It must be tremendously difficult to stay relevant, much less entertaining, especially when you're an animated children's television show that's a quarter of a century old.

Wow.

Twenty five years old.

The kids watching this when it all began must be in their thirties now.

Probably have their own kids watching this.

And there's all the television episodes and other movies that require so much writing, acting and creativity.

They can't all be winners.

But even a lame SpongeBob is at least a six.

And this is a six.

Not great. Not horrible.

Forty five minutes of your life.

Your kids might like it.

That's all that really matters.

It's still an interesting and ambitious concept.

Three separate chapters recorded like The Twilight Zone.

Unique animation and stories for each.

I'll say this, it's as good if not better than the new Garfield (2024) movie currently playing in theaters worldwide.

It's SpongeBob. He's an icon. He's 25 years old. It's 45 minutes of your life.

Think of this as a seafood platter to "tide" you over until the next movie, Saving Bikini Bottom, hits Netflix iAugust 2nd.

The Tidal Zone is literally just two episodes of SpongeBob, one episode of The Patrick Star Show, and one episode of Kamp Koral that were all tied together. The only thing notable is that the French narrator comes in between the mentioned episodes to explain them.

This entire special was falsely advertised as a "crossover" between all three SpongeBob television shows and was even pushed a couple months later for release. All these episodes even premiered in their respective shows the same exact day making this whole special a pointless anthology.

In terms of the episodes themselves they don't really feel special in any way. "Shrinking Stars" is just your average unnecessarily messy episode of The Patrick Star Show where it has no real plot and random stuff happens for no reason. In terms of the OG series episodes featured, the "Binary Bottom" episode was admittingly cool but nothing really special on its own. "You're Going to Pay Phone" isn't bad but it feels like a regular episode, and "A Skin Wrinkle in Time" is basically the crossover which was also a part of the original series for some reason where GrandPat Star accidentally ends up in Kamp Koral and in the SpongeBob intro. Again some of these are actually pretty good on their own but they had no reason to be in a compiled special. I eventually stopped watching this once I made it to the Kamp Koral episode "The Switch Glitch" because that's when I knew something was very off.

Again, I am not saying all the episodes themselves are bad. The ones from the original SpongeBob SquarePants series are actually pretty good and creative, but they have no reason to be compiled if they're literally released in the same show. This special was falsely advertised as an actual crossover and the only crossover we get is when GrandPat time travels for less than three minutes. You're better off watching the episodes from their respective shows themselves than this unexpectedly disappointing ratings trap.