. The story’s opening lines, very fittingly, read as follows; “I just want to start off by saying that if you want an answer at the end, prepare to be disappointed. There isn’t one.”
Throughout the many years I’ve been aware of this story, after first reading the story as an impressionable child and admittedly being creeped out by it, to quickly coming to ‘cringe’ at it and consider it not worthwhile art, to regaining some sort of weird, maybe rather patronizing appreciation for it nowadays, the part I’ve thought about the most which has always been genuinely intriguing to me from an ‘artistically-minded’ perspective, is that its ambiguity leads you to imagine a specific ‘rogue animator’ within the Spongebob staff who would be so dedicated towards their own twisted tastes that they would independently animate an entire episode about Squidward unaliving himself without the rest of the staff even so much as hearing about it until it had reached the ‘post-production’ stage. ‘Dead Bart’, one of it’s direct inspirations, even goes as far as to write a particularly mortified version of Simpsons creator & famous island visitor Matt Groening into its frame narrative, being the one who grants the narrator access to the titular lost episode himself. S.S. takes a more intimate approach, in that it actually places its narrator inside the studio; Just imagine being one of those animators, looking around at your co-workers who you see all the time, having to suddenly question without ever considering such things before, “Who in the hell would make something like this? We’re working on a baby’s show, damn it, and the one thing we should all understand not to do is to make something fucked up with our precious, marketable characters!”
Well, maybe you would think that. Then again. Maybe not..
This is ‘SpongeBob: Behind Closed Doors’ — a little booklet of obscene sketches drawn by the crew of SpongeBob Squarepants throughout the first 2 years of production. This era was where the groundwork for the Spongebob Universe we know today was first laid, and in some of the drawings in this book, you can see Spongebob himself getting laid; the full book has been said to contain everything from ‘deviant sexual acts’ to ‘gratuitous physcial violence’. This used to be the stuff of pure internet speculation, only known to exist in the first place because of an off-hand reference in an interview with former SB animator Kent Osborne (who was tragically ‘unalived’ the next day after throwing himself out the window of Nickelodeon Studio… Hey, i’m just kidding). It, too, was considered ‘lost media’ once upon a time.. and then, one day, it wasn’t; in 2023, a Lost Media YouTuber by the name of ‘LSuperSonicQ’ (yea, theyre all called stuff like that..) was unexpectedly contacted by an anonymous ex-Nick employee, sharing with him several exclusive excerpts from the book which sent tidal waves throughout Spongebob Twitter. Here is an link to go view them on Internet Archive. Because its important to Culture...
Never meant to see the light of day outside the studio doors, this scrapbook of crude doodles is surprisingly sweet once you put yourself in the headspace of those who doodled them; It’s well known that making a cartoon takes a lot of time, energy, and constant creativity. it stands to reason that the only way to endure so many hours of nonstop drawring is to occasionally break up the boring bits with meaningless little exercises to amuse yourself and keep the juices flowing.. in more ways than one! Just kidding. I dont mean to say that the makers of Spongebob were ‘jerking off’ to the pictures they drew of Spongebob ‘doing the nasty’ with Squidward. But even if they were, I can empathize with their poor, depraved souls; being stuck in the studio with a buncha' sweaty art school freaks for so long, can be kind of like being in Prison, and everyone needs to find a release somehow.
“Sometimes school children would be given a tour through the SpongeBob offices. I loved the look of disappointment in their eyes as they came face to face with the sad old nerds who actually drew the cartoons that they loved. Some board guys would actually lock their doors as the tours came around. It was better that the kids not step into some offices as they were decorated with Post-It drawings of the SpongeBob characters cavorting in the most disgusting, depraved, sexual scenarios that only the sick minds of jaded cartoonists could vomit up.”
— ‘Kaz’, famous SpongeBob writer/director
The SB staff were far from unique for indulging in such things, however. Investigating Lost Media is a massive cottage industry right now, and everybody is trying to get in on the fun, digging up whatever they can about whoever from whenever, and long before ‘Behind Closed Doors’ was brought to the public’s attention, a deleted LiveJournal post by the now-infamous Rugrats animator Steve Ressel gave the animation fandom its first real peek at the utter depravity that bored cartoonists were capable of; it described a 1998 “storyboard jam” worked on by various members of the ‘Rugrat Pack’, that began by depicting the lovable baby hero Tommy Pickles trying to poison his evil cousin Angelica with Drano. According to his own account, Ressel initially “pushed the storyboard away in disgust”, before eventually coming back to it and adding on his own scenes which were pretty much infinitely worse in every way. (Basically, just imagine the worst thing you can possibly imagine happening to a ‘Rugrats’ character)
So it seems the urge to imagine innocent childrens’ characters doing messed-up stuff they ideally “shouldn’t ever” be doing, is not exclusive to the weird, maladjusted kids who grew up watching these shows, but also shared by the weird, maladjusted adults who make them; Meaning, my exploration has led me to a gaping chasm; It goes so much deeper than we thought, and I’m not sure theres much farther I can go with this without just straight up talking to someone who worked on one, any, or all of these shows!! and as we’ve learned, the Animation Studio is an extremely special, even sacred environment, and it cant just open its doors to any curious cat like me. I mean, I have my “connections”, but do they really go that far…??
Section III. An interview with veteran animator Archie Weinberry.
You read that right, dear readers; I actually interviewed the real Archie Weinberry for this. So if the perfect angel newsletter isn’t considered a legitimate publication at this point, then maybe Donald J. Trump should shut down NPR, because nothing could possibly be sufficiently ‘legitimate’ for you coastal elitist snobs. but, I digress..
“Who even is Archie Weinberry?!?”, some of you cultureless fly-over state slobs may be wondering. Well, truth be told, I didnt freaking know either! until our trusty contact with connections in the animation industry (Tiffany Barb-Streuss, owner of the Cartoon Crazy news group) brought him to my attention. He isn’t the biggest name around town, and he’ll be the first to admit that; he was more of a ‘journeyman’ in the animation industry, not as much an auteur, and none of his stints on the big shows ever lasted very long— yet, his resume is staggering, nonetheless; practically a list of every animated show from the 90s to the aughts worth giving a ‘hoot’ about.
Starting out at Disney, touching up on the work of Walt himself for a series of Classic re-releases in the late 80s, then pivoting to storyboards on the Simpsons for a brief period. after being fired from that job, he thought his career was over, but thankfully, he had an influential friend in the ‘Ren & Stimpy’ offices, and throughout the 90s he was something of a Kids’ Show stalwart. and yes.. he even did some work for our jolly little friend from under the sea; ‘SpongeBoy SquareMan’ (as he was called at the time of his initial hiring).
You may think its a bit of a waste, having this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity talking to an under-sung legend who’s seen just about every corner of the industry during maybe its most iconic era, and primarily talking to him about crap like Squidward’s Suicide. Well, that’s actually the perfect place to jump right into it;
Perfect Angel: So how do you feel about crap like Squidward’s Suicide, anyhow??
Archie Weinberry: (laughs) “Anyhow”. That’s good… Well, it’s real interesting, you know. I like to keep up with what’s going on in the industry, even though I haven’t really been a part of it for some time, and that’s actually how I know our mutual friend ‘Tiff’… I call her Tiff… So yes, despite my old age, I have been kept up a tad with the current state of things due to online, and seeing how the, eh, ‘fandom’, I think its called, has transpired over the years — all the little fan theories, legends, conspiracies, whatever you want to call them — I can certainly see the fun in it. Heck, I even like to feed into it a little from time to time. Just doing my part to keep the legacy alive, you know? (laughs) Honestly, I mostly just find it flattering.
P.A.: Really? Even the more… ‘salacious’ stuff?
A.W.: Oh, definitely. (laughs) You know, all cartoonists got kind of sick senses of humor, anyways. And if people were more aware of what things were like back then, they’d be used to it by now, but I guess you kids are kind of the first to really care about all the boring, behind-the-scenes crap when it comes to stuff like this, and so each new thing that surfaces gets treated like some kind of big discovery, and everyone has a period of acting like they’ve just had their entire view of the world shaken, or something. I’m sure some find it annoying, you know, the guys who worked on some show 30 years ago and don’t really think about it at all anymore, having all these curious kids suddenly show up on their doorstep, but for me, well, I’m the kind of sad-sack who likes to sit around reminiscing on the glory days, really, and I just find it flattering.
P.A.: Wow… That’s so sweet! You know, when I started this project, I was really worried that all of my research was sort of trending in a negative direction. But finding you at the end of it, it’s nice to get some confirmation that it truly is all ‘in good fun’ at the end of the day.
A.W.: Yeah, definitely… Though I feel like it’s not my place to be flattered as much as it is Stephen’s, rest his soul, or any of those other sweet, naive kids. Honestly, I barely worked on SpongeBob. I was just there for the first season, and I’m thankful I could be, because seeing them build that ship from the ground up and watching it just take off… Well, it was kind of a miracle, I’ll just say that.
P.A.: Wow.. What an apt metaphor. Because Spongebob is underwater!
A.W.: Huh? Oh, yeah, I guess that’s true… Thanks.
P.A.: But, honestly, I think you’re selling yourself short, Archie, because even what you said just right there is giving us a lot of invaluable insight! Ehm, I guess I should say that’s kinda the main thing I want to discuss today, is just what the environment was like working on these shows. Were you all really crazy back then??
A.W.: (laughs) Yeah. I guess we could get a little carried away. I mean, you just had to be there, really. The guys working in cartoons at that time, they weren’t thought of as real artists or even showbiz types. We were all just a bunch of weird art school kids playing with our toys in some dark room, you know?
P.A.: Oh! What fun..! You know, there’s something kind of… pure, about that. Is that really not how it is anymore? That’s kind of… sad.
A.W.: Yeah, nowadays it’s completely different. You know, a lot of animators are considered public figures now, because they’re on social media and all that, and people actually care. Well, there were always people who cared, but now there’s a lot more of them and they have a lot more access to us. (laughs) We were working behind closed doors. And lots of things stayed behind those doors.
P.A.: And yet… Some didn’t.
A.W.: Well, we’re just people like anyone else, you know? If people can think up those kind of things you’ve been telling me about, then obviously we should’ve been able to think up stuff like it back in the day, too. And we would! Anyone would, working that many hours on these kinds of shows. It is a part of the process in the sense that, you know, you’re working on something that’s meant for kids to see. So part of your job is to keep it sanitized, to a certain extent. And that means knowing exactly what kind of stuff you shouldn’t be doing.
P.A.: Right. Like… Making Squidward shoot himself in the head?
A.W.: (laughs) Yeah. Yeah, like that. Or worse, honestly. It all crosses your mind at some point. Even if I was never an animator stuff like that would cross my mind.
P.A.: Squidward killing himself??!
A.W.: No. Well… Eventually, maybe. But what I’m saying is if I wasn’t looking at Squidward or Tommy or SpongeBob all day, I’d probably be thinking those things about, like, random people who annoy me… And that’d be worse, right?
P.A.: Mm.. Probably.
A.W.: Hey, can I show you something? It actually just… Popped into my mind, randomly, I hadn’t even thought about it again before this conversation, but, uh, I actually do have an old sketchbook just sitting in some drawer here…
P.A.: Oh! Well, yes. I think that’d be really good for the newsletter!
A.W.: (laughs) Well… I don’t really know if you should take pictures of it. I, uh… I don’t like to let people take pictures of my stuff anymore. So.
P.A.: …Right. Okay, then.
It is at this point that Archie Weinberry took out and showed me his sketchbook; It was big and quite impressive, and from the stains and scratches all over the black hardcover, clearly well-loved. His walls already adorned with framed sketches, animation cels, and other pieces of cartoon history, needless to say, I was in awe just thinking about what little wonders this could contain.
I could tell that the earliest sketches in it dated back to his time at Disney, with several practice sketches of Mickey Mouse’s walk cycle; as in, at least four pages of this book were just different, practically identical drawings of the mouse with his hands in his pockets, laying down one foot after another… gee. How riveting.
P.A.: Oh, wow… So you must’a been carrying this little thing around your whole career, huh?
A.W.: Yep. Just my little handy-dandy notebook..! Couldn’t have gotten anywhere without this, man. Any time I was hitting a rut in my work, or anything like that, I would just crack this open and purge my brain. Let it all out into the ink, y’know?
P.A.: Geez, no kidding. I can feel the inspirational energy practically radiating off of this thing. I just love when art comes straight from the soul, and keeping it all to yourself for all these years, well, that’s the purest thing I’ve ever heard..!
A.W.: (laughs, pushes up his glasses) Gee, thanks… You know, that’s actually the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about my art.
P.A.: Well, hey. Don’t mention it! (laughs)
A.W.: Your laughter… It’s.. intoxicating.
P.A.: Oh? Sorry..
P.A.: So was Disney a different vibe from everywhere else you worked? It seems like they run quite a tight ship!
A.W.: Yeah… Let’s just say, it wasn’t the greatest fit for me there. I wasn’t even working on new stuff. They just had me making slight touch-ups on these vintage Mickey shorts they were restoring at the time. You know, if the original reel was smudged in a place where it cut off the end of Mickey’s elbow or something, they’d have me re-draw just that bit. Not the most exciting work, especially for a punk kid like me at the time. I’d get so unbelievably bored working on that stuff, I’d honestly just go completely off-task and start playing around with the random old reels they had lying around in the office. Now that I think of it, I can’t really remember, but I’m pretty sure that’s what I got canned for. Man, I really fumbled that, huh..?
P.A.: Well… These things happen. It’s very fortunate you were able to find other chances in the industry, though.
A.W.: Right... Except the next one didn’t go too well, either.
At this point in flipping through the book, I was pretty sure I had jumped ahead to his tenure on the Simpsons, with a lot of the sketches taking on a rougher, early Matt Groening sort of style. I wasn’t sure if they were supposed to be the characters from the Simpsons or not; If they were, they were pretty rough practice sketches, since they all looked kind of like squished little blobs, and one even had a buncha flies buzzing around it…
P.A.: And then you worked on the Simpsons, right??
A.W.: (long sigh) Yes, the Simpsons… I wish I could say I worked on it when it was really hitting it stride, but it was still just those awkward, early seasons, you know? They didn’t even really know what the tone of the show was yet. There was a lot of sappy family values stuff, mixed in with all the darker, subversive shit. It was actually pretty frustrating having to try and bring these episodes to life, when you don’t even know what emotions you’re trying to evoke from week to week.
P.A.: Hm… I can imagine. That is certainly a show that changed a lot over time. Even to this day. Did you hear they killed off fucking Marge???
A.W.: Really?? Are… Are you sure, because… (scoffs) I don’t know. I just don’t think they’d do something like that… Like, I really think that Matt [Groening] would be strongly against something like that.
P.A.: Well, actually, it was like… Kind of a “hypothetical future” sort of thing… They, uh, didn’t really “kill off” Marge. I mean, she’s still alive in most episodes.
A.W.: Oh. Okay. Well that’s good… [long pause] I mean, it just really confused me when you said that because… Well…
It was at this point I noticed Archie becoming visibly uncomfortable, shifting in his seat, sweating thru his shirt a bit… I think his hand was trembling? I don’t know, but I’m also pretty sure that between the last time I started looking at the sketchbook and then back at him, all the color kinda drained from his face… Weird!
A.W.: I don’t know. It’s just that, when I first started working on that show, I was so excited about it. I actually wanted to try and break into being a writer at that time and I remember talking to Matt a lot, saying things like, “You really could have something special here. If you lean away from the sentimental shit, this could really be something special.” But, well, I think our visions were just incompatible, and he also fired me pretty quickly.
P.A.: Oh..? Incompatible, how?
A.W.: Well, it’s pretty quaint now, but the Simpsons was a big deal at the time. You know, there was this whole sense of, “The wholesome family sitcom is dead, and this is the bastard offspring that killed it.” Except it wasn’t! Not really. And I don’t know, again, maybe this is just the art school punk in me, but my thinking was, ‘This should be a show where anything can happen! We should be breaking all of the rules, not just some!’ And so, I just tried to pitch one little story idea to Matt, and the guy flew into a hissy-fit on me. Talk about a control freak...
P.A.: …What was the idea?
A.W.: (sighs) I don’t know, something a bit juvenile and crass, I’m sure... But the one big rule Matt had on the show, was that he absolutely did not want any of the characters to fall out of an airplane and die. He’d get really up in arms if you even joked about it. Well, by the end of my time there, I guess I must’ve just really wanted to piss him off, and… Yeah. We don’t have to get into it.
P.A.: Hm… Well. That actually… Hm. That actually really reminds me of something. But, uh… I’m probably just thinking about it too much.
A.W.: Can we just move on, please??
P.A.: Right. Moving on..
P.A.: Well, not every opportunity works out. It’s pretty lucky, though, that you were able to bounce back after two ill-fated jobs like that in a row.
A.W.: (chortles) Yeah, thank God for Ren & Stimpy. As brief a stint as that was, it at least put me in a place where I could really prove myself in this corner of the industry. I was never desperate for work for the entire 90s because of that. That’s just what that show did for people, and that’s why Jon K. will always be a personal hero of mine.
P.A.: Right… Jon K… I’m assuming you haven’t been keeping up with him much, have you?
A.W.: Well, I contributed to his Kickstarter a few years back. I’m not sure, does that count..?
Now at this point, I was admittedly looking for an out from this conversation. I felt I had probably gotten about as much as I needed from this interview, but my subject just had this.. need, like he was both incredibly happy and incredibly nervous to be receiving any kind of attention at all, and I guess I found that relatable.
P.A.: (clears throat) I don’t know. But, uh, why don’t we just go through all those impressive credits you have under your belt, huh? I’ll, uh, just start listing them, I guess, and you just pitch in if you have anything to share..
A.W.: Sure. Sounds great! Let me have ‘em.
P.A.: Hmm, let’s see… I wrote them down in a kind of random order, but I got Dexter’s Lab, Doug, Caillou, the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog.. Ooh, there’s this one writing credit in here, for some TV movie??
A.W.: Ah! That would be Crybaby Lane, I believe…
P.A.: Hm. Never heard of it.
A.W.: Ah, well, it was sort of a Halloween special. They only showed it the one time.
P.A.: Alright.. Jimmy Neutron, Max & Ruby, O Canada.. oh! And of course, Rugrats.
A.W.: Yes! Rugrats!! Really pleasant workplace environment, that one.
P.A.: Any crazy stories there..?
A.W.: Hmm. Nothing out of the ordinary, no... Things got a little weird around the time the movie for it came out, though. This one lady on our staff had a kid of her own and suddenly had a much harder time maintaining her work/life balance. She tried to make it work for a bit, but, uh, let’s just say the story ended up kind of tragic… These things happen.
P.A.: Sheesh.. There’s a lot of these. Let’s see what else; some Stick Stickly shorts, Gregory’s Room, Mr. Bear’s Cellar, and… ‘Happy Appy’ ?? Huh. I was pretty sure that one wasn’t even real.
A.W.: Well, that one actually got pulled because of some, uh, unfortunate real-world events shortly after, that just so happened to be similar to something in one of our episodes. Pure coincidence, mind you. It’s not like we could have reasonably had any idea or anything. (laughs) I mean, we’re not the Simpsons, we can’t see the future…
P.A.: And also, ‘Tiff’ told me you were involved in the early development of ‘Ed, Edd, and Eddy’. Is that true? I sure loved that one as a kid..!
A.W.: Yeah, yeah, with the Brothers Grunt guy. That was fun. You know, I was really just a creative consultant, helped him flesh out the premise for the show, its characters, their backstories and everything. I’m not sure he used much of it but let’s just say we had a pretty different concept initially. A bit more spiritual. But, y’know, it’s kids’ TV, at the end of the day, and those elements are naturally the first to get left behind in creative limbo... At least, that’s my theory, since I wasn’t involved so much after that point…
In the interest of maintaining my professional journalistic tone that I am so famous for, I won’t dwell on the details of how I was feeling at this point; I’ll just state in very neutral terms, that numerous things about Archie had started to give me the ‘ick’. Tired of trying to make sense of his increasingly bizarre sketches, I had closed the book and set it down, and was now preparing to get up and leave. He still looked painfully nervous..
P.A.: Alriiight… This was fun!
A.W.: Wait, that’s all..? I mean, I, I, I still have more to say about the places I worked. I mean, that’s what you wanted, right..?
P.A.: Yeah, but, you know, we don’t have to dwell on every workplace you ever had.. I think we got enough to get the gist, y’know?
A.W.: Well... You haven’t finished looking through my sketchbook. Don’t you find it interesting? Or.. what was it you said.. inspirational? “Pure”?
At this point he had picked up the sketchbook and was pretty eagerly shoving it in my direction. I froze up a bit, struggling to process the sight in front of me for a bit… But after a bit, I gave in and took it to look through for one last while.
P.A.: Uh.. Yeah! Totally. I just had other plans today, that I forgot about, until now.
A.W.: Oh. So.. This was all just an afterthought to you? Or what..
P.A.: …No, Archie. Just a scheduling flub. These things happen, you know..
I cracked open the book again and started halfheartedly flipping thru until I saw anything more that caught my interest; If this were earlier in the interview that probably would have been easier, but at this point I felt like I basically knew what to expect, and it wasn’t really grabbing me anymore. After a few seconds I looked up at him, hoping he’d seem satisfied. Instead, he was staring at me even more eagerly than before, now giddy, but slightly shy, like a kid showing me their drawings for approval, except instead of a kid it was a sad old man with a Mickey mouse t-shirt, crumbs in his beard, and a big box of Red Vines sitting on his desk.
P.A.: These are.. pretty good, Archie!
A.W.: Yeah..? Well, uh... Wh-Why don’t you just skip to the last few pages, then? From after I stopped working… That’s where all the good stuff is.
His tone was suddenly somber now, and so I flashed my best ‘excited’ eyes and did as instructed, shifting my gaze downward while trying to force a semi-sarcastic smirk; And then I stopped. The thing is, I can’t really tell you what happened next. I had seen some strange things up to this point, sure, and even caught a few ‘bad vibes’. But in this instant I genuinely couldn’t beelive what I was seeing, and even now I can not confidently conclude whether it was really what I thought it was, or just my frightened mind tracing shapes out of the TV static. All the color drained from my face, my stomach dropped, and my cold, clammy hands started to smudge the ink at the edges of the page. I wanted to look back at Archie, study his expression carefully, just to get a clue what his purpose for this could possibly be, but I couldnt bring myself to raise my gaze; I quickly clapped the book shut, dropped it, & turned away, all in one swift motion..
A.W.: Hey! Wait, I-I-I-I have more to show you..! Wait, don’t go!!
As I was walking out of his apartment and firmly thudding my thumbs against the screen of my phone so as to order myself an ‘Uber’ ride, I was pretty sure I heard him scream “I thought you’d understand”, but since I’m not totally sure, I guess I won’t write that into the interview.
If you’re waiting for the part where I spell out what’s to be learned from all this; This ain’t no after-school special, sweetie. All I know is, much like an after-school special, I’m just happy that its over. I figured I would never see or hear from Archie Weinberry again; The reason our paths crossed in the first place was already convoluted enough, and while a part of me strongly felt that other people — be it the animation community, the authorities, or maybe just the World — should know about this, I selfishly decided that the best course of action for me specifically was to simply move on from the whole thing; a can of worms I willingly pried open to begin with. And so for a while after the interview, I was debating whether or not I should even publish it; I knew I wouldn’t really be able to articulate what the experience felt like for me, anyways.
But then, as the morning sunbeams filtered thru my blinds, rousing me to adorably arise on this Autumn morn, I peeped something in the corner of my eye whilst stretching my arms; sitting on my bedside table was some Mail, which my roomie had likely placed there in frustration due to me never checking for my own. I figured it wouldn’t be anything substantial, and so I didn’t brace myself one bit for when I finally reached over & opened it.
And then; I froze.
“I never believed in unexplainable phenomena before, but now that I’ve had something happen to me and can’t prove anything about it beyond anecdotal evidence, I think twice about things.”
These just keep getting better
I was going to write a post on lost episodes, but you beat me to it...