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The most widely accepted provenance (which remains unverified) points to a former Nickelodeon tape librarian in 2016. As part of a mass digitization effort for the network’s internal archive, several U-Matic and Betacam SP tapes were converted to ProRes 422. Among them was a mislabeled tape:

In April 2021, Paramount Global’s legal team issued a DMCA takedown notice to the Internet Archive. The file was removed, but not before the Internet Archive’s own crawler had cached it. Today, searching for “SpongeBob Season 1” on archive.org yields only a handful of foreign dubs, a 2003 PC game ISO, and a user-uploaded “Recreation” using the standard DVD source.