Agent Pixel: The Lost Webisode

I wish more people out there knew about "Agent Pixel". It was a Flash cartoon that used to be featured on Nick.com in the early 2000s, but was discontinued sometime after 9/11. As a child, I would watch the movies every day after school and play the games to my heart's content. So as you can imagine, I was pretty saddened when years later, I went to Nickelodeon's website to relive the nostalgia, only to find out that "Agent Pixel" was no longer hosted on the site.

I decided to try to relive my nostalgia on YouTube instead, but to my surprise, there were barely any videos of the show available at all. How could a Flash cartoon that was beloved by many kids, I'm sure, be mostly lost to the ethers? Well, as it turns out, there was a good reason for that...

One day, I was watching an episode of Agent Pixel on YouTube when I saw that someone in the comments claimed to have worked on the cartoon. I believe they went by "M Jaye" if I remember correctly. Anyway, I asked them why Nick.com had taken down my favorite webtoon. They said they couldn't answer that, but they could tell me what they did while working on it. Except for writing, M Jaye worked on every aspect of the show, so surely they must've overseen every production of every episode ever. So I asked them how many episodes they made overall.

"I wish I could remember, it was so long ago," M Jaye answered. "But the actual number was somewhere between ten and one hundred. We also had been working on a movie that would close out the show, but Nickelodeon fired us before we could have posted it."

"I see..." I waited a bit before asking again. "Do you have a video file of the movie?"

M Jaye didn't answer me for days. I couldn't understand why. All I did was ask for proof that they helped make a movie. A few days later, we went back to talking, almost like nothing had happened. Once again, I asked for a video file of the movie. This time, they wasted no time in responding and assured me that they'd upload it as soon as possible. They did it the very next day. When I typed "agent pixel" into the search box again, I saw it. The "Agent Pixel" movie in its full four-hour glory. Wait, four hours? Why did it have to be four hours long? My curiosity was piqued.

When the movie began, the intro began like normal. There was the expository theme tune, Agent Pixel going through all the video game worlds, Chief, Numlocke... it was like going back in time and being a kid again. However, this is where my innocence officially came to an end. Right away, I noticed something was off. There was a radical art shift from the regular webtoon. Rather than animating everything in this blocky, pixel-like art style reminiscent of video games from the 1980s, the animators decided to go for a more, semi-realistic art style; it was like "Archer" in a way. The colors were still bright and colorful, but a little too much now. However, everyone was acting like a little off. Pixel was now acting neurotic and obsessed, Chief sounded deadpan as hell, and Numlocke... well, he'd gone from simply creating mischief for the F.U.N. to actually becoming a genocidal monster.

"What the shit?!" I couldn't help but yell out. "Where's the Agent Pixel I grew up with?"

I couldn't seem to find that innocent Pixel girl anywhere. It's like the people who made this movie had never even heard of her before, but that couldn't have been the case because these were the same people who made the webtoon! I wanted to quit right there, but I had to find out what the rest of the movie was like. The next several minutes were of Numlocke and his army of glitchy minions rampaging through the cities of the world and raping and pillaging people left and right. I wasn't sure if the rest of the movie was going to be like this or not, but I had to press forward. Suddenly, Pixel showed up and started shooting at him with honest-to-God lasers. However, he didn't seem to flinch even once. Apparently, they didn't affect him at all. Then without warning, he wiped her head clean off with just the back of his hand. It was at this point that the movie just ended, so what happened to the other three hours? Well, they were just three hours of a pure black screen interspersed with flashes of people who'd just been gang-raped and were left for dead. I couldn't bear to look at it any longer. It had to be a dream.

I suddenly woke up in my bed, bewildered by what had just happened. Had I actually been dreaming all along? I had to find out. I went onto my Gmail account to see if M Jaye had replied to my comment. Nothing. So that meant they hadn't uploaded the movie onto YouTube...