"It's a SpongeBob Christmas!" is the 23rd episode of the eighth season, and the 175th episode overall, of the American animated television series SpongeBob SquarePants. It originally aired on CBS in the United States on November 23, 2012, and on Nickelodeon on December 6. In the special, Plankton tries to convince SpongeBob to transform everybody in Bikini Bottom into jerks by feeding them his special jerktonium-laced fruitcakes in order to get his Christmas wish—the Krabby Patty secret formula.
The episode was produced in stop motion animation at Scre Novelties, and was directed by Mark Caballero and Seamus Walsh, two of the founders of the company. The animation style was inspired by those of the classic Rankin/Bass television specials. Writt by Luke Brookshier, Marc Ceccarelli, Derek Ivers, and Mr. Lawrce, "It's a SpongeBob Christmas!" was based on Tom Kny and Andy Paley's 2009 song "Don't Be a Jerk (It's Christmas)", which was also featured in the episode. John Goodman guest starred as the voice of Santa Claus. On November 6, 2012, the soundtrack album and the DVD for the episode were released simultaneously.
Upon premiere, "It's a SpongeBob Christmas!" attracted nearly five million viewers and met positive critical reception. It received four nominations at the 40th Annie Awards including Best Animated Television Production for Childr (with Dan Driscoll winning the Character Animation in an Animated Television or other Broadcast Vue Production category). It was also nominated for Best Sound Editing in Television at the 60th Gold Reel Awards.
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In the oping wraparound of the special, Patchy the Pirate and Potty the Parrot are driving in a mail truck which the former had stol. While arguing about the directions to the North Pole, Potty sees a fork in the road and crashes. During Christmas season in Bikini Bottom, Plankton becomes angry that his evil acts have landed him on Santa Claus' naughty list, and he won't receive his Christmas wish—the Krabby Patty secret formula. However, he discovers jerktonium, an elemt that can turn anyone nice into a jerk, and plots a scheme. He bakes the jerktonium into fruitcakes he intds to spread around the town. To test it, Plankton lets SpongeBob taste a fruitcake, but learns he is immune to jerktonium. Upset that his plan seemingly failed, Plankton gives his fruitcake dispser to SpongeBob, who promptly distributes the fruitcakes to all of Bikini Bottom and turns all the residts into jerks. Plankton th sds out an evil wind-up robot SpongeBob to commit troublesome deeds and frame the real SpongeBob.
The next day, SpongeBob begins to notice that everyone is acting like jerks. SpongeBob and Sandy Cheeks discover the antidote for jerktonium, and it happs to be a song. SpongeBob begins singing, bringing back the residts' Christmas spirit. Unfortunately, it is too late as Santa Claus arrives and states that everyone including SpongeBob is on his naughty list, except Plankton, who is the only nice person in town. Santa grants Plankton the formula, and tells SpongeBob that he is the worst of them all for wreaking havoc in Bikini Bottom. The SpongeBob robot th arrives to eliminate Santa and destroy more of Christmas. SpongeBob fights and destroys the robot with the fruitcake dispser, and saves Santa. Santa thanks SpongeBob, and is raged wh he realizes that Plankton was behind the chaos. Plankton loses the formula and is giv coal by Santa's Elves.
As Patchy is about to give up searching for Santa, he suddly finds what he believes to be Santa's workshop. He th sees Santa with gifts in a cave and tells him his Christmas wish is to meet SpongeBob. Patchy realizes that he was hallucinating and in reality countered a polar bear, which starts chasing him. Santa puts Patchy on the naughty list for stealing the mail truck, with he and Potty wishing the audice a Merry Christmas.
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Tom Kny (pictured here in 2008) and Andy Paley's Christmas song "Don't Be a Jerk (It's Christmas)", that was released in 2009, inspired Nickelodeon to produce the Christmas special. The song was used as the featured music in the episode and was re-released on the soundtrack album.
Luke Brookshier, Marc Ceccarelli, Derek Ivers, and Mr. Lawrce served as the episode's writers, with Brookshier and Ceccarelli serving as storyboard directors. "It's a SpongeBob Christmas!" was based on the 2009 Christmas song "Don't Be a Jerk (It's Christmas)" writt by SpongeBob's voice actor Tom Kny and his writing partner Andy Paley. They wrote it as "...just sort of a little sample calling card of what we were thinking about."
Kny explained, "...Evtually somebody at Nickelodeon found it [the song] on their desk and decided to make it into a holiday special."
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The network let Kny and Paley write three more songs for the upcoming special episode (Nickelodeon evtually decided to release a soundtrack album, which became It's a SpongeBob Christmas! Album, containing the songs to coincide with the episode).
Mark Caballero, Seamus Walsh, and Christopher Finnegan animated it at Scre Novelties, while Caballero and Walsh served as the directors. Scre Novelties was chos by the show's executives to execute the animation because they had already worked with them before in other several smaller projects. These include the revamping of the oping title sequce of the show for 2009's SpongeBob's Truth or Square and the stop motion sequce of The Spongebob Squarepants Movie.
Walsh explained, "They dug one of our shorts that we'd done a while back, which was called Graveyard Jamboree with Mysterious Mose, and wanted to have us apply our ssibilities to SpongeBob ... We come from the same planet as far as our sse of humor and comic ssibilities are concerned. But we also wanted to make sure that it felt like a SpongeBob episode."
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All the main SpongeBob SquarePants cast members lt their voices to the episode. Series executive producer Paul Tibbitt also had a minor speaking role as the voice of Potty the Parrot. In addition to the regular cast, American actor John Goodman guest starred in the episode as the voice of Santa Claus.
The animators cited the classic television specials Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town by Rankin/Bass Productions as inspirations for the episode's animation styles.
Caballero said, "Well, we are heavily immersed in that particular Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass style. They are big heroes of ours ... So we tapped into that knowledge for sure. We definitely use modern tricks, though. We shot everything with digital cameras directly to the hard drives of our iMacs."
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The animators worked closely with executive producer Paul Tibbitt, creator Steph Hillburg, and creative director Vinct Waller to sure the cartoon characters were properly translated into three-dimsional puppets.
Hillburg and Tibbitt provided hands-on feedback on the production on a weekly basis. "They'd check out the weeklies and go back and forth with us on the various gags [...] It was really a pleasurable experice wh they came to visit, because we come from the same planet. It all felt very easy and natural, " Walsh said.
About 30 people—whom Walsh described "...seemed to be thrilled to work on the show"—worked on the making of the episode over at Scre Novelties. Walsh described the initial stage of production as "a very busy period for all of us ... We came in at about 8:30 in the morning and didn't leave until midnight some days. But it all zipped by pretty quickly." He said that they "felt pretty lucky because usually executives involved with productions look at the stop-motion process as annoying, but on this special, they were very jazzed and gung-go about it."
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To keep the production crew in the Christmas spirit, six months worth of Christmas music was played, which included 83 versions of The Nutcracker suite.
Caballero and Walsh had conflicts on making sure the stop motion version of Bikini Bottom will resemble the 2D world of the series.
Caballero said that "We didn't want to make exact sculptural copies of the cartoon drawings and layouts, just because it might've ded up feeling too 'perfect' or something. So we chose to re-appropriate real world objects as much as possible." Art director Kelly Mazurowski focused on "digging through salvage yards", picking the right materials to be used in the set. Caballero described this process as "'puppetizing' the world of Bikini Bottom."
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Six sets were constructed on which 60 pounds of baking soda were used as snow (the crew tried to use real snow but it melted),
42 pounds of glitter were used to cover the background, and 20 boxes of breakfast cereal were used to cover the coral rocks.
Over 38 differt types of foam were used to make the set pieces and the characters' bodies and heads. To rder SpongeBob's pineapple house, palm fronds from a tree in a school yard were used. Other props and materials used were an actual starfish, three Christmas trees (for the Patchy the Pirate's Winter Wonderland sces), six boxes of puff cereal (to create the fruitcake inside SpongeBob's mouth), 21 pounds of googly eyes (for rivets, texture pieces, knobs, etc.), 22 pounds of woodchips (to create Sandy's treedome floor), and 24 bunches
