You know, things aren’t always as they seem. Some people believe in fate, others believe that their deity of choice has a plan for them and what they should do and that they’re just the passenger of their own lives while their deity “takes the wheel.” I myself believe in the flying spaghetti monster and I believe everything starts and ends with him. When you die, he’ll welcome you back into his delicious noodly arms covered in the most divine Italian gravy you’ve ever encountered…

I grew up in a small apartment with my dad and older brother. My old man worked at a Jell-O plant and was responsible for packaging the gelatin treats in their boxes right off the conveyor belt. He packaged Jell-O, Jell-O pudding, the Jell-O pops and pudding pops, he did it all over the span of his Jell-O packaging career. It didn’t pay that well and he had an hour and a half drive to and from work, but we didn’t go hungry as he’d sometimes pocket Jell-O instant pudding for my 7 year-old self and my brother, much to our felicity as we both were big chocolate fanatics.

The day after my father’s retirement from a long career of packaging the gelatin and the pudding, he let out a long fart and sat me down to give me something. I thought it was going to be a lifetime voucher for Jell-O pudding but to my chagrin it was just a VHS tape.

“Son, please don’t tell anyone about this. It’s top secret but I need you to know what Jell-O has tried to put on the market time and time again. It’s… really something else.” My dad said to me in a hushed tone as he presented me with the outdated media consumption apparatus. My face turned from annoyance to slight confusion with a still very prominent annoyed expression.

“What do you mean? Did they try doing toothpaste flavored pudding?” I half-joked.

“Trust me.” My father whispered. “If anyone finds out I have this, You bet your ass I’m getting necked. I feel that you deserve to know what Jell-O is really like and it might even keep you away from Jell-O altogether.”

“What? Me, away from Jell-O? You’re out of your mind, pops.” I said with a hearty chuckle.

“Once you watch this tape, you’ll understand.”

I didn’t watch the tape at all. I grew up on Jell-O and ET for the Atari 2600 as we didn’t have the money to buy an NES back then, but I wasn’t going to part with Jell-O regardless of how bad things might be. I mean, ET for the Atari 2600 is widely regarded as one of the world’s worst video games and I still hold it near and dear to my pudding-laden heart. How bad can things really be? The tape collected dust in my junk drawer for a decade before my father passed away at the age of 75. Things got really rough for me around that time because of the loss and I did anything and everything I could to try and rekindle the feeling that my father, God rest his soul, was still with me in some form.

I was going through all of his belongings and keeping everything that was sentimentally valuable to me. That’s when I remembered the tape. I decided that finally I would watch the tape my father gave me the day after his retirement. It was his wish that I view its contents after all, and in my grieving state, I would do anything to please my pop. After sniffing back some snot that threatened to pour from my nose after a few tears fell, I stood up and went to my junk drawer in my desk, retrieving the VHS cassette. I went into my attic, pulled out our old VCR that was stored in one of the many dusty tote bins and one violent sneezing fit and an epi-pen jab to my thigh later, I opened the system, cleaned the heads and made sure all was in working order. Finally, the VCR was hooked up and ready to play any tape that was fed into it. I looked at the label on the cassette which was just an abbreviation. “JBP - BC” with a year of 1987 scrawled in black ballpoint pen. I stuck the tape in the VCR and hit play. Man oh man, the only thing I can say right now is my father wasn’t lying about the hateful truth of Jell-O.

The tape opened with a jazzy late 80s track played to white text on a blue gradient background.

“The following is a pitch of a new Jell-O product for your consideration, brought to you by Jell-O spokesperson, Bill Cosby. We hope you enjoy it.”

What the fuck? A rejected Jell-O pitch featuring disgraced comedian Bill Cosby? I was already uncomfortable with this premise as, if it’s rejected and has Cosby, a known rapist, attached to it then it can’t spell anything good. The video then did a cheap shuffle transition to a kitchen set on a soundstage. Cosby walked in as the jazz music faded into the background at a lower volume. Cosby’s face was stern and he was wearing the ugliest abstract patterned sweater I had ever seen in my life. It was so ugly that it made me vomit in my mouth a little bit and I had to swallow it back down. Cosby walked behind the counter and placed both hands on the countertop.

“Good day.” Cosby began. “Today, I want to show you a new product that will change not only the face of the company, but it will also change the entire world as we know it.” Cosby leered. “I passed by a homeless man on my way to work today. He rattled his tin can in my face.”

He held his hand out and shook it violently as if he were rattling the aforementioned tin can.

“RINGA LINGA DING DONG DAGGER!” Cosby shouted as his eyes grew to the size of dinner plates, about to roll right out of his sockets. “RINGA DINGA RINGA DINGA!”

He slapped the countertop and took a deep gasp of breath.

“I opened a packet of Jell-O pudding and poured it into his mouth. He suffocated on pudding and died. RINGA LINGA DINGA!” He grabbed a wad of cooked noodles out of his pocket and flung them at the camera before giving it the middle finger.

“YOU WANNA MAKE A POPSICLE OUT OF HUMAN BLOOD?” Cosby screamed, leaning over the counter at the camera, the camera zooming into his crazed face, into the wrinkles on his forehead, his eyebrows raised way high.

“Let me get you hip to this new product that’ll surely catch on! We call it Jell-O Blood Pops!” Cosby took out a dagger and a glass bowl. “We’ll first need a sacrifice.”

Cosby looked around the soundstage before throwing the dagger off set at a person behind the cameraman. The camera panned to the other side where the crew sits, revealing that the dagger pierced the director in his throat. The director’s eyes widened as he grabbed at the dagger before collapsing, blood trickling from his throat. Whoa, what the fuck?! Cosby killed a person on-camera and it was covered up by Jell-O and General Foods this whole time?!

“We’ll have to make quick work of this one.” Bill Cosby said as he drug the dead director onto the set. He straddled the body and pulled the dagger out of his throat. He slid the bowl over, grabbed one of the director’s wrists, and cut his hand open, letting the blood pour into the bowl.

“Yeah, that’s it. Fill ‘er up, you son of a bitch.” Cosby spat as the director’s blood poured and poured away. Once the bowl was full, he kicked the body away, the body sliding out of frame and hitting what sounded like a bunch of pots and pans as I could hear lots of clattering and clanking.

“JELL-O!” Cosby shrieked as he pranced back to the counter with the bowl of blood. He took out popsicle molds and poured the blood into each mold, complete with a popsicle stick in each one. I could hear a weak groaning off-screen and Bill shifted his gaze to his right where the director’s body laid. He grabbed more spaghetti out of his pocket and flicked it at maximum force towards the body. “BOO!” He shouted as he flung the noodles. “HAVE SOME CREEPY PASTA!”

Now, what the shit was going on? What in the fresh sweet fuck is this pitch? Jell-O would never, ever, EVER greenlight something like this. Cosby losing his mind and making popsicles out of human blood? This is the most fucked-up, sadistic, downright evil thing I have ever had the absolute displeasure of witnessing.

Cosby set the molds in the freezer behind him and turned around, his eyes bulging and wide as he went to the stove to his right and turned on the heat. He set down a large saucepan and began boiling some water. He threw in packets of Jell-O pudding, some leftover human blood, sugar, four large McDonald’s Sprites, Flintstone vitamins, bits of brain matter, a rutabaga, carrots, a Dave’s Single, and a whole pepperoni pizza. He stirred the ungodly concoction and chugged it whole.

“YIBBA JIBBA JAR JAR BINKS!” Cosby tilted his head to the sky and let out an earth-shattering belch before going completely bonkers. He screamed, running around the set, waving the dagger around, eating a sour grapefruit, hopping around on a pogo stick, and scatting in incoherent gibberish while waving his hands around. He then deepthroated an entire 10 inch skillet while his eyeballs pulse in and out of their sockets. He deepthroated the pan for an entire 15 minutes. Why the fuck was he performing oral on a pan for this long? The world may never know, all I know is that after 10 minutes, the camera stopped moving and I heard eating from behind the camera. After putting two and two together, I deduced that the cameraman got tired of filming Cosby doing the gawk-gawk on a pan and went to eat lunch.

After 15 minutes, the disgraced comedian threw down the skillet and rushed to the freezer to retrieve the now completely frozen blood pops.

“JIBBAJAB JINGLE MY BELLS, THE POPS ARE DONE!” He spat everywhere when he enunciated the “p”, saliva spraying violently from his lips and frothing at the mouth. He retrieved the pops from the freezer, which was turbo cold. When I mean turbo cold, I mean that the entire icebox was frozen completely solid. When Cosby pulled out the pops, his right hand froze solid as well and just fell off.

“FRIGGITY FRIGGIN’ FROSTBITE, MY HAND JUST FRIGGITY FLOO FELL OFF!” Cosby screamed, doing a small dance with some fancy footwork may I add, spazzing out about the loss of his hand. He grabbed the pops with his other hand and set them on the counter as the unthinkable happened. I looked closely. Very closely. I could see what looked like another hand regenerating from the stump attached to his wrist. What. The. FUCK. Cosby’s a lizard man? This… this is inconceivable! This is crazier than the time my brother swallowed a rubber chicken which caused him to squeak every time he coughed until we got to the hospital.

The new hand regenerated and grew back in place of the old one. Cosby flexed his fingers and went right back to the pops. He took one out of the mold and gave it a quick lick with his… forked tongue. His forked, reptilian tongue. This was getting too much for me and I shut down the VCR. I made my favorite bedtime snack, room temperature Nestle Quik and went to bed. The next morning, I woke up and discovered the tape was on pause. What the hell… I thought I turned the whole VCR off? What’s going on… I made my morning coffee and sat down at the television, wondering how the fuck it turned itself back on. I decided that maybe I didn’t shut the tape off and just paused it so I could watch it later, so that’s what I did.

Coshy finished sucking down the blood-based frozen dessert and licked his lips, smacking them rapidly.

“MMMM! ZIP ZOP BLOODY BLOOD POP! TASTY BLOOD POPS TO ROT YOUR SOUL! TAKE EVIL TO THE TOP!” Cosby’s eyeballs almost popped out of their sockets; they were so wide. The camera zoomed in again, zooming in on his mouth.

“BLOOOOOOOD! PPPOPS!” Cosby spat, spraying spittle all over the place again. “BLOOD POPS, BLOOD POPS, BLOOD POPS, BLOOD POPS!” He began saying rapidly, spouting more saliva from his mouth. He was covering the entire countertop in his frothy dribble. This was downright perturbing. I didn’t want to see Bill Cosby spitting all over a marble kitchen countertop.

“THE DADGUM PUDDING… IS ALIVE!”

Cosby vomited up Jell-O pudding and it began to rapidly grow small lizards with Cosby faces that sneered up at the disgraced former comedian.

“AHH! THE LIZARDS! DON’T LET THEM SPREAD! THEY WILL BREED WITH HUMANS!”

Bill smashed a few of the tiny lizard men with a Jell-O cookbook before they jumped onto the comedian and attacked his eyes.

“NOT THE EYES! AAGH! NOT MY EYES!” Cosby’s eyes began to fall out of their sockets and the lizard men feasted on them as Bill Cosby stumbled around the studio, knocking plates over, silverware, knocking over the stove, ripping cupboard doors off of their hinges as he tried to find his way around. He slid up in some Jell-O pudding and dropped to the floor.

“GET THE GAS! THE GAS!” Cosby shrieks as he clutches his empty eye sockets. The soundstage then began to fill up with a purple gas that seemed to incapacitate the small lizard men as they tore ass around the kitchen. They dropped like flies and Cosby was dragged out of view. The tape ended with a shot of Bill Cosby getting eye replacement surgery and it then cut to him stumbling out of the empty hospital room, mumbling about Jell-O blood pops and lizard children while traipsing the dark hospital halls in the dark before the tape fades to black.

White text appears on a black background.

“GENERAL FOODS HAS APPROVED “JELL-O BLOOD POPS” FOR PUBLIC RELEASE. MANUFACTURING BEGINS 4/4/1988.”

What… the fuck… They actually approved this fucked up product pitch by Bill Lizard Cosby?!

I leaned back in my chair in disbelief. I felt like I had pissed my pants. I felt something warm trickle around my crotch region. I looked down and realized I had spilled my coffee on myself. Well, that’s just fucking great. I stood up, cleaned my pants off and went to my kitchen sink to wash my hands. When I looked out the window overlooking my backyard as I washed my hands, I swore I could see Bill Cosby himself peeking at me from behind one of the trees, holding a box of Jell-O Blood Pops, pointing and laughing at me in an intimidating, “you know my secret and you better not tell anyone” manner.

I didn’t sleep at all that night.

The next morning, I got a call from the funeral home that was in possession of my father’s body. The funeral was the day after this one so I was expecting a call, but I wasn’t expecting what was to come of this call.

The funeral home worker on the line said, “Your father is missing.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “M-missing?!”

“We checked his body this morning to prepare him for the funeral but… His body… wasn’t there. It was… It was replaced with… a mold of his body… made out of Jell-O.”

Indeed, my father turned into Jell-O post-mortem and I’m sure he’s up in spaghetti heaven right now, smiling his Jell-O-y smile with his Jell-O-y face in his Jell-O-y body, smiling down at me as I tell the whole world about the sickening acts that the Jell-O brand supports.

I’m probably next. I indeed did swear off Jell-O products and don’t consume them anymore. Though there is something telling me constantly that they’re onto me, that they’ll turn me into Jell-O as well with just the snap of a finger.

Jell-O? More like HELL-NO.