Surely some of the most disturbing animated images you remember belong to ‘SpongeBob’. The Nickelodeon series, created by the late Stephen Hillenburg, has shown on more than one occasion to be beyond its children’s target, so much so that even there are two episodes that have been removed from the platform’s catalog that broadcasts it in the US
sponge removed
The first of them is the second half of the season 3 episode 15titled in English ‘Mid-Life Crustacean’. The episode is led by Mr. Crab, who begins to get insecurities because everyone treats him like an old man.
In the end he decides to go out with SpongeBob and Patrick, although he ends up desperate because everything they do is far from what he understands as fun. The reason for removing this episode is probably due to the outcome of it, in which Patricio proposes to go steal girl’s underwear (and in the end that girl turns out to be Crab’s mother, who sends him to her room as punishment).
The episode aired in 2003 and was pulled from the Paramount+ platform in 2018 and has also not been rerun since then on Nickelodeon. However, it can still be seen on Nickelodeon’s YouTube channels or the official ‘SpongeBob’ account.
As to ‘Kwarantined Krab’is the second half of the season 12 episode 22 and it took more than a year to be issued. In the episode, a health inspector visits the Krusty Krab and, finding signs of a contagious virus inside the premises, decides to put the whole restaurant in quarantine.
In this case, the episode took over a year to air and also cannot be found on Paramount+ because it coincided in time with the rise of the pandemic and its premise had many commonalities with that situation, despite the fact that it was carried out in the pre-Covid 19 era.
At the time, the content managers of the platform announced that these two episodes “they don’t pass the current standard of what they consider appropriate for children”… which leads us to wonder if there really is any episode of the series that could pass that standard, taking into account that ‘SpongeBob’ has always had moments of bizarre and extreme humor, scenes of the most disturbing and endless jokes for adults
In Spain, the series is not complete on any platform: on Netflix there are three random seasons (4, 8 and 9) and some episodes can be seen on demand on Movistar+, Tivify or RTVE Play.