 Several years ago, I bought and received a job lot of early SpongeBob SquarePants videos and the like from an eBay seller. The auction's description mentioned that several of the videos were actually given to him in the development of new episodes, implying that the seller originally worked on the show in some way. Some of the early tapes he sent me were in relatively good condition and some are a little worse for wear, with missing boxes, labels, etc. The video that grabbed my interest the most, however, was a video simply called SpongeBob Bootleg, which I believe was made in 2008. Intrigued, I played the video before any of the others I received in the job lot. The video starts with the SpongeBob intro, but in an unsettling way. The colors were pretty much dark, patchy the pirate looked totally red, SpongeBob has red colors, his pants were black and also his eyes. In some parts of the intro, SpongeBob's eyes would be changed to blue. The sand was totally black, the clouds was also dark, the bikini atoll also sounded more dark. The Nickelodeon Japan logo was also present in the tape, except the Nickelodeon font in the splat is missing. The theme's audio was also pretty much low. After the intro ended, the episode title card came. The title card seemed off. It read, colon tenny two hundred thousand one hundred fifty three. I just had no idea why the title card was like this. However, the music seemed normal. The episode started with SpongeBob walking outside. The way he walked sounded like he was depressed. The scene bubble transitioned to SpongeBob's house. It cut to SpongeBob's couch. For some reason, the couch was red and black. Very little sound is present in this scene of SpongeBob snoring. The scene once again bubble transitioned to SpongeBob in a blue and black background. This time, SpongeBob was totally black. I couldn't see his eyes, mouth, or nose. Except his legs wearing his shoes, alongside the objects that I guess they were in the place SpongeBob was. I didn't know if it was outside his pineapple, or if it was his bedroom. I just kept watching the episode. Immediately following this, Japanese text appeared on top of the screen. Even worse than this is that a beating sound was also present when this came up. After a few seconds, SpongeBob holds an axe, or maybe a knife. Scarier than this is that a sound of an axe, or a knife also played. I wasn't sure if it was an axe or a knife due to the bad quality the tape had. But it really seemed like it. A few seconds after this, the screen transitioned to another Japanese text, in red, on a white background. It could read as, Sarabada. I tried translating the text, and the result was, farewell. After this, I kinda got some context in my mind. The farewell text could have meant SpongeBob has killed himself. Other than that, this screen was only for a few seconds, as the bubbles transitioned to black for a few seconds. When the credits showed up, the colors were pretty much dark that I couldn't even see any text. The United Plankton Pictures screen showed up. This time, it wasn't that dark, as I could read the United Plankton Pictures incorporated text on the screen. On the main copyright screen, that used to show in every ending of a classic season SpongeBob episode, things seemed to be different this time. The copyright notice wasn't present, and the Nickelodeon logo was in a red color, and the Nickelodeon text was also not present this time. The screen went to black and the tape ended. I was half expecting the tape to take a more lighthearted approach. I was wrong. My original theory regarding the bootleg was that it was not meant as an actual episode, but was a test episode. I assumed that the scary scenes, not suitable for a children's cartoon, were likely added simply because the video would never go public, so they didn't have to worry about things being too scary. For around almost pretty much years, I haven't touched this tape again, until now, like everything what I told about the tape and the episode.