SpongeBob SquarePants has had its dose of controversy, whether through inappropriate marketing or hiding jokes aimed at adults, but there’s one that’s stands out as it embraced an urban legend and made part of it canon. Created by marine science educator and animator Stephen Hillenburg, SpongeBob SquarePants made its official debut in 1999 on Nickelodeon and has been unstoppable ever since. The show has become the most successful Nicktoon to date and one of the longest-running American animated series.
SpongeBob SquarePants follows the daily adventures of the title character and his best friends Patrick Star and Sandy Cheeks, his neighbor Squidward Tentacles, his greedy boss Mr. Krabs, and other colorful citizens from the underwater city of Bikini Bottom. SpongeBob and company have successfully expanded to other media, most notably video games and film, but it has also done so to other, darker parts of the internet, and has gotten various urban legends, especially horror-related ones.
As the series is aimed at a young audience, Nickelodeon and the writers behind SpongeBob SquarePants haven’t paid much attention to these horror stories – at least not for years, as the series has now pretty much made part of a famous urban legend canon.
Creepypastas are horror-related legends and stories that have been passed around the internet with the purpose of scaring readers. They usually include themes like murder and suicide, and some of them are based on pre-existing material – whether other urban legends or popular TV shows and movies. Creepypastas are best known for being the home of characters like Slender Man and Jeff the Killer, as well as a story titled “Squidward’s Suicide”. In it, the author tells they were “an intern at Nickelodeon Studios for a year in 2005”, so they got to watch new episodes before they aired. These usually had mock title cards, so they didn’t think much of it when one read “Squidward’s Suicide”, except that was the actual concept of the episode.
The story was accompanied by an edited image of Squidward with bloodshot eyes and black tears, known as “Red Mist”. Obviously, it’s not a story nor an image aimed at children, who continue to be the main audience of SpongeBob SquarePants, but the writers of the series decided to include it in an episode of season 12, even if briefly, The episode is titled “SpongeBob in RandomLand”, and it follows SpongeBob and Squidward as they deliver an order to a very strange and mysterious town called RandomLand. Once there, they come across with all types of weird stuff, including an area with a lot of doors. Squidward opens two of them, each showing a distorted version of him, but a third door shows Squidward’s bedroom, and it abruptly cuts to static and a photo of Squidward with hyper-realistic red eyes and black tears, just like “Red Mist”.
The episode aired as it was in the UK but was later censored. As a result, the scene was cut in the US months later and replaced with a baby Squidward, but it aired normally in France, Israel, and Canada. The “Red Mist” in the episode became a meme, and some creepypasta users celebrated that the work of one of their authors was recognized. Adam Paloian, one of the show’s storyboard artists, shared on Twitter that he was stuck on a third gag for that sequence, and didn’t think the “Red Mist” idea would get through. This reference to the popular creepypasta in SpongeBob SquarePants was fun for those familiar with it and who are no longer in the target audience of the show, but for younger viewers, it might have been an image they would like to forget – and they probably wouldn’t like to know the origin of it, at least not for now.
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