The Making of SpongeBob Closeups

If you watch certain episodes of Spongebob Squarepants, there’s going to be some weird closeup shots of either a character or a Krabby Patty. Though some of them are kinda cheesy, I have seen ones that are so awful they’ll make you want to look away. Let me explain. I was an animator who worked on Spongebob Squarepants. However, my job was harder than other animators on the team since I had to work on excessively detailed scenes, specifically the closeups.
Basically, I would get concepts for the closeups before drawing them, and for the first one I drew, it was actually not that hard to do. All I had to do was draw Squidward with an angry expression and then call it a day. However, the concepts for closeups I got after that were harder and more disturbing since they had more details. For example, the “Nasty Patty.” I had to draw the eyeball sesame seeds, the green insides, you name it.
Eventually, when I worked on “To Love a Patty,” I had to do two closeup shots of a rotten Krabby Patty, each of them having a worm infestation, holes in the top bun that could trigger people with trypophobia, and the patty itself looking like literal dogshit. It made me want to vomit, but to be honest, what I had to work on after this guaranteed that I did.
If two closeups weren’t bad enough, an executive on the team actually decided to make an episode filled with them, since they just love the hideous closeup trope. I really didn’t want to work on it, I really didn’t, but I had a high-paying job on my hands, so I had no choice.
I don’t remember much about the episode since I was too focused on getting the closeups done and over with, but I do remember the premise of it having the characters in uncomfortable situations, which probably explains why the episode had closeups to begin with.
However, there were so many closeups I had to work on that I lost count of how many I had to do, but if I had to guess, I’d say about 2-3 closeups per scene, but the biggest problem I had with the production of the episode was the concepts for closeups I was getting. These concepts were more disturbing than the closeups you would see in an average SpongeBob episode, but somehow worse than the “To Love a Patty” closeups.
These would range from SpongeBob having some darkened liquid ooze out of his holes while having swollen eyes with distorted pupils to a Krabby Patty that looked like it was made of human flesh along with having body parts fused into it. After I finished the last closeup, I vomited a lot as if I had eaten a lot of junk food.
I’m just glad that I got it done and over with, but to this day, I still don’t get why the original concept of a disgusting closeup became a thing. All I can say for sure is that it has become one of those things that’ll make you lose your appetite.
Category:Lost Episodes
Category:TV
Category:Nickelodeon
Category:Spongebob
Category:Nicktoons
Category:Lost media