SpongeBoy Ahoy! Pilot

"Another treasure hunter losin' everything in the search for nothin'."

– John Marston, Red Dead Redemption.

"STOP PLAYING THAT MUSIC!"

– Mr. Krabs... I mean, Nickelodeon about the early theme song during the screening of the pilot, 1996.

"Who's the big yellow cube with holes?"

– Patrick Star discovering Osama bin Laden's body, SpongeBob SquarePants.

Introduction

The SpongeBoy Ahoy! pilot is a piece of unconfirmed lost media believed to be the earliest known pilot episode of the American animated children's comedy series SpongeBob SquarePants. This episode was believed to have been produced and/or pitched to Nickelodeon in 1996, predating the original 1997 cut of the official pilot, Help Wanted, and featured glaring differences from the final version. The early title refers to the title character's scrapped original name, SpongeBoy, which was replaced with SpongeBob for being previously copyrighted for a cleaning mop, and it presumably would've used the early concept character designs and art style seen in official production artwork. The artwork is currently available to view on the Twitter page The Art of SpongeBob from a 2020 post. Although Help Wanted is considerably closer to the rest of season one aesthetically, it features minor color and character design changes, indicating that elements of the SpongeBoy Ahoy! art style hadn't been corrected yet when it was produced.

According to the publicly shared portions of the pilot's storyboards, it would've been virtually identical to Help Wanted, save for the character designs and art style. Certain dialogue spoken by Mr. Krabs at the end is slightly different, and the central plot involving the stampede of anchovies isn't shown, leaving whether it was implemented yet as of 1996 up in the air. So far, no animated material of the pilot is known to exist. The supposed original theme song—a simple instrumental version of the show's 1999 introduction theme—was uploaded to several video-sharing websites in 2021, although this has since been confirmed to be a cover of the title screen music for the 2001 Game Boy Color game, SpongeBob SquarePants: Legend of the Lost Spatula. An early pilot to the show has been uploaded onto the video-hosting platform Streamable by user phih9, although this is just a recording of the initial airing of Help Wanted with the original opening credits sequence and theme song.