YMMV / SpongeBob SquarePants S 3 E 19 "The Sponge Who Could Fly"

• Awesome Music: Being a Musical Episode, it's only natural that the song numbers would have lots of effort put into them.
  • "Bubble Beat Box" is Theo Mondle's second outing following "Party Pooper Pants", and is a funky hip-hop number that almost makes the cheap walk cycles worth it.
  • "He's Flying" is a triumphant tune that makes the viewers feel happy for SpongeBob to finally achieve his dream of flying.
  • "All You Need is Friends" may be a blatant Award-Bait Song, but it also features Tom Kenny giving one of his best and poignant performances as SpongeBob, let alone singing.
• Franchise Original Sin: While it has its fans, the whole episode reads like a laundry list of everything that would go wrong in later seasons:
  • First off, the advertising mentioned that this was a lost episode, which was just an excuse to make the episode a special (though it did work given how rarely this episode was shown on Nick). The advertising of later specials would contain similarly misleading statements, such as "The Clash of Triton"^note claimed to be a battle between SpongeBob and Triton, "Atlantis SquarePantis"^note claimed to be a big adventure instead of a musical, and especially "Truth or Square"^note claimed that the Krabby Patty Formula was being revealed, and that SpongeBob and Sandy were getting married. Not to mention the infamous "Best Day Ever Marathon", which was just a highly promoted and advertised 24 hour marathon for a regular eleven minute episode.
  • The episode is a musical, which was never alluded to in the advertising... just like "Atlantis SquarePantis".
  • It features Patchy live-action segments. Many fans found these inferior to the actual show, even prior to the movie, but the Seasonal Rot made them more prominent.
  • The Ungrateful Townsfolk adding a tint of mean spiritedness that would become common in later seasons (especially since they turn out to be a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk in the end). Here however, they're more directly conveyed as the antagonists of the episode for SpongeBob to overcome, and ultimately he does get a Happy Ending.
• Genius Bonus: SpongeBob saying that they laughed at the guy who invented lightbulbs is actually a historical truth. Thomas Edison was ridiculed by the public mass for his seemingly tryhard inventions, including the record player, until his reputation was saved by inventing the lightbulb. And considering Lou says, "No, they didn't", viewers aware of this factoid could see it as a subtle highlight of the townsfolk's Self-Serving Memory.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The "Remembering SpongeBob" montage now seems like a heartbreaking eulogy for the pre-movie episodes or even Stephen Hillenburg himself.
• Heartwarming Moments: Depending on your view, the "Remembering SpongeBob" sequence also can be this.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • A YouTube video in 2014 titled "Forgetting SpongeBob", which parodies the "Remembering SpongeBob" montage by using clips from the show's Seasonal Rot-era, becomes this trope after SpongeBob won back the crowd a single year later.
  • Patchy being dismayed to discover that the "Lost Episode" he really wanted to find was apparently just SpongeBob in a bunch of walk cycles set to music seems ahead of its time in some ways. Later on in the 21st century, communities devoted to spreading rumors about lost media and searching for it would rise on the Internet, and in many cases, the discovery turns out to be disappointing for the people who wanted to find it, with one of the biggest cases being an unauthorized bootleg film called "A Day with SpongeBob", after many years of searching it turned out that the film had never actually been released or even made at all which was a major letdown to those who had been involved in the search.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "SpongeBob Betrayed Us!" The catch-all response to whenever a fandom believes that a franchise "betrayed" them (replacing SpongeBob with the name of the work/creator). Occasionally, someone will say a variation on the line "That was just a bunch of cheap walk-cycles!".
  • "That's it? That was the lost episode? That was just a bunch of cheap walk cycles!" itself is a common phrase on its own, commonly replacing "lost episode" and "a bunch of cheap walk cycles" with whatever the user prefers.
• Squick: One of the pieces of SpongeBob memorabilia that Patchy throws out is a pair of SpongeBob-print boxers. Which he takes off of himself.
  • Even worse was in a deleted scene, where Patchy rips out a SpongeBob Band-Aid, with blood spurting out.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Some consider the walk cycle to be this, due to Spongebob's unnatural movements and some of the strange faces he pulls.

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