The Creeps! || Book of Spooky Stories (COMPLETED ✔️)

11 ~ Squidward's Suicide

I just want to start off by saying if you want an answer at the end, prepare to be disappointed. There just isn't one.

I was an intern an Nickelodeon Studios for a year in 2005 for my degree in animation. It wasn't paid of course, most internships aren't, but it had some perks beyond education. To adults it might not seem like a big one, but most kids at the time would grow crazy over it.

Now, since I worked directly with the workers and animators, I got to view new episodes days days before they aired. I'll get right to it without giving too unnecessary details. They had very recently made the SpongeBob movie and the entire staff was somewhat sapped of creativity so it took them longer to start up the season. But the delay lasted longer for more upsetting reasons. There was a problem with the season 4 premiere that set everyone and everything back several months.

Me and two other interns were in the editing room with the lead animators and sound editors for the final cut. We received the copy that was supposed to be "Fear of the Krabby Patty" and gathered around the screen to watch. Now, given that it wasn't final yet, animators often put up a mock title card, sort of an inside joke for us, with phony, often times lewd titles such as "How Sex Doesn't Work" instead of "Rock-a-Bye Bivalve" when SpongeBob and Patrick adopted a seal scallop. Nothing particularly funny but work related chuckles. So when we saw the title card "Squidward's Suicide," we didn't think it more than a morbid joke.

One of the interns did a small throat laugh at it. The happy-go-lucky music plays as normal. The story began with Squidward practicing his clarinet, hitting a few sour notes like normal. We hear SpongeBob laughing outside and Squidward stops, yelling at him to keep it down as he has a concert that night and needs to practice. SpongeBob says okay and goes to see Sandy with Patrick. The bubbles splash screen comes up and we see the ending of Squidward's concert. This is when things begin to seem off.

While playing, a few frames repeat themselves, but the sound doesn't. (At this point sound is synced up with animation, so, yes, that's not common when it stops playing, the sound finishes as if the skip never happened.)

There is a slight murmuring in the crowd before they start to boo him. Not normal cartoon booing that is normal in the show, but you could very clearly hear malice in it. Squidward's in full frame and looks visibly afraid.

The shot goes to the crowd, with SpongeBob in center frame, and he too is booing, very much unlike him. That isn't the oddest thing, though. What is odd is everyone had hyper realistic eyes. Very detailed. Clearly not shots of real people's eyes, but something a bit more real than CGI. The pupils were red. Some of us looked at each other, obviously confused, but since we weren't the writers, we didn't question it's appeal to children yet.

The shot goes to Squidward sitting on his bed, looking very forlorn. The view out of his porthole window is of a night sky so it isn't very long after the concert. The unsettling part is there is no sound. Literally no sound. Not even the feedback from the speakers in the room. It's as if the speakers were turned off, though their statues showed them working perfectly.

He just sat there, blinking, in silence for about 30 seconds, then started to sib softly. He put his hands (tentacles) over his eyes and cried quietly for a full minute more, all while a sound in the background very slowly growing from nothing to barely audible. It sounded like a slight breeze through a forest.

The screen slowly begins to zoom in on his face. By slow I mean it's only noticeable if you look at the shots 10 seconds apart side by side. His sobbing gets louder, more full of hurt and anger. The screen then twitches a bit, as if it twists in on itself, for a split second then going back to normal. The wind-through-the-trees sound gets slowly louder and more severe, as if a storm is brewing somewhere. The eerie part is this sound, and Squidward's sobbing, sounded real, as if the sound wasn't coming from the speakers but as if the speakers were holes the sound was coming through on the other side. As good as sound as the studio likes to have, they don't purchase the equipment to be that good to produce that sound quality.