El Hombre Esponja (SpongeMan) - Retake

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD: This is a retake of SpongeBob SquarePants: El Hombre Esponja, originally by Tagarp on the SOG wiki (as far as I know). I found the original story's basic idea compelling while it fell flat near the end. As with most retakes, this exists to improve upon and rectify some of the issues.
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	I grew up in a small, rural town in Mexico. When I was young, about ten years old or so, my parents were overprotective of me. They refused to let me watch TV or play video games, lest my fragile and innocent mind be exposed to the horrors of the real world. All that I could gather was by word of mouth from my friends.
	At school, I would always listen to my friends and classmates talk about what games they played, what movies or shows they watched, anything that I couldn’t experience firsthand. One cartoon they all seemed to love in particular was “El Hombre Esponja” - in English, “SpongeMan”. Now, this show may sound familiar to you just from the title; it’s SpongeBob Squarepants, right? Yes and no.
	You see, before the “Bob Esponja” dub that everyone in Latin America knows premiered, there was another dub titled “El Hombre Esponja” as mentioned before. Everyone I knew at school had seen the show at least once and were obsessed with it to an unhealthy degree, some more so than others. There were rumors of some kids faking being sick in order to stay at home and watch SpongeMan while others simply played hooky. No matter where you went - the playground, the cafeteria, even the bathroom - there would be talk about SpongeMan.
	Eventually, though, strange things began to happen. Some students would arrive fatigued, looking as if they didn’t get enough sleep last night (presumably having stayed up to watch more SpongeMan). Everyone else went about their day and the teachers naturally warned the bad apples. Things started to change, however, one day when a student vomited during class despite looking perfectly healthy a minute before.
	From that point on, the behavior of the SpongeMan watchers worsened. Some had nosebleeds. Others began crying loudly and throwing tantrums. But the most peculiar thing was that they all tended to repeat a single phrase; “sigue mirando”, or “keep watching”. Two of my classmates even went missing.
	Then, it suddenly stopped.
	Aside from the two missing students, things quickly went back to normal, or at least tried to. Students previously obsessed with SpongeMan still looked a bit off and would go into a small fit whenever I questioned them about the show, but other than that, everything was ok.
	When I turned fourteen, my parents finally lifted their draconian restrictions on me. One of the first things I watched on TV was, naturally, cartoons. The past experiences had mostly left me, but I did begin to recall them when I first watched Bob Esponja, the more common dub of SpongeBob. It was then I realized this may have been the fabled SpongeMan all of my friends and classmates used to be into. I was taken aback at first, remembering the incidents the show had caused, but I reassured myself that none of those would happen to me considering how quaint the show itself seemed to be.
	After looking up the show on the internet, I decided to watch more episodes through pirate sites (yes, I’m that low). Gradually, I discovered more and more about this show and how it was like SpongeMan; episode and character descriptions matched up with what I heard in my middle school years. Then, I realized something. Why wasn’t I going crazy?
	A few more seconds of thinking led me to the conclusion that Bob Esponja was not the same show as SpongeMan. Whatever my friends watched was not this. I was determined to find out more. I scoured the internet and SpongeBob fansites, all on the trail of this mysterious SpongeMan show, with zero leads.
	I was about to call it quits when suddenly, in the depths of Google search results, I found a website called CartoonDubIndex. This website has, sadly, never been archived due to its obscurity and me not thinking ahead. It had a section for obscure and mysterious dubs which SpongeMan was filed under.
	Reading further, it stated that the dub was created by a little known company called “Dynamo” that was active from 2000 to 2007. Dynamo had made dubs of SpongeBob and several Hanna-Barbera cartoons that had short runs in small Mexican towns like mine. These dubs each had unique titles a la SpongeMan. SpongeMan itself seemed to have been a very transliteral dub going off of the episode titles. Apparently, Dynamo only dubbed the first season of the show.
	CartoonDubIndex also had a reviews section for shows it documented. SpongeMan had a single review by a user named “gjo”. Their review is as follows (translated to English):
	“This dub sucks. The audio quality is crap and sounds like it was recorded in a garage with a cheap-ass microphone. The voices do not fit the characters at all and are ear-grating. The script sounds like it was run through Google Translate with no care to properly adapt it to the language. And for some strange reason, they’ve edited the picture; the colors tend to be off and mismatched, but some characters are literally recolored like Squidward wearing a red shirt instead of brown. But the weirdest thing is just what the hell this show is doing to me. Every time I watch it, I feel dizzy and need to lie down after I finish an episode. Watching it is a painful experience each time and I’m glad they’re showing that new Bob Esponja dub on TV now. I gotta get to more of that.”
	Checking gjo’s profile yielded mostly nothing aside from their lone review. Then, I noticed that CartoonDubIndex had a private messaging system. Naturally, I used it to message them. I asked (translated again for your convenience) “Hey, I read your review for SpongeMan. I was wondering if you had any recordings of the show yourself since I remember my friends talking about it when I was in middle school. I never watched it and would be interested in doing so now.” It didn’t take long for them to reply.
	“Oh, God. You don’t want to know. But if you’re really that curious, here’s a link to an episode. But you’re better off not watching it, or even having it on your computer. Believe me. You don’t want to do this.”
	True to their word, there was a download link to an episode of SpongeMan. Being a tad cautious, of course, I chose to download it in a virtual machine in case there were any viruses attached to it. For some reason, the file was around five gigabytes in size. Nevertheless, I continued.
	The episode gjo linked me was “Soporte de Burbujas”, AKA “Bubblestand.” Right off the bat, I noticed the terrible audio and video quality, which I found very strange in contrast to the high file size.
	As stated in the review, the voice acting was poorly done. There were needless recolorations like Patrick being white instead of pink and Squidward wearing red as mentioned earlier. With these in mind, I continued to watch before things started to really get weird.
	Visual discrepancies beyond miscolorations began to appear; characters would stutter in their movements and even walk backwards. But nothing could prepare me for what happened next.
	The characters stopped dead in their tracks as did the music. Then, they turned to face the screen. They spoke in unison, on repeat: “sigue mirando.” They continued until the eleven minute runtime was up, and every time they did so I began to feel more and more dizzy.
	Those voices, oh lord, those voices. They got louder and louder before it was all I could hear. Eventually, I passed out.
	I had a nightmare where I was in this hellish world against my will, surrounded by those twisted versions of the SpongeBob characters, all repeating the same phrase from before over and over as they slowly inched toward me. Just before they were close enough to my face, I woke up in a cold sweat.
	The video continued into another episode; “Pantalones Rotos”, or “Ripped Pants”. I decided that it was no more and closed the video player.
	The following day, I messaged gjo on CartoonDubIndex again about my experiences. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you”, they told me.
	Every time I watched SpongeBob on TV, the memories of that day would flood my mind. Then one day I switched on the news for some comfort, only to be greeted with a shocking story.
	The rotted remains of two middle school-aged children were found.
	They were the two classmates from my middle school years that had gone missing.
Category:SpongeBob
Category:SpongeBob SquarePants
Category:Lost Episodes
Category:Retake
Category:Remake
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Category:Nick
Category:Nicktoons
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Category:Television