Kamp Koral: SpongeBob's Under Years

Kamp Koral is an upcoming SpongeBob SquarePants spin-off prequel series, introducing a 10-year-old SpongeBob at a summer sleepaway camp.

Stephen Hillenburg last visited the Nickelodeon studio in August 2018. He spent his "last two or three months" at home with his wife, Karen Hillenburg. In October 2018, Brian Robbins became the president of Nickelodeon. On Robbins' second day at Nickelodeon, he attended a pitch meeting for season 13 of SpongeBob. This inspired him to come up with a variety of his own spin-off ideas, because Robbins disliked that SpongeBob had "always stayed the same." Robbins wanted to start work on Kamp Koral immediately, but was unable to do it right away because of Stephen Hillenburg's rule that no spin-offs be created. In June 2019, Robbins decided to greenlight Kamp Koral, as it had been six months since Hillenburg's passing.

Sandy Cheeks will appear in the spin-off, as a kid with braces. Robbins said "Sandy is really cute in it." This directly contradicts the season 1 episode "Tea at the Treedome," in which SpongeBob meets Sandy for the first time; Brian Robbins had not watched the episode or skimmed its synopsis.

Premise
SpongeBob and friends spend the summer catching jellyfish, building camp-fires, and swimming in Lake Yuckymuck at Kamp Koral, located in the Kelp Forest.

Production
The series is due to commence production in June 2019 and it will be CG-animated. Ramsey Naito, Nickelodeon’s EVP Animation Production and Development, said: "SpongeBob has an incredible universe to expand upon and the greenlight for Kamp Koral is a testament to the strength and longevity of these characters known and loved by generations of fans around the world."

Of the Kamp Koral announcement, Paul Tibbitt (Stephen Hillenburg's successor as showrunner from 2005-2015) said: "I do not mean any disrespect to my colleagues who are working on this show. They are good people and talented artists. But this is some greedy, lazy executive-ing right here, and they ALL know full well Steve would have HATED this. Shame on them."

On June 5, Rob Renzetti (another former Nickelodeon employee, creator of My Life as a Teenage Robot) said that he disapproved of the spin-off idea. He also retweeted Tibbitt's statement.

In July 2019, storyboard artist Brian Morante said that he started storyboarding the pilot episode. On August 23, 2019, it was confirmed by Vincent Waller that Andrew Goodman is writing an episode for the spin-off. In September 2019, it was announced that the series will have its UK debut in August 2020.

Trivia

 * This is the first new entry in the SpongeBob SquarePants franchise to be announced after Stephen Hillenburg's passing in November 2018. Hillenburg himself was strongly against spin-offs, crossovers, and "aging down" the characters. As such, this has received a lot of negative backlash from many fans and staff of the show. This has also resulted in many petitions trying to get the show cancelled.
 * In some of the few interviews with Stephen Hillenburg, he recalled that he was planning to "walk out" completely on Nickelodeon when they demanded that SpongeBob be a school-aged child. He said it would basically just be, "like Hey Arnold! under the sea." He was about to abandon the idea for a full series until he came up with a compromise (putting SpongeBob in a boat driving school so he could remain an adult-aged character).