Blog post written on 7/1/2005, at 12:32 AM.
Title: This needs to come out
Between the years 1995 and 2005, I was a writer and storyboard artist at Nickelodeon. Although I worked on many shows during my time at the studio, such as Rocko's Modern Life and the Angry Beavers, there was one show that I was always working on full-time. That show, was Spongebob Squarepants. I enjoyed my time working on Spongebob when I was at Nick, but the last day of my job spurred everything I knew about the show that I put my heart and soul into.
It was a day in March of 2005. Production of Season 4 was a bit rocky under the new staff, both in the animation and writing departments. Most of the people who originally worked on the show had left to focus on new projects or to retire. I on the other hand, stayed a while longer to see what direction the show was going to take. We were almost done with the last two episodes of the season, "Best Day Ever" and "The Gift of Gum", when the incident happened.
A group of interns came knocking at my desk enthusiastically. They were young, of course, looked like they just came out of college. The oldest one in the group, let's call him Thom, spoke for everyone.
"Hey Jim, (fake name of course, since I do not want my identity known to the public), we were wondering if you could take us to the archives to see some of the older Spongebob episodes for reference." "Why would you want to do that?" I asked suspiciously. "All of the episodes so far have been digitized, why can't you just ask one of the guys in the media department to pull up on a computer?" "We want to view the original film, because it's not compressed!" A younger intern shouted. "Yeah," Tom added, "The backgrounds, colors, and line details are all muted from the digital transfer, so we were wondering if you could just let us take a peek at some of the older episodes in their original forms, so we can really get a feel for what the original animators were trying to convey in their drawings. You see, we want to make an episode where it blends the old art style with the current one."
I thought I while about this notion. Although I did not want them to see the original cuts, (from fear of information leaking about previously unreleased content from older seasons), I felt that Tom was right in seeing the original animation. It would help them have good feel for how the older seasons animated, and how they could use the reference episodes they selected to help animate the old character designs with the newer ones.
Worried murmuring was starting to become loud in the office. I stood up out of my chair and said, "Alright, alright everyone, I'll see what I can do." The crowd of interns exploded in shouts of joy. Many of my co-workers looked at me and I just gave them a shrug. Kids just being kids, I guess. I walked away from the desk, with a large crowd of interns following me like soldiers. We made our way to the media department. I asked at the front counter for the supervisor, and the receptionist called him down.
When he finally arrived at the front desk with a cup of coffee and a sour expression, I asked in a polite manner, "Could we please go into the archives to pull through some of the old SpongeBob footage. These kids want to use the original film as reference." After a brief awkward silence, he rolled his eyes and said, "Yes." in an almost a non caring way.
We all followed him to the archive entrance. The supervisor quickly swiped his ID badge through the lock and a green light flickered from red. "Make it quick." He said to everyone. All the interns noded, and they all scurried inside the room.
As we entered the archive, each side of the room has tightly sealed containers, each with a label near their handles. Each side was at least ten containers tall, and they were huge. The hallway was around twenty feet in length to the other side. As I waited patiently for the interns to pick which episodes they wanted, I noticed that most of them were crowding around a single container.
I quickly walked over to see what was garnering all of this attention. One of the interns was holding a film reel, with a label reading "Squarepants S1: PC: 2515-1415" in black ink. I stared at the reel in shock, knowing that 2515 meant it was a season one episode, but the 1415 was never used for any of the released episodes. I quickly snatched the reel out of the interns arms. The interns looked at me with suspicion. "Why did you take that away from him?" one asked. "Are you hiding something?" another asked. Murmuring like before began to circulate between the interns. I had to stop this before anyone from media department saw what was going on.
"Quiet!" I shouted in a strained whisper. I lifted the reel up so everyone could see it. "This here, is not supposed to be looked at. It is unreleased footage, so it is strictly prohibited from being watched."
Before I could continue, Tom and some of his friends snatched the film from me and started running out of the archives. Me and the rest of the interns followed suit. I chased them all around the building until they had found what they were looking for, the projection room. Luckily, there were no staff inside the room except for the employee who manages the projection equipment. Tom handed him the film and told everyone to sit down. Before they did, I told him to give me the film, in which his plainly refused. Defeated, with nothing I could do because of the group interns fully supporting Tom, we all sat down as the projection room employee carefully set the film inside the projector. He walked over to the back wall and pulled down a screen. He looked at us with a stern look on his face, "Don't blame me if this film gets damaged, it's on you." He shut off the lights and started the film.
At first it was just black static for a couple of seconds, and then a brief countdown started to play. After the countdown, the normal SpongeBob theme song played like in a normal episode, with a title card reading "Lucky" appearing after. The text was black in cursive over a red and white striped background, with the usual happy go lucky music playing in the background. However, instead of the usual credits you get after the title card, the screen immediately bubble transitioned into the next shot. It was a wide shot of Squidward house, with Patrick's rock visible on the left side of the screen. Right off the bat I could tell that this was indeed a season one episode, due to the animation being on cells and the art style being exactly the same.
After a brief couple of seconds looking at the hand-drawn background of Conch Drive, the animation abruptly cutted to Squidward sitting on his couch, with a blank expression on his face. The animation at that point was completely still. At first we thought the film was damaged, but I saw the visual noise coming from the footage, which meant that this was intentional.
Squidward's face was frozen, in a state of nothingness, though after a few seconds, his mouth moved. He said in a emotionless tone, "I shall always curse my bad luck." The odd thing about this is that the voice actor did not sound like Rodger Bumpass, the person who voices Squidward, but the voice coming from Squidward sounded like someone doing a Squidward impression.
Suddenly out of nowhere, Spongebob and Patrick appeared behind Squidward's couch. Squidward did not react at to them at all. The two characters both grinned before the screen suddenly cut to black.
What we saw next shook me and the interns to our very cores.
When the film cut back to Squidward's couch, the audience was displayed an horrific sight. SpongeBob was fucking Squidward up the ass with a dildo. Squidward was visibly tortured and gagged screaming out in agony. Additionally Patrick was fucking his eye sockets with his enlarged penis. You could see the blood oozing from Squidward's rectum as tears fell from his eyes, begging for it to stop. The voice acting was unbelievable, and it actually sounded like a real person was in agonizing pain. Most of the interns gasped and cried at the disgusting sight, with others just stared with their mouths agape at what they were witnessing. Some of the interns immediately ran out of the room when they saw the animation, horrified that something like this was animated inside of Nickelodeon.
Not before long, SpongeBob had shoved the dildo so far up Squidward's rectum that you could see a lump protruding out from the front of his body. At the same time, Patrick had ejactulated into Squidward's head, smashing his eyes and pieces of his innards out of his skull. After the deed was done, Spongebob helped Patrick remove his penis from Squidward's now empty skull.
"I guess Squidward finally got what he wanted, getting away from us." Patrick giggled.
"Yeah, I guess he finally had some good luck for a change!" Spongebob replied enthusiastically.
The screen cut to just Squidward's beaten head lying on the couch, drawn in a way a background would. Each paint stroke carefully showed Squidward's horrific injuries from being raped in his own head. Spongebob and Patrick could now be heard laughing in the background as everyone in the room observed the shot of Squidward. Brain matter was spread over his large forehead near his eye sockets, and streams of blood and semen were running out of his mouth. Bruises were clearly visible all around his head.
The laughing of the two characters began to grow louder and more maniacal. This continued until the laughter was almost so loud enough that it could break the speakers. The laughter then abruptly cut, and Squidward smiled, and opened his mouth to say one last thing:
"Yes, I am finally lucky."
…
That's when the explosion happened. Before I could react what was happening I blacked out as I collided with something. I woke up inside of Hollywood Community Hospital, surrounded by my family and one of the network executives.
I asked the executive what happened to the interns that were in the room with me. He told me all of them died in the explosion, and the only thing that remained of them were their charred ashes. The reason why I survived is because I sat right next to the door, which saved my life because the explosion propelled me out of the room before I could get burned.
I started cry out in guilt. I was responsible for the deaths of over thirty people. Some of them I mentored. I slammed the side of the hospital bed. Nurses were called over to restrain me and they gave me an injection of some medicine to calm me down.
I talked with my family for a little while until they had to leave the hospital. The executive stayed after my parents were asked to leave. I looked at him with my throbbing eyes, and whispered, "Why are you still here."
"I'm here because I have to tell you the truth. That footage that you viewed, was not an ordinary animated program. It is a weapon that uses the frequency of the last piece of audio to cause an electrical disturbance in television sets to make them explode. It was supposed to be used on May 1st, 1999 on viewers in the United States to make a statement of what we can do. Too bad someone hid the film, and we couldn't test it."
"What the fuck, you people were trying to murder millions of innocents just to make a statement that people like you have power?" I replied.
"Oh no, we were not going murder anybody directly. It was the person who we told to make it who would have been responsible. It's nice to have a half-scapegoat." he snapped back with an evil grin on his face.
"That person would have been you."
He started to walk away from me, but before he left the room, he muttered,"Oh, and thanks for testing the film for us. By the way, it stayed intact, scapegoat."
I don't know why they didn't erase my memory again. I need to put this out before they use it again, they are planning to use it again soon. I know they have still have the film of it somewhere in the studio and I need to warn people for something I was responsible for making. I will probably die in the next few days but my life being taken is much much better than millions of people dying because of the corrupted individuals hijacking the company I loved. If it does happen, I will still be the scapegoat. Hopefully my knowledge will help save people.
Bye.