The SpongeBob SquarePants Details That Are Darker Than You Think

Sneaking adult content into work made for kids is a tradition that dates back to the invention of child entertainment and it happens in Hollywood more often than you might think. From risqué images secretly being inserted into classic Disney films to adult jokes hidden in live-action movies aimed at kids, this practice is widespread, and the Nickelodeon juggernaut "SpongeBob SquarePants" is certainly no exception.

The brainchild of late marine biologist Stephen Hillenburg, "SpongeBob SquarePants" began as yet another Nicktoon in 1999. Few could have known then that it would become Nickelodeon's longest-running show by some distance. A cartoon that runs for as long as "SpongeBob" tends to scrape the sides of its writers' and animators' creative jam jars. This often leads to them coming up with jokes intended to tickle grown-ups while going over the heads of the kids in the audience, and, sometimes, these grown-up gags get pretty dark.

Just what is in that secret Krabby Patty formula? "SpongeBob SquarePants" producer Vincent Waller told Cinemablend that the show's late creator once confirmed to him that they contain zero meat. "The one thing I can tell you that Steve Hillenburg has let slip is there is absolutely no meat in the Krabby Patty," he said. "There is no animal product in there." You could interpret that as the Krabby Patty being 100% plant-based. However, this doesn't align with a Krabby Patty recipe released by Nickelodeon.

According to this recipe, the Krabby Patty contains imitation crab meat. This was probably meant as a joke aimed at people on Reddit who think that Mr. Krabs is killing his own kind and serving them up, a theory backed up by his line, "So that's what I taste like." There's also the fact that The Krusty Krab kinda looks like a crab trap. Nickelodeon refuted this theory on Instagram, saying, "We can 100% confirm that Krabby Patties are not made from crabs," but having them made of imitation crab is just as worrying — this is made from shredded or pulverized fish, so every time a fish customer eats a Krabby Patty, they're effectively engaging in cannibalism.

In the episode "Krusty Love," we get a depressing glimpse at the backstory of Mrs. Puff. Mr. Krabs falls for the beleaguered driving instructor and is initially dejected that she's a Mrs. and not a Miss. But SpongeBob explains that Mr. Puff is out of the picture. What happened to him? The show briefly cuts away to the surface, where a human hand turns on a pufferfish lamp. So Mr. Puff was seemingly caught, killed, and turned into a lamp. Perhaps this explains why Mrs. Puff is always on edge. It's not just SpongeBob's terrible driving skills — she is still processing some serious trauma.

This tragic backstory would also help explain the episode where Mrs. Puff goes completely insane. After taking the fall for the carnage from yet another one of SpongeBob's failed driving tests, Mrs. Puff is arrested and locked up. She enjoys the quiet of life on the inside, but SpongeBob and Patrick keep trying to bust her out. Her guards never see them, however, just her ranting and screaming about people trying to get her. As a result, Mrs. Puff is committed and put in solitary confinement, where she begins hallucinating. It's a dark turn of events for a character that really doesn't deserve any of this.

The episode "Dunces and Dragons" contains a well-known "SpongeBob" gag aimed squarely at adults, particularly those who are sick and tired of their job. In it, SpongeBob and Patrick visit a medieval themed restaurant named Medieval Moments, which promises "sorcery and bad hygiene" — you can't say it isn't period appropriate. When the greeter behind the restaurant's drawbridge isn't sufficiently old-timey in his manner of speech, SpongeBob corrects him, saying "Excuse me, my good man, I believe thou meant to say, 'Righteth this wayeth.'"

The greeter's reaction is a tad over the top, to say the least: He almost stabs himself in the neck with his poleaxe, before sighing and saying, "Someday, but not today." These words became a popular "SpongeBob" meme, despite the questionable subject matter. It's been used countless times by exasperated and frustrated internet users over the years since this episode first aired, and you can even by an iPad skin with the greeter and his famous words printed on the back.

SpongeBob has had his fair share of errors and blunders over the course of "SpongeBob SquarePants," but it was early on in the show's run that the character was confirmed to be a lot more dangerous than viewers may have realized. In the Season 1 episode "Sandy's Rocket," SpongeBob tries to convince Sandy to take him along for a ride to the moon on her newly-built spaceship. Sandy, wisely, is against bringing SpongeBob, saying, "No way, SpongeBob, especially after your little mishap with my whirly-bird," as the camera pans to a window revealing a field full of tombstones. 

A whirly-bird is typically a nickname for a helicopter, which means that at some point prior to the events of "Sandy's Rocket," SpongeBob's apparent mistake with Sandy's helicopter resulted in a catastrophic event that took dozens of lives. Considering how oblivious SpongeBob seems to the implied fact that he is responsible for so many deaths, it adds a dark coloring to the character's naïveté. Furthermore, Sandy relenting and taking SpongeBob to the moon anyway demonstrates just how irresponsible she is, even when she knows what SpongeBob is capable of.  

"SpongeBob SquarePants" has made plenty of pop culture and literary references that likely flew right over the heads of children. One example of this is in the first season episode "Squeaky Boots," in which Mr. Krabs pawns off a pair of rubber boots to SpongeBob after his daughter Pearl didn't accept them. However, Krabs gets more than he bargained for when SpongeBob begins wearing the noisy boots around The Krusty Krab, which eventually makes the sound seep into his dreams, so Krabs decides the boots need to go.

In the dead of night, Krabs sneaks into SpongeBob's house and steals the boots while he sleeps, taking them back to The Krusty Krab and hiding them under the floorboards. However, when SpongeBob turns up for work utterly distraught the next day, Krabs starts to feel immense guilt, and he continues to hear the sound of the boots. He finally snaps, revealing where he hid the boots before destroying them once and for all in the Krabby Patty fryer.

If any of that sounds familiar, it's because the episode takes a lot of cues from the macabre Edgar Allan Poe story "The Tell-Tale Heart," in which the narrator is driven to madness by an old man's disfigured eye, murdering him in the middle of the night and burying his body under the floorboards. Somehow, he can hear the sound of the dead man's beating heart. This gets the best of him and he confesses to the police. 

"SB-129" is one of the darkest episodes in the history of "SpongeBob SquarePants." It centers around Squidward trying to get away from the antics of SpongeBob and Patrick, only to end up trapped in the Krusty Krab's freezer. 2,000 years later, Squidward is unthawed by SpongeTron and must travel back to his original time, getting lost for a moment in primitive Bikini Bottom and eventually ending up in a place outside the concept of space time. The fact that this episode explores nihilism and existentialism is enough to warrant a place on this list, but there's another detail that makes it one of the spookiest "SpongeBob SquarePants" episodes. 

For the episode's premise to make sense, Squidward had to stay in the Krusty Krab's freezer for 2,000 years, which means no one went in and found him. Additionally, Squidward returning to the present at the end of the episode indicates that throughout the course of "SpongeBob SquarePants," his past self still remains frozen in the Krusty Krab's freezer for all those centuries, and if he were to be found, the present Squidward would cease to exist. It's a chilling thought that would only occur to the grown-ups in the audience.

It's not uncommon for episodes of "SpongeBob SquarePants" to be parables for children, subtly showing them the proper ways to behave. The episode "Hooky" is a good example of that. In it, Patrick convinces SpongeBob to disobey Mr. Krabs' order not to play in a field of fishing hooks that Patrick has mistaken for a carnival — he rides the hooks and then jumps off just before reaching the surface. Most of the episode proves that SpongeBob's act of both literally and figuratively playing "hooky" has disastrous consequences, nearly resulting in a hook catching SpongeBob by his pants and leaving him naked and humiliated in front of the Krusty Krab's customers.

It turns out SpongeBob's one of the lucky ones, as indicated earlier in the episode when Patrick points out that "There was one kid here earlier" as they pass by an abandoned pair of shoes in the hooky field. Given what Mr. Krabs says will happen to fish who play in the hooks (that they'll be taken to the surface and eaten), it's pretty morbid that the episode seems to imply that a kid was killed while playing "hooky," failing to jump from his hook in time. This certainly does its job of scaring young viewers away from disobeying their parental figures.

"Sailor Mouth" is one of those episodes of "SpongeBob SquarePants" that adults won't believe made it to air on Nickelodeon. The episode finds SpongeBob and Patrick learning a "sentence enhancer" written on the dumpster behind The Krusty Krab, resulting in their discovery of one of the "thirteen" bad words. Squidward comments, "Don't you mean there are only seven?" – a reference to comedian George Carlin's infamous "seven dirty words" routine. 

Despite the episode's insistence that SpongeBob and Patrick shouldn't use bad words, the voice cast felt a little differently. As Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob himself, revealed at a convention in 2016 (via HuffPost), "We were supposed to be recording that with swearing, but not really swearing, which is hard because it said 'Ad lib almost swearing'... and we were like, 'This is really, really hard. Can we just cuss and have you guys bleep it out?'"

Surprisingly, Nickelodeon okayed it, meaning all the dolphin-noise-censoring occurring in the episode is masking the actors actually cursing in character. It also means that there's an alternate cut of the episode somewhere in Nickelodeon's vault that contains the uncensored version of the episode. Chances are viewers will never get to see it, but the mystery of what they were saying still makes it one of the edgiest episodes of "SpongeBob" to date.

There are plenty of things that kids love about "SpongeBob SquarePants" that adults don't get, but an example of the opposite takes place in the episode "Gary Takes a Bath." For pet owners, this may seem like the most relatable episode of the show, as it's centered on SpongeBob trying (and failing) to convince his pet snail Gary to — you guessed it — take a bath. However, while the main premise is a wholesome one, this episode actually contains one of the darkest jokes in the entire show's run.

While trying to trick Gary into getting in the bath by pretending like it's a pirate's treasure, SpongeBob pulls out two bars of soap, calling them "doubloons." He then tells Gary, "Don't drop 'em," with a little wink. Of course, dropping the soap is a well-known euphemism for sexual assault that occurs in a prison, making this one of the more risqué jokes the show has ever aired.

There's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment in the "SpongeBob SquarePants" episode "Doing Time" that likely means a lot more to the adults in the audience. It takes place just before the police start chasing an out-of-control SpongeBob at the wheel of a boat. Initially, it appears that two fish police officers are brutalizing someone off-screen while shouting, "We're gonna straighten you out!" and "This'll fix ya!"

As it turns out, their words are very literal, as the cops are actually whacking a bent parking meter in an attempt to return it to its original shape. Before they set their sights on another bent parking meter, they witness SpongeBob's crazy driving, only deciding to chase him because his boat has no front license plate. It's rare to find a children's cartoon with such an obvious reference to police brutality, but leave it to "SpongeBob SquarePants" to be the outlier.

Some episodes of "SpongeBob SquarePants" are known for treading into horror territory, such as "Rock Bottom" and "Graveyard Shift." The kind of horror on display in "SquidBob TentaclePants" is more subtle, but no less terrifying — in fact, there's something deeply disturbing about this storyline, especially for adults who are familiar with the movies that inspired it. The story of SpongeBob and Squidward becoming fused together is very dark, referencing the iconic 1958 sci-fi horror film "The Fly" as well as its remake from 1986 starring Jeff Goldblum.

The episode finds Sandy tinkering with a transportation device, testing it out on SpongeBob by sending him to The Krusty Krab, only for the fry cook to get accidentally combined with Squidward. It doesn't end like "The Fly," with SpongeBob and Squidward becoming a combined monster, but it does come to close on a pretty terrifying note: Squidward hastily tries to use Sandy's device to separate them, only to fuse with Patrick, Sandy, Mr. Krabs, Pearl, and Mrs. Puff to form one gigantic monstrosity. While kids won't get the darkness of the episode's "The Fly" references, adults will no doubt be fascinated by the exploration of body horror in a Nickelodeon show. 

Few episodes of "SpongeBob SquarePants" are as bleak as "SpongeHenge," which triggered feelings of existential dread in adult viewers. In it, a windstorm causes SpongeBob's pores to make music, attracting the attention of jellyfish. SpongeBob outruns the jellyfish by hiding out in a cave. Over time, he builds a stone replica of himself to distract the jellyfish, which snowballs into a Stonehenge-esque formation of giant stone SpongeBobs to lure away the jellyfish. When SpongeBob finally gets home, however, he finds that The Krusty Krab has been destroyed and is half buried in the sand in an apparent reference to the ending of the original "Planet of the Apes" from 1968. 

YouTuber Karsten Runquist noted that, assuming it's canonical, it's technically the last episode in the "SpongeBob" timeline, with SpongeBob losing his job and his friendship with Patrick before going completely insane. Many fans have commented on how uncomfortable and anxious the episode made them feel. As Runquist put it, based on the episode's other themes (including the presence of religion in Bikini Bottom), "The message here is that the universe is something more powerful than any form of human connection, and that nature can be violent enough to wipe out entire civilizations if it comes down to that, and that's how 'SpongeBob' ends."

"SpongeBob SquarePants" is a show that sometimes toys with the laws of physics. For instance, take a look at Squidward's house, the iconic Easter Island head stuck between SpongeBob's pineapple and Patrick's rock. Several episodes showcase Squidward's house being sentient, with "The Secret Box" showing it eavesdropping on SpongeBob and Patrick's conversation. Several episodes, including "Growth Spout," "There's a Sponge In My Soup," and "Bunny Hunt," actually depict it talking (or screaming). What makes this a dark detail, however, is that if we accept the reality that Squidward's house is alive, then it has gone through some serious trauma throughout the show.

In over 30 episodes of "SpongeBob SquarePants," Squidward's house is damaged, destroyed, or abused in some way. It has been exploded, demolished by the Flying Dutchman's anchor, obliterated by an Alaskan Bull Worm, and it has been set on fire multiple times over the years. SpongeBob's pineapple home is also shown to be sentient on several occasions, but only in dream sequences and flashbacks, while Squidward's house being sentient seems to be completely canon. Knowing this, adult viewers won't be able to help but contemplate the nightmare existence that Squidward's house has.

"One Coarse Meal" is a controversial episode of "SpongeBob SquarePants" for many reasons. It's considered one of the worst episodes of "SpongeBob" according to IMDb, mainly because Mr. Krabs' revenge against Plankton goes too far. After discovering that Plankton has a phobia of whales (due to whales consuming plankton), Mr. Krabs begins using his daughter Pearl (a teenage whale) to scare Plankton off, sometimes even dressing up as Pearl himself. This begins to take a mental toll on the Chum Bucket owner.

Plankton's breakdown gets to the point where he begins laying down on the road in the hopes of being run over by a bus, which is a pretty dark gag for a children's show. SpongeBob inevitably takes pity on Plankton and convinces him to get revenge on Mr. Krabs by exposing his own fear: mimes. Yet, at the end, SpongeBob still uses the whales to chase Plankton away from the Krabby Patty secret formula. Adults viewers with their own phobias will no doubt view the treatment of Plankton in this episode in a different light.

Over the years, some episodes of "SpongeBob SquarePants" have gone too far in terms of the content being borderline unsuitable for kids. Season 8's "Are You Happy Now?" took things to a new level, exploring Squidward's depression with a lot more uncomfortable realism than the show had featured up to that point. It's based around Squidward's realization that he has no happy memories. SpongeBob's attempts to give Squidward a happy memory, but his efforts only make Squidward realize how miserable his life has been.

This is Squidward's lowest point in the entire show (which is saying something). In the episode's darkest moment, Squidward remarks that he can't seem to make himself happy and he grabs a stool and a rope, like he's about to hang himself. He says, "Maybe this will help," but when Squidward pulls on the rope, it reveals a caged pet clam. He smiles at it — only to be sprayed with clam juice.

Squidward has been the subject of psychoanalysis since the earliest seasons of "SpongeBob," but rarely has his fragile state been on display as clearly as it is in "Are You Happy Now?" Even the episode's ending is depressing, as SpongeBob tries to throw a party for Squidward and nobody comes. Squidward's rage-fueled destruction of SpongeBob's decorations turns into his happiest memory.

Despite Squidward's status as an octopus, his ability to squirt ink wasn't depicted on-screen until Season 6 of "SpongeBob SquarePants." Since then, there's been some questions about what exactly Squidward's ink is. In one adult joke in the episode "The Check-Up" from Season 11, where the Krusty Krab employees undergo a routine medical examination, Nurse Helga asks Squidward for an ink sample in a cup as if it's his urine, to which he replies, "Can I get a little privacy?" Helga even examines the ink and remarks, "You need to drink more water." 

However, an episode from the same season, "Ink Lemonade," paints Squidward's ink in a much different light. The episode revolves around Patrick opening up a lemonade stand, though he's only able to find success after he steals Squidward's ink for his secret ingredient. It's implied that Patrick and others are drinking Squidward's excrement, as disturbing as that sounds. 

"SpongeBob" writer Kazimieras Gediminas "Kaz" Prapuolenis confirmed that they tried to avoid the scatological references as much as they could via Facebook, writing, "Squidward is actually an octopus. An octopus actually inks from its bottom. We took some cartoon liberties because we didn't want it to look like he was pooping. We've also had him ink from his head in the past. We have the lord's permission to change nature for a gag."

"SpongeBob SquarePants" has rarely acknowledged its online presence in-universe, despite what cast members like Tom Kenny think about all the memes derived from the cartoon. However, one episode from Season 12 called "SpongeBob in RandomLand" contained a noticeable reference to a very dark portion of SpongeBob's online community. In the episode, SpongeBob and Squidward make a Krabby Patty delivery to RandomLand, a yet-unexplored location of Bikini Bottom that's extremely dangerous and outside the laws of nature. 

After arriving at their destination, the two co-workers are confronted with a wall of doors, and when Squidward opens one, it depicts a frightening image of him with red eyes. This is a reference to a meme image associated with an extremely dark creepypasta known as "Squidward's Suicide" that only adults in the audience would be aware of. The episode was re-edited in certain territories to remove the scene, and the image was replaced with one of a baby Squidward in subsequent re-runs.

If you or anyone you know needs help with mental health, has been the victim of sexual assault, has been impacted by incidents of mass violence, or is experiencing emotional distress related to incidents of mass violence, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org if you are struggling or in crisis.
• Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
• Call or text Disaster Distress Helpline at 1-800-985-5990.