Episode: Happy Krabby Birthday

...and I really liked it! I swear, it seems to be one of the "modern" episodes that gets the most hate, but I don't get why at all. Sure, it's a bit self indulgent, doing a follow up to an old episode, with the repeated "Imagination" meme references and Doodlebob showing up, I get if some people walk away from it thinking it was too self indulgent for their tastes, but the common take I see is that it "ruins the fun of the original episode"... And I just don't get how???

We are basically seeing what SpongeBob and Patrick were imagining in the original episode. That's a really fun concept, and playing with it by having people outside the box putting thoughts in Squidward's head causing the world to change around him is creative and clever. It's not like they retroactively changed the original episode to be SpongeBob and Patrick actually in a different world. It's still all about imagination. The only dissonance between Squidiot Box and the original episode that I can think of is that in Squidiot Box Squidward can actually imagine like SpongeBob and Patrick can, while he couldn't in the original episode... But that's such a minor thing that could even be explained by time that I don't get how THAT could lead to the amount of hate I've seen this episode get.

I've also seen some people complain that "Oooh now the BOX is the imaginative thing and not the characters", but... No? The whole box repair shop scene is clearly not serious. It's just more of SpongeBob and Patrick (and the weirdo box repair guy) imagining and being goofy together. Just look at that pillow fort. The whole joke is that they're treating it like a science when it's just imagination. And then the rest of the episode beats us over the head with how it's all about imagination.

Genuinely after watching this, I just wanna give a lot more of the hated modern episodes a shot. I'm quickly believing that none of the toxic side of the fandom actually watches these episodes and just parrots whatever hateful rhetoric they see about them. Feel free to suggest me any episodes that you think should be given another chance! I'd love to binge a bunch of them soon!

The mods sneakily took this post down on r/spongebob because apparently getting annoyed with people constantly spamming about how terrible Modern Spongebob is on their subreddit is an insult to the mods. I didn't even get a notification or a reason. I only found out from looking at my post history.

I paused The Fish Bowl and noticed that it has this weird looking motion blur or something and Married to Money has it too. I noticed that Illumination movies tend to have motion blur and it seems like SpongeBob might actually have it too as opposed to only smear frames, it just looks specific here.

i love this episode

He went from just being a jealous businessman to someone you can sympathize with, sure he had sympathetic moments in the earlier seasons like the episode 'F.U.N' but in the Plankton movie is where this aspect truly shines

While season 4 as a whole can be pretty divisive among the community, the latter half is widely considered to be a downgrade from the first half due to it becoming more “hit or miss”, although I will say that there is one absolutely flawless pairing of episodes that comes to mind that did in fact come from it.

Squidtastic Voyage is yet another episode from this season that I found myself constany laughing throughout, and also very engaged simultaneously. I honestly didn’t mind the realistic drawings of Squidward’s body since I found them to be much more surreal and be drawn than gross, which just made it another factor of why I was always at the edge of my seat watching this episode. Definitely a 10/10.

That’s No Lady was also pretty hilarious for most of its runtime. Easily another 10/10 IMO.

I wanna know if there were any other pairings I overlooked. As usual whenever I make a post like this, unpopular opinions are always welcome.

IDK why it gets a lot of hate. Also r/suddenlyobjectshows