I’m just all about the classics right now. Since we’ve already talked about two of the most famous “lost episode” pastas, how about we look at the story considered to have spawned this entire genre? Again, I have reviewed this story before, about five years ago on Tumblr; this review is a rewritten version of that one.
Only content warning is for suicide. Obviously.
“Suicidemouse.avi”
Plot Summary
This story is written in the style of a forum post with the narrator explaining what a source who works for Disney told him about the titular video. The narrator is not a character in their own right and I won’t really be talking about them going forward. This is their story. *dun-dun*
Some time before this was originally posted, Disney had released a bunch of old Mickey Mouse shorts from the ‘30s in DVD form. One short that didn’t make it onto the DVD was rejected because it appeared to be a meaningless test animation for Mickey’s walk cycle — it just shows a loop of Mickey walking past the same six buildings over and over for a few minutes before a fade to black. Of note, Mickey’s expression is neutral throughout; he doesn’t smile or otherwise emote. The background music just sounds like someone randomly banging on a piano, and eventually it cuts to white noise.
However, even though this animation wasn’t going to be included on the DVD, it was an original animation by Walt Disney himself and so it was digitized for archive purposes. Once that was done, Disney higher-ups in charge of this whole project noticed that the video ran just over nine minutes total. There was more to it after the initial fade to black. Employees currently present sat down to watch it in its entirety, and this is what they saw:
After fading to black, nothing happened until the six-minute mark, when it went back to the loop of Mickey walking. There was a sound in the background described as a “gurgled cry” which built louder and louder. The animation became distorted, with the movement of the background no longer corresponding to Mickey’s walking. Mickey’s expression began changing from neutral to a smirk. The gurgled crying eventually escalated to outright screaming, there were colors that seemed technically impossible for 1930s animation, and everything began to go alarmingly off-model — Mickey’s eyes are described as “roll[ing] on the bottom of his chin like two marbles in a fishbowl” (wonderful line).
No one wanted to finish watching the video (probably in part because the screaming is described as physically painful to listen to) but one employee was ordered to do so and take notes while everyone else left the room. At this point, the video had cut to the Mickey Mouse face typically shown during the end credits of these old shorts, and the audio was of a broken music box playing. There were only about thirty seconds of film left.
After those thirty seconds have played, the sole employee to see how the video ended stumbled out of the room, looking pale. He reportedly said “Real suffering is not known” seven times before grabbing a guard’s pistol and shooting himself. The last frame of the video displayed Russian text saying “the sights of hell bring its viewers back in” or something similar.
Narrator’s source ends by saying that he knows a lot of employees have tried getting their hands on the video, but it’s grounds for immediate termination and he doesn’t know for sure if anyone has been successful. He’s heard rumors that the episode was uploaded to the internet under the filename “suicidemouse.avi” and wants the narrator to inform him immediately if he finds evidence that this rumor is true. Narrator says they haven’t found the video yet but are certain it’s out there somewhere.
Closing Thoughts
It’s kind of odd, in retrospect, that this pasta was so influential in kicking off the “lost episode” genre. For starters, this story is about an unreleased test animation, not an episode proper and also arguably not lost. It also doesn’t invoke the “hyper-realism” trope that came to define the genre, and in fact leans in the opposite direction — the video goes from abiding by typical cartoon anatomy and physics to losing all coherency in a way that doesn’t even seem to make visual sense (wording is clunky here, but I think what’s being said is that the landscape Mickey is walking through becomes non-Euclidean and impossible to visually follow). The screaming background noise and Mickey’s alarming smile do fall in line with typical “lost episode” tropes, though.
Upon rereading, there are a couple details that don’t really work for me. By the time it’s decided that one employee will be tasked with finishing the video so that no one else has to suffer through any more, they’re only thirty seconds away from the end. They know how long the video is. It’s disturbing and seems to be going downhill fast, sure, but… only thirty seconds! And it’s still just of a cartoon mouse taking a stroll! C’mon. Also, as I mentioned above, the wording is awkward when describing how exactly the animation begins to look off — the line about Mickey’s eyeballs is great and there are a few other good details, but lines like “the sidewalk was still impossibly navigating in warped directions, a few seeming inconceivable with what we, as humans, know about direction” just feel clunky to me. There is, however, one notably good detail I hadn’t remembered: Walt Disney himself is credited as having created this abomination. I certainly wouldn’t put it past him. It strengthens my suspension of disbelief, quite honestly.
I like this story, overall. It feels different from other “lost episode” pastas in that the horror seems to stem not from corruption of childhood innocence but from discovering something disturbing in an unexpected place. It’s a bit like finding a creepy Easter egg in a familiar video game, or discovering a hidden bonus track at the end of an album after you thought the music was over. Maybe the idea that something in this video could have driven a grown man to commit suicide out of nowhere is a stretch, but the story cleverly shows us the buildup to something awful and then skips to the aftermath without revealing just what the ultimate horror is. Leaving the worst part up to the reader’s imagination was a wise decision and it serves this tale well. This wouldn’t rank among my favorites, but I can certainly see why it was influential and why it continues to be a standout in its genre.