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zombiegangster · 2 days ago

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Atlantis Squarepantis

Episode 92: Atlantis SquarePantis

“♪~ Good-bye, Atlantis. We’re Bikini Bottom bound. There’s no place like home! ~♪”

Synopsis: SpongeBob and friends take a trip to Atlantis, a lost city with all of their desires, but encounter some trouble when they destroy their most prized possession. Meanwhile, Patchy gets lost in the desert when his home town goes missing.

Well, everybody, here we are: review number one-hundred. When I first created this blog, I decided I’d tackle one of the movies every hundred episodes or so, including the two TV movies. Since TV movies are considerably smaller than regular movies, I figured this would be the first one I’d take on. Now before we dive in, I must say something about this episode: it is notoriously known as being one of the worst SpongeBob episodes of all time. Frequently criticized for its several musical numbers, meandering plot line, and so on and so forth. When watching this episode, I ultimately had to take into account a neutral perspective when reviewing this episode. Listen, in the past, I feel as though something I’ve done wrong is expecting an episode to be good or bad before viewing, and ultimately I feel that might make my reviews of said episodes a bit more biased. “Atlantis SquarePantis” is an episode I haven’t seen in ages, and really, I couldn’t really trust past judgement of the episode from myself. I am aware that this episode is widely considered to be bad, yes, but ultimately, I have had a few unpopular opinions in the past; might review “Stanley S. SquarePants” in the near future as an example. But nonetheless, let’s discuss my opinions on “Atlantis SquarePantis.”

SUMMARY:

While I did go into this episode with a neutral perspective, the honest truth is simply… yeah, it isn’t very good. I could just end the review there, but listen, is that really what you want to see out of a one-hundredth review? Nah. However, before I go on and give actual opinions, let’s get all the little nitpicks that people blow up way too much out of the way.

“This episode is a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ripoff!” Listen, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is one of those stock plots that so many cartoons rely on from time to time. This episode is no less a rip-off of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory than say, “Squidtastic Voyage” is to Fantastic Voyage. I might take off a few points for using a stock-plot for the show’s first TV movie, but frankly trying to consider it a rip-off is a pretty lame argument about this episode.

“Why doesn’t David Bowie get a musical number?” Listen, I’m gonna get it out of the way: David Bowie was a pretty terrible person, if my memory serves right. However, once again, while I will take points off for hiring a famous musician in a musical episode and not having him sing, it’s frankly the least of my concerns. When watching this episode, really I wasn’t wondering so much “When will LRH get a musical number?” because the musical numbers aren’t really what I’m watching this episode for. Of course, musical numbers can help episodes go from being good to great, like “Band Geeks” and the recent “Mimic Madness,” but as a whole, they aren’t anything that concerns me much in an episode.

And while there are far too many songs, I mostly had a neutral opinion on them. They’re nothing I’d seek down and listen to, but it wasn’t like “Oh dear Neptune just let it end” whenever I heard one. They’re pretty middle-of-the-road SpongeBob songs that ultimately don’t really bother me all that much.

While all those things are kinda bad, they ultimately don’t contribute much to my overall opinion of the episode. If there’s really a big issue I have with this episode, it’s how little really happens for the time it’s worth. Many of the issues this episode has can be seen in my reviews for an episode like “The Cent of Money” or “The Clash of Triton.” However, I do feel “Atlantis SquarePantis” is a little above those episodes.

For reference, in “Atlantis SquarePantis,” SpongeBob and Patrick are enjoying a nice day blowing bubbles, when they are disappointed with how briefly they last. SpongeBob decides to attempt blowing a long-lasting bubble, but it ends up carrying him and Patrick to a cave, where they find half of the Amulet of Atlantis. They go to the museum, where they find Squidward, Mr. Krabs, and Sandy, who all talk about their dreams in the lost city. Seeing the lost half of the Amulet of Atlantis, they manage to re-join it, and fly through a song-filled bus to the lost city, where everyone gets lost in their desires. SpongeBob and Patrick find the oldest-living bubble and get freaked out when they accidentally pop it, but ultimately it doesn’t mean much because it’s not even the real bubble; but then they do pop the real bubble and kinda piss off the Atlantian guards, and Plankton has a kinda shoehorned in plot about getting Atlantian weapons for unknown purposes. They fly home, missing Atlantis, and yadda-yadda. This plot would be fine for an episode anywhere between eleven and twenty minutes; probably working best as one of those half-specials, along the lines of “Back to the Past” and “Shanghaied.” And ultimately, that’s really the episode’s biggest fault: it just feels… padded out. It feels like an episode that was intended to be much shorter, but was extended just so the show could have a TV movie or get higher ratings or something.

Patchy also gets a subplot that’s equally as uninteresting. Patchy gets stuck in traffic waiting for the new SpongeBob, but ends up realizing his home town of Encino, California has disappeared somehow. Patchy gets stranded in the desert, looking for Encino, only to have weird hallucinations, feed a sandwich to a vulture, and eventually discover the town was shrunken by Space Aliens. Part of me wants to give the highlight of the episode to the weird live-action SpongeBob costumes, but it’s more funny in a “what-the-heck” kind of way than in an actually, legitimately funny way.

What puts “Atlantis SquarePantis” above other similarly boring episodes is that while, yes, the plot is pretty meandering and pointless, it at least enjoys a bit of fun with the medium. A few different animation styles appear in this episode, and while the one in Mr. Krabs’s song feels kinda cheap, and the one in Squidward’s doesn’t make nearly the use of the different paintings it should, it still is a nice change of pace for the series. I actually do really like the art style in Sandy’s song, which kind of takes an ol’ 16-bit SNES look to it, with some surprisingly fluid animation. Might just be personal tastes, though.

The biggest issue with the episode is that it really goes nowhere. Everything ultimately just leads to another anticlimax, but not even really a funny one. So SpongeBob and Patrick popped the bubble, but surprise it wasn’t the real one. Plankton gets advanced weaponry but nope it just fires ice cream. Ultimately, each time it feels a conflict is about to build up, it just kinda ends with some dull anticlimax. An episode with low stakes can occasionally work on, perhaps, an eleven minute-or-shorter level, like “Patrick! The Game.” However, when aiming to create a TV movie, ultimately, having an episode with as little climax as this one ultimately just feels boring. I do not recommend “Atlantis SquarePantis,” no, but admittedly, I don’t really feel that that mad at it. It feels like just a generic kinda dull SpongeBob episode with a lot of padding. None of the padding is really grating or obnoxious, just dull. “Atlantis SquarePantis” is an episode that I can’t really think of much reason to hate with all my heart. Yeah, it’s bad, and pretty dang bad at that, but it doesn’t give much reason for seething hatred. Once it’s over, it’s over, and well, there’s nothing you’re really feeling aside from “did I really just spend forty minutes on that?”

RECAP:

THE GOOD:

“Atlantis SquarePantis’s” biggest strength is that it does manage to have some interesting formats that wouldn’t be shown in your average episode. It’s one of the few things that could make this episode feel “special” when compared to others.

I’ll hand this episode that it did get a handful of laughs out of me, particularly the “I Hate Mondays” gag, but nothing too fantastic.

THE BAD:

The songs, while nothing abominable, are pretty forgettable, and definitely have those rhymes which just feel… forced. You know, the melons with edible rinds, the looking great on the side of a van, etc.

The plot really just meanders a lot. For a 40-minute long episode, it ultimately did nothing that a 22 or even 11-minute long episode couldn’t cover.

Plankton’s side-plot is entirely unnecessary.

This episode hardly has any climax. There’s a kinda neat fight sequence with Sandy and the Atlantians, but it’s so brief that in the grand scheme of things, it may as well be just a little more filler, since even it hardly leads anywhere in the end.

VERDICT:

I’m sorry to say, but this one-hundredth review is probably going to be as anti-climactic as the episode it is for. I was expecting something I could tear to shreds, or really just despise with every inch of my being, but ultimately… I couldn’t think of too much to say. There are many small things that are wrong here, but none of them are really wrong enough to fill my heart with rage or anything of that sort. It’s just dull, and forgettable. Really, the only question I should be asking is why watch this when there are multitudes of eleven minute episodes that tell better stories with more humor? Throw together “Married to Money,” “Life Insurance,” “Kracked Krabs,” and “Krusty Krushers” and you’d probably have a more worth-while forty minutes than watching this episode. Really, this is one that is difficult to give a final score to. It’s bad? Yeah. And frankly, it doesn’t really have major redeeming qualities. Ultimately, though I just can’t gather up the anger to rate it anything lower than…

FINAL SCORE: 3/10

Worse than the average 3/10 episode, but ultimately, it was just another boring, inoffensive episode of SpongeBob. A 3/10 is what I’d rate another episode of that sort, and TV movies aren’t held to any other standards. I’d definitely avoid this episode, it hardly does anything in the forty minutes it lasts, but that “hardly anything” can be said for both the good and bad.

THE SIDE-NOTES:

While it did get the same score as “What Ever Happened to SpongeBob?,” how it got the score was in a very different way. While “What Ever Happened to SpongeBob?” had a somewhat compelling story, the humor was lacking, and the episode just felt a tad too depressing to really enjoy. “Atlantis SquarePantis” achieves the score on sheer account of just doing nothing that I can really appreciate, while having nothing loathesome to really rant against.

I guess this still lines up with my “every ten episodes review something infamous” rule.

Time to count down to my review of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie! Only 100 more reviews to go!

So Atlantis has outgrown the needs for currency and warfare? Heck, they just need to ditch the monarchy and I’d be packing my bags and heading straight for that town.

Just getting back to reviewing run-of-the-mill episodes will feel so weird now. It’s like, “Hey! Here’s a review of a TV movie! And now here’s a review of uh… ‘Wishing You Well.’”

Yeah I’m gonna review “Wishing You Well” next. I got a request for it a couple months back so… yeah let’s do that.

<<PREVIOUS REVIEW: MARRIED TO MONEY NEXT REVIEW: WISHING YOU WELL>>

#spongebob #spongebob squarepants #season 5 #final score: 3/10 #atlantis squarepantis

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