A Day With Spongebob Squarepants: The Movie

About

A Day With Spongebob Squarepants: The Movie (Unauthorized Mockumentary), often shortened to A Day With Spongebob Squarepants: The Movie, or just ADWSS, is a 2011 unreleased direct-to-DVD film based off the popular animated Nickelodeon series Spongebob Squarepants.. The film was planned to be distributed by Reagal Films under the pseudonym of Inovisim Films and distributed by MVD films. Since 2014 the film has gained a large internet following from sites like The Lost Media Wiki, Reddit, and 4chan due to its elusive nature and the lack of any information or proof of its actual existence at the time. No verifiable clips or stills of the movie, or any actual physical copies were known to exist, and all that was known about the movie's plot is a 5 sentence summary on the film's entry on Amazon. ^[1] The film is mostly known for the search efforts for any evidence of its existence. Until August 3rd, 2016, the film was officially considered lost.

Origin

ADWSS was supposedly released on Amazon on November 22nd, 2011. Up to that point there had been little coverage on the film. The film was supposedly available for a day before going out of stock. A bar code was also registered for the film.^[12] The description for the film reads:
"In this mockumentary, SpongeBob lives above ground like all Hollywood superstars. Afraid that SpongeBob is becoming old news, his boss runs a contest called "Spend a Day with SpongeBob." The contest makes SpongeBob the talk of the town, as thousands of kids enter to win. The lucky winner is Seth, and he is ecstatic about his day with SpongeBob. However the day becomes a rollercoaster ride as things don't go quite the way they planned."^[1]

The movie has currently an average score of 2.5 with 25 reviews, but many assume those reviews to be fake, and the earlier reviews have comments on them asking for evidence of the film's existence or to upload the film online.

Before Internet Fame

Before the film gained widespread interest, there were a few mentions of the film on different websites, however little actual information about the film was given in these mentions.^[8]

November 19th, 2011 - User CRZ from the website The-W briefly mentions the film when discussing movies that come out on November 22nd, 2011. In the post he says “I found very little on this one – maybe they're trying to keep it under the radar and avoid litigation.”^[9]

November 21st, 2011 - Music blog largeheartedboy.com mentions ADWSS in an entry titled "This Week's Interesting DVD releases" along with 61 other DVD releases^[10]

November 22nd, 2011 - The supposed release date of ADWSS^[1]

December 2011 - The film is listed on a PDF as a new DVD arrival by the Hunterdon County Library in Flemington New Jersey as a new DVD arrival for December 2011.^[11]

January 1st, 2012 - Twitter user TheDanielSean tweets that he is watching the film(this tweet later in 2015 got flooded with replies asking if he has a copy of the film)^[13]

January 22nd, 2012 - A page for ADWSS is created on the Spongebob Fanon Wiki ^[14]

April 22nd, 2012 - A page on A Thread on The Spongebob Community.com is made discussing the film.^[15]

October 28th, 2012 - User mcarver on the dvdtalk forums lists ADWSS on a form post listing titles he had recently found to be out-of-print ^[16]

August 8th, 2013 - A thread about the film is created on Spongebob Mania, the film gets dismissed due to being unofficial ^[17]

February 1st 2014 - A song which is claimed to be the movie's theme song is uploaded to Youtube(currently unknown if any affiliation to the movie itself)

February 14th 2014 - A Kickstarter for Reagal Films's "Good Luck" (under the pseudonym of Grand Scale Entertainment) earns $11,000 with 20 backers.^[18]

May 9th, 2014 - Amazon user Mike Zendar gives ADWSS its first Amazon review in which he praises the movie and gives it 4 stars. He would later edit his review in response to the outpouring of interest in finding the movie

Spread

On July 4, 2014 Wiki user LarryInc64 found the film on Amazon. Finding little to no information about it anywhere else, he created a page for it on the Lost Media Wikia(the original Lost Media Wiki).^[2][3] But even then it didn't receive much coverage.^[2] The first real notable coverage of the film came from the film being mentioned on the Youtube video "Top 20 Lost Kids Films" by user blameitonjorge on July 1st, 2015, which to date has over 1 million views(shown below).

The search for the movie gained further popularity when famous Youtuber RebelTaxi uploaded a video on the subject on September 8, 2015, which to date has over 300,000 views(shown below)^[3]

A post on Reddit's r/unsolvedmysteries board about the film and recovery efforts for it was posted that same month and recieved 100 upvotes and 85 comments before being archived.^[4] On November 4th, 2015 Gawker published an article on its "Weird Internet" section detailing the ongoing search efforts for the film.^[5] The next day French newspaper La Monde published an article on the subject.^[6] As of today the Lost Media Wiki's forum for the film has over 2,000 posts.^[7]

4chan's Involvement

On August 4th, 2015 a 4chan thread was posted on /co/ asking if the film had been found. This caused anons to take interest in the film's search as well^[8], leading to the discovery of the film's QR code.^[20] This search also led to the discovery that the boy on the film's cover was actually just a purchased stock image.^[21] The same day anons discovered that Inovisim Films(the company on the label) was not a real company, and was actually Reagal Films.

The next day an employee at a branch of Hastings under the name "hastingsfag" posted on the thread that it was listed on an employee-only system, but not accessible through public search. He claimed to have ordered it and that the movie would arrive in 2 weeks. Another Hastings employee appeared on the thread and claimed to have done likewise.^[8]

Phone Call With Company Owner

In May 2016 Lost Wiki User William Glover managed to contact Reagal Films owner Lorenzo Holley via phone-call. In the call Glover asked Holley if he was able to purchase the film, to which Holley responded that they no longer have any copies, but were willing to make a better version which would possible be funded via crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter. The calls were later uploaded to youtube on May 13, 2016.(shown below)

Cover Art

The cover art is the only image truly known to be related to the movie. For this reason 4chan's /co/ board actually focused on the artwork and the boy on the cover's identity to find more information about the movie. What they found however was that the artwork was in itself extremely sketchy and that everything in it was a lie. First, the boy himself was confirmed to not even be an actor in the movie when anons discovered that the image of him was actually a stock photo from the website iStock.^[21] The quotes at the top of the film have been discovered to be from non-existent people and publications. And the illustration in the background wasn't even made for Reagal, but by artist Jorge Pacheco for a real-estate broker.^[23][8] And, as said previously, the "Inovisim Films" mentioned on the cover is not even a real company, but an alias of Reagal.

Hoax/Joke Images/Videos

Following the film's sudden increase in popularity, an influx of videos and images came from people who claimed them to be from the actual film itself. Most of these images and videos were declared false, but only spread the infamy of the film as a result.^[2][5]

Resolution

On August 3rd, 2016, Youtuber Bedhead Bernie released a video on YouTube titled: "The End of A Day With SpongeBob SquarePants – The Animation Warehouse [Feat. Zeepsterd]"(below, left). In the video he declared that he had come into contact with the director of the movie himself, named "Mr. Orange" in the video to keep his privacy. Bernie detailed his conversations with Mr. Orange and Lorenzo Holley. Mr. Orange revealed that Reagal Films simply was a distributor and not a producer as thought beforehand. It was revealed that the film was never finished because they did not have the budget, and the Amazon page was only created to see if there was any public interest. The same day, the Ongoing Mysteries YouTube channel posted a video titled "[A Day With SpongeBob SquarePants] The End – One Year Anniversary + 5 Pages of Script + Audio Log"(below, right), which contained recordings on phone calls with Mr. Orange, Lorenzo Holley, the first 5 pages of the script, along with audio readings of those pages. On August 8, 2016, The Lost Media Wiki declared the search for the movie officially over.^[24]

Notable Videos

Search Interest

External References