SpongeBob: Squid's Visit (Alternate Ending)

## Part 1 - The DVD

Remember the SpongeBob episode, Squid's Visit, the one where SpongeBob tries to get Squidward to visit his house? Remember how extremely dark and creepy it was? It turns out that this episode in particular has an original, much more disturbing version to it.

I was walking through an old video store one day, when I found some SpongeBob DVDs. There were some DVDs like Nautical Nonsense and Sponge Buddies, Tide and Seek, Sea Stories, Lost at Sea, etc. But, there was one DVD that had caught my eye. It was a DVD named Scaredy Pants, I Was A Teenage Gary, and other Spooky Sea Tales. Like the others, it was around 5 dollars, so I decided to buy it.

Once I brought it home, I looked at the episodes on the DVD. The episodes on the disk were Scaredy Pants, I Was A Teenage Gary, Graveyard Shift, Shanghaied, Nasty Patty, Ghost Host, SquidBob TentaclePants, Night Light, and Spongehenge. Their were actually a few bonus episodes as well, BlackJack, Krab-borg, Doing Time, Funny Pants, and then Squid's Visit.

I watched the full set up to the bonus episodes, and everything seemed normal. Then I watched the bonus episodes, and one thing seemed out of place, In some scenes in episodes like BlackJack and Krab-borg, the color looked as if it was filmed in olden times, like the 1960's, and it would flicker a little bit.

## Part 2 - Squidward's Descent Into Madness

I turned on the episode, Squid's Visit, and the title card came up. But it looked rather... eerie. For one, instead of the normal, happy tune it played in the TV version, the sound played a disturbing tune that sounded as if something was scraping along a hard ground, followed by a bang every few seconds. The title card showed the pineapple background, except that it looked ruined. It was covered in gashes and scratch marks, as if something had just torn the pineapple's texture apart. Instead of the words "Squid's Visit" being in their usual blue and white, they were actually black and red.

The episode started off normally, with SpongeBob constantly asking Squidward to visit him, with Squidward saying "no" every time. But, instead of taking no for an answer, SpongeBob steals Squidward's vacuum cleaner like in the normal episode. And when Squidward comes to SpongeBob's house, he finds that SpongeBob redecorated it to look exactly like Squidward's! Every room, every detail, every mark is correct. Things go normally in the episode until Squidward decides to look for his vacuum cleaner in his art room. And this is where things get really disturbing.

Once he enters the art room, the room is extremely dark, though Squidward is still capable of seeing what is around him. An eerie wind chime-like tune begins to play as Squidward looks at the portraits around him, and some of them looked slightly morbid. One of the paintings shows a decrepit and a feeble squid sitting over a bed and sobbing hysterically. Another one displays a pale, thin Squidward with nothing but hollow sockets where his eyes, nose and mouth should be. Another painting displayed the clown from the original episode, but with black holes for eyes that seemed to be crying blood.

Squidward sits on the center rug and he huddles in fear. He finds the closet door and goes to open it, and instead of finding a pile of SpongeBob's stuff (with the vacuum cleaner under it) like in the TV version, he finds a large stairway leading into a cold, dark basement...

## Part 3 - Together... Forever...

This is where things get truly disturbing. Squidward walks down the stairway, into the basement. And what he sees is extremely eerie. He is standing inside a room, with a dim ceiling light in the center, along with chains hanging from the ceiling. On the opposite side of the room is a rusty cage. He walks to it, and there's a crude looking sentence engraved on the front. The inscription, though scratchy, says "Harry - friends forever!". He looks inside the cage (it has a barred window) and is horrified to find the remains of someone who was trapped inside the cage, with the interior filled with twisted and distorted drawings and writing on the walls. Squidward is even more horrified when he sees that the name under "Harry" is his own!

Squidward tries to escape as fast as he can, but all the doors are locked. Just as he tries to escape the back door, SpongeBob appears behind him, startling him. SpongeBob looked psychotic, twitching and trembling as he walked. He had a large unnerving smile on his face, and he was holding a bloody butcher knife.

Squidward: Please! Let me out of here!

SpongeBob: Oh, I can't do that, Squidward! If I let you go, you will tell everything to the police, and nobody wants that. And you can't escape me! I've barred every door, every window, every secret passage so that you have no chance of getting out! But now that you're stuck here, and once I'm finished with you, we shall be closer together, forever...

Squidward tries to break the door down, but it won't budge. And SpongeBob begins to cackle maniacally as he slowly approaches Squidward, who is now huddling in fear. he screams while SpongeBob is raising the knife in the air, SpongeBob then pierces the knife into Squidward, causing a large, graphic amount of blood to splatter on the wall, it was not cel animation blood it was food coloring either paint or real before suddenly cutting to black, but not without a horrible scream from the poor cephalopod. And the episode ended.

I felt extremely uneasy by the time the episode was over, I was determined to find out it's origin.

## Part 4 (Final Part) - How It All Began

After contemplating what I just saw, I went back to the video store, with the DVD, to find out where the DVD originally came from. I asked the store clerk about the DVD, and he reluctantly, but willingly led me to the back room. And this is where I learned the secret of how this episode came to be...

The man originally worked with the writers of SpongeBob SquarePants, as one of the creators of certain DVDs. He even composed the DVD "Scaredy Pants, I Was A Teenage Gary, and other Spooky Sea Tales". And he told me that the version of Squid's Visit that I just saw, was it's original and unaired version that was created way before it aired in Season 6. In the late Season 5, after Blackened Sponge and Mermaid Man vs SpongeBob aired in 2007, the writers wanted to make a new special for the upcoming month of October. They wanted to do something a bit different this time around.

They decided to make a full 30-minute Halloween special along with 4 rather morbid episodes to follow it. But for some reason, these episodes were delayed, even though they were fully written, recorded, and animated. The 30-minute episode was one where SpongeBob and Patrick supposedly find a haunted house/ship and meet what was originally the Flying Dutchman's first mate. The 30-minute Halloween special was delayed, but it later aired in Season 8 as Ghoul Fools. And the four other morbid tales were released later as regular episodes. The four episodes were Plant Of The Jellyfish (Season 8), Are You Happy Now? (Season 8), One Coarse Meal (Season 7), and Squid's Visit (Season 6). The three episodes (POTJ, AYHN, and OCM) stayed the same they aired, but the same thing can't be said for Squid's Visit.

It turns out that Squid's Visit was intended to be much darker than it is today, but since SpongeBob was targeting a younger audience, the episode either had to be changed to be less disturbing, or be cancelled entirely. So, the writers lowered the eerie tone of the episode and removed the scene where SpongeBob stabs Squidward with the knife, changed the paintings to look less scary, and changed the scene where Squidward finds the rusty cage to the where he finds a pile of SpongeBob's stuff with the vacuum cleaner under it. But even though the darker version never aired on TV, there are DVDs like the one I bought that include this "special" episode, though it's extremely rare. If you do come across a DVD like the one I bought, and if you are willing to watch the unaired version of Squid's Visit, just remember, after you watch the DVD, the episode could haunt you for the rest of your life. And if you do have someone that holds an unnerving obsession over you, just be wary. You could end up like Squidward, trapped inside a dark, cold, and isolated room, never to see the light of day, eventually being driven into the dark depths of insanity where you can never, ever escape...