A New Twitch Emote

The Twitch community is constantly pushing things. There’s a cool new way to consume copyrighted material just a few months after the issue surrounding Twitch artists viewing television on broadcast.

Last year, a Twitch emote that shows off a whole episode of SpongeBob SquarePants gained greater popularity in chat rooms across the platform. 

The episode in question is “Reef Blower,” which is a perfect fit for Twitch because of its iconic status. Squidward wakes up to find a shell on his lawn and tosses it across to SpongeBob’s yard in this episode. SpongeBob cleans up the mess with his world’s version of a leaf blower (the “reef blower”), resulting in several more minutes of high jinks. 

The episode is ideal for this format because it is one of the few in SpongeBob where there is no meaningful dialogue. The compressed SpongeBob episode has been circulating the internet for some years, and it was originally packaged as a GIF by content creator “FourScore64.” The manufactured one for the first episode of SpongeBob — “Help Wanted” — was posted first, followed by the reef blower episode on the same day. Both tweets went semi-viral — collecting tens of thousands of likes. 

When someone requested he create a GIF of “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie”, FourScore64 responded “compressing a 90-minute movie into a GIF seems a bit tricky to do, but not impossible”. 

This sought-after GIF has not been released after the tweet. SpongeBob Squarepants’ owners, Viacom and now Paramount Global, have a reputation for being tight with their intellectual property. They’ve been known to sue Google in a big copyright lawsuit and to prohibit fan-made videos in the past.