Screen Novelties delivers yet another hilarious stop-motion special, featuring a real SpongeBob cardboard cutout getting destroyed by fireworks in the studio’s parking lot, a hand-built wreath set ablaze because purchased versions were flame retardant, and a down-home jug band complete with banjo and washboard; special debuts today on Nickelodeon and Paramount+.
Self-described as “the ugly stepchildren of stop-motion,” Screen Novelties has not only made their mark with a portfolio of credits – ranging from stop-motion work for properties like The Flintstones to Robot Chicken and Family Guy – but with some unconventional production methods used to create truly unique viewing experiences… like exploding a cardboard SpongeBob with real fireworks in the studio parking lot.
“We made a custom dummy SpongeBob out of a cardboard box, stuck real sparklers in it and lit them on fire,” shares Screen Novelties producer Chris Finnegan, referencing Nickelodeon’s latest SpongeBob SquarePants holiday special, SpongeBob and Sandy’s Country Christmas. “It was kind of crazy. Sparks were raining down on the puppeteers below. But it was so fun.”
SpongeBob and Sandy’s Country Christmas, debuting today, December 2 on Nickelodeon and Paramount+, is a half-hour stop-motion Christmas special that centers around Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie’s fluffy-tailed heroine. When one of Sandy Cheeks’ experiments goes awry, the science-minded squirrel’s acrobatic family teams up with SpongeBob and the gang to save Christmas in their underwater home, Bikini Bottom.
This is the third holiday special Screen Novelties has done for the SpongeBob team – including It's a SpongeBob Christmas! and The Legend of Boo-Kini Bottom – and they’ve also worked on the main series’ spin-off series like Kamp Koral and multiple SpongeBob movies.
“One of the things we love about working with Marc Ceccarelli and Vincent Waller and the whole SpongeBob team is they’re always so receptive to all of our dumb ideas,” says Mark Caballero, producer and co-director at Screen Novelties with Seamus Walsh. “Other people we’ve worked with on other projects have had a hard time picturing what we’re talking about. But we have a really good rapport with the SpongeBob team there and they get what we do, and we totally get what they like to do. Stephen Hillenburg baked that multi-media aspect into the show from the very beginning and we try to be an extension of that.”
Ceccarelli, who serves as an executive producer alongside Waller on SpongeBob, adds, “What we love most about Screen Novelties is their willingness to throw in any technique to get the right shot. In the beginning of the special, where a country-fied Vincent’s in this narrator suit, they cut between a tiny marionette for the long shot to Vincent in the suit in the close up. It’s just really funny and the technique is a big part of the humor.”
There’s another scene early in the episode where SpongeBob looks at his hand during Sandy’s Christmas presentation to help remember his lines in promoting her holiday spectacle and the stop-motion scene cuts to a real hand wearing a five-fingered yellow glove.
“That’s the hand of Screen Novelties’ puppet maker Robin Walsh,” shares Waller. “I heard there was also a leg-wrestling competition to see who would get to animate Santa falling down through the tree.”
Stop-motion animation production is inherently meticulous, but with so much enthusiasm coming from Finnegan, Walsh (Seamus), Caballero and the rest of their team, Waller and Ceccarelli say there were very few if any challenges with creating this year’s holiday special.
“I really love the fact that they add so much squash and stretch into their animation, which they really defined when they were working on Celebrity Deathmatch and it became their house style,” notes Ceccarelli. “If you slow down the animation and examine the frames of those squash and stretch moments, you’ll see they do a rough carving of a character out of foam just for a shape that they’ll then animate into that scene.”
He continues, “Another one of my favorite shots in that special is a close up of a hand tying a knot when they’re making the sleigh, and every time I frame through it to see if they’re really tying that knot all the way through in stop-motion.”
Walsh adds, “I think we’re doing pretty good if we’ve made Marc wonder how we did something.”
Apparently, Screen Novelties used a bit of eye trickery to fake the knot tying sequence, but a shot that’s almost entirely real is the scene where one of Sandy’s relatives lights a wreath on fire during an acrobatics act.
“It was real fire, much to our DP’s chagrin,” says Caballero. “He’s a great DP, always looking out for everyone’s safety, and told us, ‘We can’t shoot this inside unless you want the studio to catch fire.”
So, like with the cardboard SpongeBob and fireworks, the team took to the parking lot to, once again, set their models ablaze.
“We went around to art stores looking for wreaths that were flammable, but most were flame retardant,” notes Caballero.
Walsh continued, “And they obviously should be. But, like many times before, had to make our own weird thing in order to pull it off effectively and safely at the same time.”
While they may call themselves “the ugly stepchildren of stop-motion,” perhaps a better description for Screen Novelties is “early years ILM,” since Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic studio was such a strong inspiration for the way Finnegan, Walsh and Caballero approach stop-motion animation.
“When I was a kid, I would devour anything ILM,” shares Walsh. “They didn’t have a ton of Behind-the-Scenes stuff back then, so I was always trying to figure out how they did what they did. Even when I was in college, there weren’t any stop-motion classes or anything so Phil Tippett and all those guys at ILM were my heroes.”
And, like Tippett, Screen Novelties tries not to reveal too many of their stop-motion secrets.
“We try to keep that sense of wonderment going with people and take a tip from Tippett and even Ray Harryhausen, where we try to get people to stray focused on the story itself because everything we do is supposed to support the story. The more you learn about how things are done, the more it takes viewers out of the story.”
The true heart of this stop-motion special is Sandy and her family. And in keeping with Screen Novelties’ tradition of off-the-wall storytelling, they found time within the episode to make Sandy and her family part of a jug band.
“The cheesy variety shows of the 60s and 70s were a main inspiration for us on this one and what I’m especially proud of is we were able to take this family, established in The Sandy Cheeks Movie, and add this down-home jug band with a washboard and banjo as part of their story and really embrace that Country Christmas vibe. We also added some square-dancing style to the end sledding scene. Marc and Vince gave us a lot of freedom on reboarding certain sequences and changing things to work for stop-motion and the story.”
That square-dance-meets-sledding scene at the episode’s conclusion, which takes a piece of music the SpongeBob team already had, refined it and wove into a dance sequence, is one which Waller and Ceccarelli also thoroughly enjoyed, and hope audiences love as well.
“That’s something that was really exciting about this episode, just the inclusion of all the country music,” shares Ceccarelli. “That’s what Sandy’s family brought to the SpongeBob universe, and we haven’t done a lot of country-themed things over the years. The classic country is a brilliant flavor for us to be playing around with in our 25th year.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
