So... The Amazing World Of Gumball: The Ritual. This is something that I have wanted to talk about for quite a while. I just want to share with you guys this issue because I thought about it a month ago, and I want to share this issue, so you guys won’t have to stumble upon this Gumball movie either.

So, it was about a month ago as I said. I was at a house with my friend named Derek. While I joined the TAWOG fan base in 2017, Derek has been a fan since 2016, which was just three years before the end of the “golden age” in 2019.

Derek told me that he had a friend and that this friend was an archivist at heart. Derek was an old fan who also really liked Gumball, so he managed to stay throughout the “dark times” of The Gumball Show. Derek’s friend, William supposedly downloaded a copy of a lost Gumball episode and let us have it. Derek originally had a YouTube channel where he gave people gumball episode videos to watch before they were made fully public.

He pirated the video files so people could watch the videos earlier. We received a copy from Derek's from William after Derek’s YouTube channel got terminated for pirating said videos. This was a copy of what was supposed to be the original Gumball Movie. For those of you who don’t know or heard about the Gumball Movie drama, HBO had been promising to release a Gumball official movie for over a year now, in which he had constantly delayed it up until the point where it was cancelled, because there's really no point in waiting..

However, We had just received the copy of the movie and were eager to watch it. We would be the first to witness the official TAWOG Movie. Derek and I had a sleepover at his house and decided to watch the video file for the first time. However, when we saw it, it wasn’t the TAWOG Movie.

It was a TAWOG episode titled, "The Ritual". Derek and I were both really confused. We expected to watch a copy of the TAWOG Movie early, but instead, we got a regular TAWOG episode that was 22 minutes and 17 seconds long, titled, "The Ritual". The video file actually had its own custom thumbnail, which I can only guess was the thumbnail of what was originally the video on YouTube. But it wasn’t lan ordinary thumbnail. The usually bold text was rather thin and dreary looking, the background was a dark field. The only other thing on the thumbnail was Gumball.

But not ordinary Gumball. All of the color on the thumbnail was flushed out of the thumbnail, including Gumball. He had no eyes, Instead, his eyes were replaced by bleeding holes in his skull. You could see the ribs through his shirt, and he was holding his arms down in a depressed way. Derek didn’t want to watch but I convinced him that we had to because for all we know, it could just be a rickroll, and for all we know it could be the actual movie. So we clicked on the video file and began watching.

The video started off with Gumball and Darwin on the couch like most modern TAWOG episodes. Just like most modern TAWOG videos, it began with Gumball and Darwin yelling at each other. Darwin makes a somewhat valid point and Gumball shoots it down anyways. Then Darwin gets mad, pulls a catapult from the garage, and decides to shoot the couch into the air with the catapult. We see the couch land in an ocean nearby.

And of course, this understandably results Gumball yelling at Darwin even more. Darwin starts swearing, and at this point me and Derek were wondering what anything in this episode had to do with the title and thumbnail, but then again, we were only a minute and 20 seconds in, and so now that I think about it, we shouldn’t expect much so far.

We see Richard go to a store and see if he can buy a new couch since the old one was practically gone. A guy working at the store says there’s a perfect couch for the family that’s Richard’s size. The guy then takes him into the back where we find a black sectional sofa that can fit everyone and pretty much everyone else. We get a scene with the Waterson family sitting on the couch, Gumball, Darwin, Anais, Nicole, and Richard all sitting on the couch.

Richard and Nicole congratulate their kids considering that without them, they wouldn’t have gotten such an awesome new couch. You can later tell that night when Gumball decides to get up and get the urge to eat tacos at 4:00 AM, this is when things would probably get weird.

This is weird but I guessed that it's meant to be funny, so I took it as a joke. Gumball goes into his parents’ room and asks them if he could eat tacos at 4:00 AM. Richard tells Gumball that they don’t even have tacos in the first place.

Gumball goes downstairs anyway and starts making tacos. Then he suddenly becomes dizzy and faints out of nowhere. We get about 30 seconds of a blurry camera zooming in on Gumball while a high-pitched tone plays. Then silence for a solid 10 seconds.

Gumball eventually wakes up, turns his head, and see something that me and Derek could never unsee. It was a dead woman lying right in front of him. Her face was pale, her eyes and mouth were wide open. Blood was oozing out of her almost toothless mouth.

I had no words or thoughts. I almost felt like I was going lightheaded from fear just watching this video. The camera only focused on the dead woman for a few seconds before Gumball jumped to his feet and ran down the hallway to his room. That was when he saw the woman standing right outside his door and slowly walked towards him. Gumball runs to the couch where he sees a ritual in the dark area and the shadow of the woman slowly approaching him from the hallway.

He attempts to stand on the ritual, and crouch in fear in order to make it until the morning. But he ends up getting pulled in by something. Then we hear a crunch as Gumball flails around the ritual as his muffled screams soon fade. That is the last time we see Gumball in this episode, alive. We get the next scene which takes place in the morning after Gumball’s death.

It’s a scene outside with a poster on a telephone, well more like a telephone pole. It was a picture of Gumball Waterson, saying “MISSING”. This was unsettling considering that we, the audience, both knew and didn’t know what happened to him. Richard, Nichole, and even Anais spent the day searching for Gumball. Alas, they didn't find him. Later that night, we get a shot of Darwin sleeping when he hears a strange noise coming from the hallway. Darwin, stupidly enough, goes to see what the noises are.

He steps into the living room and sees the noises are coming from the ritual for some odd reason and asks, “W-Who's There? Where's Gumball?” For 10 seconds we hear a weird humming noise coming from the ritual.

Then, a bloody mangled hand reaches for Darwin and pulls him in the ritual. We see Darwin wake up in a field similar to the one in the thumbnail. A creepy field with scarce trees and no color. The only sound for the next 20 seconds was a slight sound of wind rustling through the trees. Even Darwin is discolored and appears to be expressionless.

Then the scene changes as this mystery world dissolves around him and Darwin is now inside a dark void. Then Darwin hears a slight noise of a creepy child’s laughter and turns around. What he sees next is even scarier than before.

It was a dead creature. It’s body and bones were so mangled that neither me or Derek could tell what kind of creature it even was. Suddenly, it lifts it’s head up and slowly stares into the camera. It's eyes catch fire and brighten his face and he said in a slow and creepy voice, “Hey Darwin!” This is when Darwin loses it. He begins to scream in panic. But he doesn't scream in his typical manner we’ve heard so many times before. This is a scream of true fear, panic, confusion, and loneliness, because it was actually a woman screaming that sounded like the scream sound effect from Slendytubbies, which was Tinky-Winky's jumpscare.

You can hear the panic in Darwin’s voice as he tries to escape. The figure rises up to about 7 feet tall on it's hind legs. Most of the mangled meat and muscle falls off it’s body as it raises it’s hands into the air and gives some kind of ancient chant. Suddenly, weapons start to fly around the void as two axes slice Darwin’s body creating a massive X of blood across his stomach. Then a butcher knife flies around the slowly dying Darwin, goes above him, and it slams into his head, cutting his skull in half. We watched his corpse slowly bleed out for over a minute as the camera slowly zooms out, so slowly in fact you can barely even notice the camera zooming out.

It is now the next day. There's a missing poster for Darwin hanging over the one for Gumball. Richard gets a knock at the door. When he opens it, he sees Doughnut Sheriff standing there.

Doughnut Sheriff says they might know how to find Darwin and Gumball because he secretly installed security cameras in Richard’s house so that he can make sure Richard's working on his house payment. They check the security tapes and surely enough, they see Gumball getting sucked into the ritual. They fast-forward to the next night and see the exact same thing happen to Darwin.

Sheriff says that he then has to leave because he’s being called by the police. But when we see Doughnut Sheriff leave, the camera quickly zooms in on Richard’s face, and we see Richard tying a rope around his body as Nichole lowers him in to save Darwin and Gumball. "Be careful Richard," she says, "We are all counting on you!”

Suddenly, the police burst into Mario’s house and run upstairs, telling Richard that they can’t go into the secret room with the ritual in it and that they’ve been trying to destroy the room for three years, but they can never find it. Richard pulls out his own gun and aims it at the police officers, telling them that Richard had to go into the ritual needs to save everyone and he could save Gumball and Darwin. Nichole takes out a gun and points it at Richard, telling him that he can’t resort to violence, which is pretty ironic considering that she’s pointing a gun at him.

Eventually, every character in that scene has a pistol pointed at one another. There’s a few seconds of silence until Richard says, “I'd rather die than have those kids be strained there forever.” One of the cops takes this quite literally as he shoots Richard, and every character fires their pistol killing one another. We then see a screen pop up saying “3 hours later...” It’s late at night. All of the lights in the house are out. Richard wakes up and starts crawling away. Every character in the scene from the shooting, Nichole, and everyone else are all dead. Richard hears a creepy wailing noise downstairs. He stumbles to his feet and runs to a dark room in his house. He falls back down to the ground. Richard came to the conclusion that the ritual might be a portal for demons to enter the real world. This makes sense considering that people were trying to destroy it. Suddenly, a door in the room he was in, swung wide open. It was the forbidden door from before.

Richard crawled into the room as the door swung shut behind him. He probably only did this to see if he could wait out the spirits until the morning It’s pitch black in the dark room except for the faint outline of Richard’s half-dead body crawling through the room.

Suddenly, there's a sound of thunder as a shadowy figure fades in and stares at Richard for a split second and then he fades away, only to reappear a couple of seconds later but then he fades away again. It’s the same creepy Gumball-like figure with no eyes in the thumbnail, except that this was happening behind Richard so he couldn’t see it. Then it goes through the process of appearing and disappearing a couple more times. Then we get one more shot of Richard’s point of view. He looks up and sees a shocking sight. A dark shot of the REAL Gumball and Darwin’s mangled bodies hanging by nooses. Of course, they didn’t kill themselves. Whatever killed them must have put them like that in order to anger Richard and Nicole. There's a flash of lightning as the creature from the thumbnail appears out of nowhere in front of Richard’s face and screams a high-pitched scream that sounded like the same Tinky-Winky scream from earlier. That’s where the episode ended.

Then, there was no end credits, but it was only the Cartoon Network logo, But it was just a black screen with no music saying, “You’re next…”

Suddenly once me and Derek shut the laptop down and I was about to go home, I went into the hallway and saw blood splatters on the wall and shroud covered gumball plush bodies on the hallway. Then, the plushies began to speak on their own telling me to save myself.

I don’t know if I was hallucinating or I had schizophrenia and didn’t know it. I knew what I was seeing because I felt the warmness of the blood on the wall when I touched it. I picked up one of the plush bodies as it was flailing around in my hand. I saw a rifle on the floor, so I picked it up and I went into the kitchen expecting a homicidal intruder, but instead, I saw something shocking. It was the dead creature from the black void in the video. It raised its head and asked me in a slow deep voice, “Wanna watch a TAWOG video with me?” That was the last thing I saw before I blacked out.

And since then, I never went back to Derek’s house...