SpongeBob fans discover controversial 'Panty Raid' episode was removed from streaming
SpongeBob SquarePants fans are only just learning that one of the show's old episodes has been taken down from streaming by Nickelodeon.
It was decided that the 2003 episode 'Mid Life Crustacean' would get taken off all streaming services for not being 'kid appropriate', referring to the part of the story where SpongeBob, Patrick and Mr Krabs launch a 'panty raid'.
In the episode, Mr Krabs (Clancy Brown) is feeling his age so he decides to join SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) and Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) on a night of fun antics across Bikini Bottom.
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This is also the episode where the 'are you feeling it now Mr Krabs?' meme comes from, as SpongeBob repeatedly asks his boss whether he's having fun and feeling young again yet.
What really does the trick for Mr Krabs is going on the panty raid, where the trio break into a girl's house and steal her underwear, only for things to go wrong as they discover the home they've broken into belongs to Mr Krabs' mother.
People weren't happy to find out the episode was gone, with some SpongeBob fans saying it was 'one of the best episodes', and that's got to be high praise considering how long the show has been going on.
They said it was an example of 'why physical media is superior', as people who own DVDs of the show won't suddenly discover some of the episodes have been taken down with no way to access them.
Other fans said they hadn't really understood the joke at the time, wondering 'why the hell would you take someone's underwear'.
A few wondered if more episodes might get taken down, as like many cartoons for kids, there were some pretty adult jokes hidden inside.
Someone else said they wondered how the idea of SpongeBob and co going on a panty raid to Mr Krabs' mother's house had ever managed to make it into an episode in the first place, branding the idea 'wild' even considering some of the other stuff on the show.
Plenty of fans thought the episode being taken down was unfair, either because they thought it was one of the best the show had done or because other cartoons had got away with plenty of other shenanigans.
One commenter said that back in his dad's day 'Jerry used to beat the ever loving f**k out of Tom' but somehow that was all fine and dandy.
In 2021, a representative for Nickelodeon told IGN that the episode had been 'in and out of rotation since 2018' after a standards review determined that 'some story elements were not kid-appropriate'.
And this isn't the first time SpongeBob has fallen foul of censorship, as back in 2019, the movie got banned in Indonesia for being 'too violent and sexual', which is not often an accusation levelled at children's cartoons.
Topics: Film and TV
Joe Harker