Ever hear of Drake and Josh?

Anyone who watched Nickelodeon in the mid 2000s will know of this massively-adored sitcom featuring the unmatched chemistry of Drake Bell and Josh Peck. However, what 99.999% of the world’s population doesn’t know, is that there is a secret missing pilot episode created by the ever so notorious child predator Dan “The Tool Man” Schneider. You all will know better than to be tricked into thinking this is fake, seeing as I have decided to call this a creepypasta, because as we all know, creepypastas are real. Vagina spiders.

Drake & Josh was originally going to be a little different. It was going to be a show based on more adult and serious themes, and even some of the original ideas made it into the final episodes, such as where the two step brothers thought their dad was cheating on their mom. However, test audiences reacted negatively to the original pilot. So negatively in fact, that they set the whole fucking place on fire, a fire so big that not even King Kong could piss on it to put it out.

I know all of this because of the following. Allow me to explain...

This story begins one lit evening this past summer as I played a savage game of Minecraft. Don't ask me how I did it, but I landed a game session with famed YouTuber PewDiePie. I got the idea to blow him up and have him fall into a large hole I dug just to EPICLY troll him.

Almost immediately after I tricked him though, I got a Discord message from none other than PewDiePie himself. I was perplexed as to how he knew my Discord tag, or how he even sent me a message without a friend request or even being in any servers together. It was a link to some website.

He also sent a message after that saying, "FIST ME BRO."

I hesitantly clicked on the link, and my CD-ROM drive suddenly hummed to life. I immediately thought the site that PewDiePie sent me contained a virus that would completely destroy my computer. My CD-ROM drive kept whirring and making noise until the disc tray finally opened to reveal a VHS tape inside. I sat in total silence, blinking rapidly. My PC just downloaded a damn VHS tape and spat it out my disc drive. I took the tape out of the disc drive and read the front label.

It read:

“The Lost Original Pilot of Drake & Josh: With Bonus ‘The Making of The Lost Original Pilot of Drake & Josh’ Documentary”

So, instead of trying to get me back in Minecraft, he sends me a tape of a lost episode of my favorite 2000s family sitcom, AND a documentary on it? Of course I’m on board! I completely disregarded the events leading up to that tape being in my hands, and went to go get my VCR out and hook it up to my old CRT TV in the basement. I haven’t been down in my basement for a while, maybe 2 years. Cobwebs were littered about and the whole place was totally dark. I had to get out my souvenir Daffy Duck flashlight to see what I was doing. Once I got my TV and VCR hooked up, I put the tape in, and hit play.

The tape sputtered a bit and began playing as the TV sprung to life, illuminating the dark and dirty basement, and my blackened soul. It started with a 2 minute black screen with nothing but the faint sound of a dual-tone signal that sounded like a phone being dialed at the very beginning and fuzzy white noise for the remainder of the black screen. The dual-tone digits at the front of the tape mean that there are in fact several copies of this that have been mass-produced from a master tape. Oh God, what other poor souls have seen such a horrible display?

After the black screen finally ended, the classic orange splat Nickelodeon logo showed up against a black background in total silence, except… it wasn’t orange. It was red-- crimson red, like blood. I thought that the color was a bit off on my TV and I didn’t think much of it. Then the episode starts. May I just say that from here on out, I wish I would have never put in this tape at all. If I could go back in time and kick myself square in the testes and grab that fucking tape and smash it, burn it, and snort the ashes, I would have.

The episode starts with the typical split-screen intro with Drake on one side and Josh on the other. The environment they’re living in is completely different. It looks to be a pretty run-down house. Dust covering the walls that are littered with chipping paint and peeling wallpaper. They look pretty much the same in this pilot, except Josh looks like he hasn’t slept in a few days, rushing himself to complete a test for school, and Drake looks skeletally thin. They don’t say anything the entire time, just Josh working in dead silence, the occasional heavy or rushed breathing, while Drake just drinks a beer, scowling at the camera. I was honestly very shocked by the portrayal of underaged drinking.

This goes on for about 2 minutes until it fades into the exterior shot of the house before starting a scene. Indeed, this is a run-down, single-wide trailer in a park. The interior scene starts with the mom, played by the same actress as in the final show, cooking a pot of some kind of slop on an old, dirty stove. She puts some of this slop between two pieces of bread, puts them on paper plates, and calls out the family to eat. Drake, Josh, Megan, and the dad come out to eat. The dad is played by a different actor, and looks grotesquely redneck-like. Big beer belly, receding hairline, and a greasy white tank top that’s too tight for his stomach. He’s carrying a bottle of Budweiser and is missing a few teeth.

“Finally, somethin’ I can eat without fuckin’ chewin’.” I was harshly offended by the f-bomb he dropped and my heart started racing. “I lost another tooth since our toothbrush broke.” He takes a swig of Budweiser and sits at the table. Drake, Josh, and Megan sit at the table as well. The mom puts down the plates of slop and everyone begins to eat. The mom asks Drake how school was. Drake just replies with, "I just wanna shit on the wall." Seemingly undisturbed by Drake's remark, the mom turns to Josh and asks him about school. Josh speaks with a heavy, almost exaggerated lisp.

“It was shit. No one ever speaks to me other than to laugh at me for being poor, I got beat up for the 3rd time this week, and everyone calls me Stinky Josh.” The mom became concerned. “How did they beat you up?” “Well, a few of my classmates drug me to the restroom, and one of them went into a stall, and took a massive diarrhea shit. Then they took me by the head and gave me a swirly in the shit-filled toilet, and that’s why everyone started calling me Stinky Josh.”

Drake starts laughing. “STINKY JOSH. STINKY JOSH!” The dad yells, “SHUT THE FUCK UP DRAKE!” Drake, well, he scoffs at his dad. “Fuck you, dad, you shitload of fuck,” he retorts. The dad snaps back, “OH YEAH? WELL I FUCKED YER MOTHER!” Drake, wild-eyed, fires back, “NO FUCKING SHIT!” The dad becomes enraged and smashes the beer bottle over Drake’s skull. The rest of the family scatter in all directions. Drake’s head is covered in semi-realistic blood as he re-adjusts his equilibrium. The crimson red Nick logo appears at the bottom right hand of the screen. The dad grabs Drake by the collar of his shirt, pinning him against the wall. He brings his face up to his bleeding and broken son’s face and he looks like he was about to say that he was gonna kill him or something, but all he could spit out was “fuck, cock, piss, shit,” as he leered angrily, grinding his teeth.

Drake’s eyes become even more bloodshot as he pulls out a switchblade from his rear pocket, stabbing his redneck father in the spleen. A couple of pints of blood pour from the gaping wound as he keels over and dies, bleeding, bleeding some more as the camera fixates itself on his corpse. Drake, free from his father’s abusive grip, screams “FUCK THIS LIFE! FUCK EVERYONE AROUND ME! FUCK EVERYTHING,” and goes into his room. There are bottles of Rolling Rock littering the floor, Nintendo Power magazines strewn about, and several Nintendo posters adorning his walls. He reaches under his bed and grabs a sawed-off shotgun.

He goes on a murderous rampage, shooting his mom in the stomach, which was shown in graphic detail that was terrifying, too real to be CGI. He then went into Megan’s room where she was hiding. Drake cocks the shotgun. “HOW’S THIS FOR A PRANK YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT?” He proceeds to shoot Megan in the skull. Blood and brain matter spreads everywhere as her capless corpse topples to the ground, again, it was so hyperrealistic that it was making me squirm like a worm in my seat due to the intensity of the realism. Drake then goes looking for Josh. This is where the scene fades to black, transitioning into commercials.

An ad starts with a McDonald’s commercial advertising a collaboration with Heinz EZ Squirt, that weird colored ketchup from the early 2000s. It came in your choice of blue, purple, or green. I don’t remember McDonald’s ever collaborating with Heinz, especially on EZ Squirt but this could have been a local thing, I don’t know. The disturbing part of this commercial was that every person that dipped a french fry in this ketchup, every person that put it on a hamburger, every person that dipped a delicious chicken McNuggie into the colored ketchup, ended up vomiting all over the McDonald’s restaurant. They vomited so much that they vomited up their stomachs, their lungs, their hearts, and even their skeletons. The skeletons then covered themselves in the ketchup and conga lined around the McDonald’s as the ad ends.

A second commercial plays which is a Nickelodeon bumper telling the viewer to not miss a special airing of a show I’ve never heard of, called Candle Cove, and the last commercial to play was a commercial on Airheads that was absolutely bizarre. It was famed Limp Bizkit singer Fred Durst sitting in the back of a tour bus and unwrapping a piece of Airheads candy. He eats it, and instantly his head starts to slowly bulge. It continues to swell as he panics, attempting to shrug it off first, lay down, then finally attempt to jump out the window of the bus, but his head is too big to fit through the window. In the final moments of the ad, Durst grabs his head and screams at the top of his lungs before his head explodes with a loud BANG. Blood, brain matter, and bone fragments litter the surrounding area, splattering all over the floor, walls, and windows.

The show returns with another exterior shot of the trailer. There's an odd red fluid leaking through the windows. It cuts inside to Josh who was hiding in his closet behind his clothes. The problem was, being so poor, of course Josh wouldn't have many clothes, so Drake easily sees Josh's large frame, and pulls him out.

"You're gonna know what being stinky is." Drake drags Josh out to a steep ditch outside of the park, all the while Josh is screaming to let him go, that he had a test to study for. Drake pushes Josh into the ditch, pulling out all of his textbooks, and throwing them on the ground.

"The American education system is a shitload of fuck," Drake asserted, adjusting his newly acquired… pocket protector.

"Fuck this shit, I just wanna take a shit all over this shitty school system." He drops his pants, puts his hands on his knees, and squats over the textbooks.

"Bombs away…" Drake strains, having materialized a pair of nerdy glasses.

Sure enough, Drake takes a shit on the textbooks. Pound after pound of liquid ass descends onto the books like a chocolate fountain. All the while, Drake is talking in a distinct New Jersey accent, "Yeah, you fuckin' piece of shit, eat shit. Eat MY shit!" Josh cries uncontrollably at the sight and probably the smell, his face beet red from his blood pressure rapidly rising. Nerd starts throwing the textbooks at Josh's face, nailing him every time, leaving shit skids on his face.

"IS THAT STINKY ENOUGH FOR YOU, YOU FUCKIN' PILE OF BUFFALO DIARRHEA FUCK FARTS?"

It’s at this moment that I realized that Drake wasn’t played by Drake Bell in this pilot. He was played by James Rolfe doing his Angry Video Game Nerd character.

“What the fuck…” I muttered to myself.

Drake, er, James kicks the rest of the shitty schoolbooks down into the ditch and douses Josh and the books in gasoline. He lights a match and says, "Go fuck yourself you fucking fart fiend!" It then shows a slowmo shot of James dropping the match into the ditch while giving Josh the middle finger. The ditch instantly goes into flames. Josh just screams. His screams are so full of pain and anguish, that it had to be real screams. He screams and runs about the ditch, even doing the old stop drop and roll, to no avail. He eventually falls over and stops screaming, the fires dying as his charred body lay there burnt, melting, dead.

James turns around and opens the door to go back inside, but as soon as he touches the doorknob, he looks at the window with an odd expression. He notices that the window is leaking… blood. Blood is seeping through the window pane. "Holy fuck," James mutters. It cuts to the inside of the trailer as the father's body continues to leak blood at a terrifying pace. The blood touches the ceiling and the trailer is overflowing with the father's blood. James starts to spot cracks in the house and I could hear the sound of the house creaking and moaning before blood shoots out of one of the cracks in the trailer.

James takes off running in the opposite direction as the shot runs in slow motion, showing James running, then the house exploding behind him, and James diving to the ground. The house explodes much in the fashion of Fred Durst's head. Blood completely floods the trailer park, washing away the corpses of the Drake & Josh family, James being washed away as well. As the blood ocean spreads out and subsides, James stands up, covered in the crimson substance, and spots a McDonald's across from where he washed up, and a payphone.

After storming out of the McDonald's for them not carrying a "McAss" sandwich, James uses the payphone. Once someone on the other line picks up, James says, "Mike, I need you to come pick me up, I need a place to stay, and I lost my copy of Jekyll and Hyde." James adjusts his blank stare to the camera. "You won't believe the shit I saw." With that, the camera fades out, and the episode ends. No credits are listed, but the only thing shown is a line of text that said "In memory of Walter Nichols: 1952 - 2003" So apparently there was a real man named Walter Nichols and he actually died on camera during the shooting of this episode.

By now, I had completely forgotten about the behind-the-scenes, and I wasn't ready to watch them. It was too late to make a decision on whether or not to continue however, as a shot of the real Drake Bell abruptly appeared with the text "Drake & Josh Behind The Scenes" as Drake chanted over and over, "OBEY DAN SCHNEIDER, OBEY DAN SCHNEIDER, OBEY DAN SCHNEIDER…” The chant continued as the camera faded to an external shot of the excessively bleeding corpse of Walter, a few softbox lights surrounding the corpse, complete with the camera used to record the dreaded episode, with James giving the camera the middle finger in the background.

The tape suddenly came to a stop, and ejected itself, falling onto the concrete floor, shattering the plastic into pieces and spontaneously catching fire. I would have uploaded the footage to YouTube had the VHS not have been broken and burnt to a crisp. I tried to save it; I threw some Crystal Pepsi at it to douse the flames, but it only made it worse. So much for the Pepsi Generation. I got my diamond sword dildo and beat the flames out with it. It was finally over. The only things I'm left with are the broken and torched pieces of VHS tape, the horrifying, nightmare-inducing memories of the episode, and a hole in my heart.

About a month later, I was out buying groceries at my local Walmart, having mostly forgotten about the preposterous content that I viewed prior. All until I strolled past the electronics section, past what was a box set of the entire Drake & Josh series. I was confused, as Nickelodeon never put out a box set of the entire series! Memories didn't start flooding back until I saw on a sticker in the bottom right corner of the box that said, "INCLUDES NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN PILOT EPISODE, STARRING JOSH PECK AND JAMES ROLFE!" I shuddered, shook my head, wiped the sweat off my brow, and kept going.

A few steps later, I bumped into none other than the Angry Video Ga-- I mean, James Rolfe, wearing his nerd outfit, glasses and pocket protector. He asked me, "You saw the lost Drake and Josh episode, didn't you?" "How the fuck did you know?" "How wouldn't I know? I did the script," James grinned big and wide as he got up in my face. He told me about the original screening, and how much panic and chaos ensued afterwards. "I did it." James then began to laugh and snort as I quickly walked away. I could hear his haunting laugh trailing off as I left, reverberating throughout the store, and in my mind.

Now for the obligatory warning, if you ever, EVER come into access of the lost pilot, please never view it. It's not worth the loss of your sanity...

Another person who has seen this episode has found the location where this pilot was shot. He said that when he arrived at the location, that the corpse of Walter Nichols was still laying there, bleeding from his spleen, blood pouring out of his wound 20 years later, surrounded by softboxes and a camera that was still rolling…