“SpongeBob SquarePants” needs to die. From 1999 to 2004, the first three seasons of that show represented some of the finest children’s television — undeniably childish, but with a balance of razor sharp wit and absurdist humor centered around identifiable characters impossible not to latch onto. To top it all off, in 2004, we were graced with “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie,” a film which somehow translated the show’s short-form comedic chops to a moving narrative about maintaining child-like optimism in the face of adversity, all while polishing up the show’s rough-around-the-edges animation style to something befitting the silver screen.

Twenty-one years later, the new direct-to-Netflix “Plankton: The Movie” is not witty and not engaging — it’s a second-rate musical for no one.

In “Plankton: The Movie,” Plankton is once again trying to steal the Krabby Patty secret formula. Of course, he fails, but when he comes back to the Chum Bucket, he finds that his computer wife Karen miraculously turned the fast food restaurant into a flourishing business, slinging mysterious piles of fish goop to customers hungrily gobbling it up. The film revels in showing us images of fish devouring flesh and eyeballs, presumably belonging to people they once could’ve known as friends, marking the first bit in a trend of markedly anti-SpongeBob humor. Plankton, displeased that his wife managed to find commercial success without his thievery, trashes the place in a fit of rage and Karen responds by packing her bags and deciding to take over the world herself. 

What follows is a poorly animated, meandering musical that — as opposed to the first SpongeBob movie, which felt like a feature film narrative built around the SpongeBob cast — seems more like a 11-minute episode padded out to feature length. This is felt most through the bizarre choice to make it a musical. Given the show’s history of musical installments, this is not entirely out of left field, but the songs in “Plankton: The Movie” do not follow SpongeBob tradition. 

Classics like “Ripped Pants,” “F.U.N. Song” and the inimitable “Sweet Victory” are all short, hummable tunes, which punctuate heightened emotions. This is especially true in the first film, where “Goofy Goober Rock” and “Just a Kid” represent moments of true ecstasy and misery, respectively, and the all-time great “Ocean Man” elegantly ties everything together.

But “Plankton: The Movie” seems to have taken a page out of the “Emilia Pérez” book with needlessly wordy songs meandering through unclear melodies and poor rhyme schemes, letting characters describe the actions they are already taking. There is one notable exception, with Plankton’s “I’m A Jerky Jerk.” While it does not come close to the beauty of “Sweet Victory,” the ballad at least has a defined melody and something of a joke, where a close-up of Plankton’s nub hands playing the piano reveals two real human hands painted blue. 

That gag also represents the film’s other greatest failing. Putting aside the feckless narrative, horrible mechanical 3D animation and stilted musical numbers, “Plankton: The Movie” is just not funny. Endemic of much of late SpongeBob, the film’s jokes rely more on making characters simply do funny things and then deriving humor from the characters’ natural reactions.

For example, in the early episode “Pizza Delivery/Home Sweet Pineapple,” SpongeBob’s Boy Scout antics to find a rock he can fly are funny because they make sense for an altruist like SpongeBob and annoy the daylights out of Squidward, and the absurdity of finding the rock is made funnier because it is shocking to Squidward, an actual character in the episode. But in this film, when SpongeBob dons a mustache and a dumb Austrian accent to pretend to be Sigmund Freud and psychoanalyzes Plankton for 20 minutes, not only does the joke not make sense for SpongeBob’s notably not-too-bright character, but neither him nor Plankton note the absurdity of this comedic shift. 

Of course, populating “Plankton: The Movie” with jokes that fit the characters and highlight emotions, rather than just killing time, would take an amount of effort and care that the creators of “SpongeBob” simply are not invested in giving anymore. That’s the reason they made this film with PlayStation 2-level 3D animation. That’s why they didn’t give the musicians the resources to make proper melodies. That’s why they didn’t give the writers time to make SpongeBob jokes instead of whatever they thought might get a laugh out of a 2-year-old. “Plankton: The Movie,” alongside all of the other SpongeBob-related garbage that has been shoveled out for the last two decades, is symptomatic of a company that lacks the respect for its audience that the late Stephen Hillenburg had. It’s embarrassing.

Contact Max Vetter at [email protected].