The Original rough cut of Sponge Bob.

I was interviewed for a piece on Polygon about the 20th anniversary of Video mods. https://www.polygon.com/24213898/mtv-video...


That's right, I have found the original rough cut of the infamous sponge bob video that has NEVER been seen outside of the production studio and SpongeBob creator Stephen Hillenburg . This was a version that was made to get a sign off on the concept of the video dance party, and used the same formula as our other VideoMods, characters from the IP or Game playing instruments in a band singing the song. You will see Sandy tearing up the Bass, Patrick pounding it out on a seashell drumkit, and SpongeBob ripping into his flying V electric guitar, as well as singing the song. Stephen Hillenburg disapproved of this version saying that "SpongeBob doesn't play a guitar or sing" and didn't want that aspect of the video. We had a short 48 hours to refit what we had already made and created new animation to replace the offending shots. I was always puzzled by this as I remember sponge bob singing and playing a guitar describing himself as the "goofy goober" Upon retrospect, I feel that it was more of him singing Karaoke style and it wasn't something he wanted at that time. Our video was made before he ever sang in one of the movies or on the show.

I present it here along side of the original video so you can easily spot the changes. The only copy of this video was a very low res supper compressed QuickTime, which I kept at the original resolution in the upper left corner, with an AI upscaled version. Enjoy.

NOTE***
The audio is directly from the rough cut playblast. For whatever reason its only in the left channel and is very compressed and noisy. I decided to preserve it here as was the nature of the roughcut.