SpongeBob keeps a terrible secret and its creators are splashing

It is said that the animators of ‘Pinocchio’, in 1940, had time to draw a sex scene between Jiminy Cricket and Tinkerbell at the end of the shooting. In fact, apparently, they used to put it to the new animators who entered the studio as a hazing. There are different sources about Walt Disney’s reaction to this lost piece of the film industry: some say that he laughed his head off, others that he kicked the animators out of the studio. The truth is that since then there have been hundreds of rumors about X versions of cartoons perpetrated by the creators themselves, but only one has been proven true: that of ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’.

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Who lives in the pineapple under the sea?

You don’t want to know. And it seems that Bikini Bottom lives up to its name: in the beginning, at the end of the series’ seasons, the storyboarders used various post-its, technical scripts and useless papers to draw SpongeBob, Mr. Krabs and company having all kinds of sexual relations. The idea was simple: to make each other laugh with absurd ideas, such as Bob having a flute-shaped genitalia or Squidward with a phallic nose.

Obviously, the idea was that no one would see this, so Sam Henderson, who was nominated for an Emmy for the series in 2003, compiled all the drawings into a book called ‘Behind Closed Doors: Horrible, Disgusting, Vile, Disgusting, Inapparate and Unmodest Drawings by the Crew of a Popular Cartoon Series’. He handed out a copy (well, more like a spiral notebook) to everyone, without giving real names in case it ever came to light, and that was the last anyone heard of it, a memory from another era that lived on as a myth among fans.

However, youtuber LSupersonicQ has obtained a copy and some of the drawings are available – where else – in the real Library of Digital Babylon, the Internet Archive. And they really are… impressive. In their own way, of course. In the end it has the historical significance it does and forms a collector’s item that many would like to see in print, though it doesn’t look like Nickelodeon is up for it.

Obviously, there are ethical issues in all of this, and even more so with a studio like Nickelodeon that has been plagued with problems for years, but it shows very well what it was like to work on a series like this in the early 2000s and the changes in sensibilities that exist in 2023. So much so, that it’s still possible that the finding will splash the current creators of ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’. We will have to wait to find out.

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