Rita and Runt - Play Dead

You know how Warner Bros. has a weird way of counting Rita and Runt episodes on Animaniacs?

They refuse to count a couple of them, making the amount of episodes inconsistent.

The reason for this is a lost episode from season 1.

Finding details about this missing episode is difficult, no one who was working on the show at the time likes to talk about it. From what has been pieced together, the lost episode was written entirely by Tom Ruegger.

I first heard of it at an event where Paul Rugg was speaking. Someone in the crowd asked about the episode, and Paul simply left the stage, ending the presentation hours early. The episode's production number was E62, the title was Scare Happy Slappy/Play Dead/Macbeth. The episode, Witch One, was made later and given Play Dead's production to hide the latter's existence.

At a fan event, I managed to follow Tom Ruegger after he spoke to the crowd, and eventually had a chance to talk to him alone as he was leaving the building. He didn't seem upset that I had followed him, probably expected a typical encounter with an obsessive fan. When I mentioned the lost episode though, all color drained from his face and he started trembling. When I asked him if he could tell me any details, he sounded like he was on the verge of tears. He grabbed a piece of paper, wrote something on it, and handed it to me. He begged me never to mention the episode again.

The piece of paper had a website address on it, I would rather not say what it was, for reasons you'll see in a second. I entered the address into my browser, 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 Animaniacs on it.

Apparently the quality of the episode was mediocre when held to the regular standards. Animation was choppy, sound was constricted and very muffled. There was even a line running up and down, similar to a crappy VHS tape. Scenery was overwhelmingly dark and depressing without changing props and other background objects; stormy looking.

Characters also behaved oddly. Instead of the normal goofy, hijinks inspired personalities, they seemed extremely agitated, gratuitously hateful toward each other, and constantly about to begin sobbing after the lines. The protagonist, Rita, also had a very bad lisp - I don't know why, but she spoke with a sexual tone and that further bothered me.

The episode began like the episode Witch One; Rita and Runt find themselves in Salem, Massachusetts during the Salem Witch Trials, where Rita is accused of being a witch. All the songs in this cartoon are parodies of songs from the 1991 Disney film Beauty and the Beast. But suddenly, something went wrong.

Dr. Scratchansniff, one of the series antagonists comedically pulls out a book labeled, The Necronomicon, and summons a bunch of zombies out of their tombs and kills everyone. No doubt that this was a parody of the 1981 horror classic Evil Dead. During this scene, Dr. Scratchansniff sings a song similar to Friends On The Other Side, from Disney's Princess and The Frog.

I know this was my favorite song from one of my favorite Disney Villains, it was comical and frightening at the same time. The shot became blurry and low moans were heard coming from Runt before a zombie bit him on the head - which never happened because the screen went to black.

The screen then snapped back and the zombie was again biting Runt - the view was so blurry this time, all I saw was a green blob fusing with a tan one. Again, the low moan, only this time it sounded like the microphone was broken and loud static came, greatly overshadowing the moan.

The scene cuts to Max Montana inside his private jet, near the end of the first act, the plane was taking off. Furball was fooling around on the plane, as you'd expect. However, as the plane was about 50 feet off the ground, Furball broke a window on the plane and him and Max was sucked out.

At the beginning of the series, Tom had an idea that the animated style of the Animaniacs' world represented life behind big cartoon icons like: Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, but the violence used in Tom and Jerry made it more realistic. This was used in this episode. The picture of Furball and Max's corpse was barely recognizable, they took full advantage of them not having to move, and made an almost photo-realistic drawing of their dead bodies.

This went on for all of the episode. Till it opened with a title card saying one year had passed.

Wakko, Yakko, and Dot were skeletally thin, and looked as if they're about to have a nervous breakdown. There was no sign of Ralph the Guard.

They decided to "Cut The Cord" on this episode and realized that this was too scary for children; breaking the 4th wall. As they walked to the Warner Bros. Studio the place around it became more and more decrepit. They all looked abandoned. When they got to the studio, Furball and Max's bodies was just lying in front of the studio, looking just like it did at the episode.

They just stared at the studio. The camera zoomed in on Yakko's face. According to summaries, Yakko tells a joke at this part, but it isn't audible in the version I saw, you can't tell what Yakko is saying.

The view zoomed out as the episode came to a close. It cuts to a still image of the cemetery, with tombstones with the names of every Animaniacs guest star on them. Some that no one had heard of in 1993, some that haven't been on the show yet. All of them had death dates on them.

For guests who died since, like Roddy McDowall and Ernie Anderson, the dates were when they would die. The credits were completely silent, and seemed handwritten. The final image was all the characters dancing and singing, like in the intros, but all drawn in hyper realistic, lifeless style of Rita and Runt's corpses.

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 Animaniacs 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.

Well, 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 Furball and Max Montana corpses, it was myself at three years old. I found a picture of myself at three and the nightmare was closer to it than my own memory. I swear... that picture of myself at three, dead, started flashing on the computer screen so quickly that I could never be sure. After that, I tossed the computer in the firepit, lit the match, and watched it burn.

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 a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. I have a cousin who was watching Animaniacs 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 recalled seeing the episode when he was ten. He hasn't seen any source materials about the episode since, instead, they were other episodes of the show.

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 would have been possible in the 90's—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. I'm sure you can figure out what date was on the tombstones of the currently alive celebrities.

There was one difference in the episode itself, though. The "joke" Yakko told was completely clear on this version. When it zooms in on Yakko's face, while looking at the Warner Bros. studio, he says:

"At least one of us had to go."