About

SpongeBob "Behind Closed Doors" Lost Media refers to NSFW pornographic drawings of SpongeBob SquarePants characters done by the show's storyboard artists that were discovered by a lost media researcher in July 2023. Shortly after appearing online, the images went viral on social media, becoming a prevalent subject of discourse and memes.

Origin

On September 21st, 2012, comic art magazine Hogan's Alley published an interview with people who worked on the animated series SpongeBob SquarePants titled "The Oral History of SpongeBob SquarePants."^[1] In the interview, the show's former writer and storyboard director Kent Osborne describes Behind Closed Doors, a book of crude and obscene drawings of SpongeBob SquarePants characters drawn by storyboard artists working on the show around 2001. The drawings were done on Post-It notes and placed on the back of the doors, so if the door was open no one would see them (extract shown below).

On July 18th, 2023, YouTuber^[2] LSuperSonicQ uploaded a video about the book, revealing that he was in correspondence with a person who had a copy of it. In the video, LSuperSonicQ talked about the book and showcased the book's cover and six of the images found in it, most of which depicted SpongeBob SquarePants characters in a sexual manner or engaged in some sort of sexual activity. The video (shown below) gained over 227,000 views in 16 hours.

Additionally, LSuperSonicQ uploaded scans of the drawings to Internet Archive^[3] (censored versions shown below).

Spread

On July 18th, 2023, @LSuperSonicQ tweeted^[4] about the discovery, describing it as "the lost SpongeBob Holy Grail." The tweet (shown below) received over 980 retweets and 6,500 likes in one day.

In the following hours, the discovery became a subject of discussions on Twitter as users posted about Behind Closed Doors and referenced it in tweets. For example, on July 18th, 2023, Twitter^[5] user @Q_Review wrote "Congratulations to lost media hunters, but I have never seen something and so quickly thought "This didn't need found." The tweet (shown below) garnered over 1,100 retweets and 20,600 likes in one day.

Congratulations to lost media hunters, but I have never seen something and so quickly thought "This didn't need found" https://t.co/CabBnHH4ir

— Quinton Reviews🎬 (@Q_Review) July 19, 2023

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References