Immediately after the death of SpongeBob SquarePants' creator, Stephen Hillenburg, Nickelodeon announced that it was planning "over half a dozen" spinoffs of his show. They jumped at this chance as soon as possible, since Hillenburg always said no to the idea of a spinoff.

For context, Hillenburg was strongly against spinoffs and "aging down" SpongeBob's character. The first spinoff to be announced is a combination of everything he did not want to see his creation turned into. "Kamp Koral" will feature a 10-year-old SpongeBob and his kid friends. Back when Hillenburg pitched the show in the 1990s, the executives wanted to turn the original show into the SAME EXACT THING, insisting that SpongeBob would never be popular if it was about an adult character. Hillenburg adamantly told them, "No, that's not the show." Through his creation, he wanted to convey that people—like SpongeBob—don't have to "grow up" when they become an adult; they can still have fun, be happy, and love what they do. He was ready to "walk out" on Nickelodeon entirely before the execs loosened up.

Now that he's gone and can't stop them, the Nickelodeon executives have gone behind Hillenburg's back and are planning to milk his creation as much as they can. Paul Tibbitt, an animator whom Stephen chose to become his successor as the SpongeBob showrunner for an entire decade, said this about the spinoff on June 4:

"This is some greedy, lazy executive-ing right here, and they ALL know full well Steve would have HATED this. Shame on them."

And that's coming from one of the people who knew him best. Please let Nickelodeon and its new president, Brian Robbins, know that we will not accept this ill-intentioned, greedy executive meddling. We need to let Robbins know that we can see past the execs' sneaky ways and that we will NOT support their backhanded moves. By signing this petition, we are asking that they stop production on Kamp Koral, which is scheduled to begin later this month.