I honestly just lowered the contrast by 100 and bumped up the brightness by about 25 on Google Photos. It was simple lighting changes but it worked surprisingly well.
I think the first one especially looks straight out of Season 4. It reminds me of when Squidward is playing the clarinet at the beginning of SquidBob TentaclePants. But the linework is most similar to the 2004 produced episodes.
The bottom one looks like the moments where Season 4 looks more pre-movie than usual, like in this shot of Good Neighbors
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I speculate the reason Christmas Who? and The Sponge Who Could Fly looked newer is because maybe Rough Draft Animation let the animators use better computers (that may have been being reserved for other shows) for specials. I know it sounds far-fetched but why would the other episodes look so primitive and these episodes look comparatively new? Though I guess another possibility is that the old technology is fully capable of making new looking episodes like Christmas Who or The Lost Mattress and they simply spent more time refining the linework? Honestly who knows?
Maybe, all the specials don’t look newer.
The Sponge Who Could Fly and Christmas Who don’t have those gray undertones that the SD post movie seasons do. Even the HD seasons have that distinctive “SpongeBob undertone” that is absent in the pre movie seasons.
I find it weird how season 1 was the most consistent color wise despite using traditional cel animation.
It still baffles me how SpongeBob is the most inconsistent looking show on TV despite the fact that it was originally gonna run for only three seasons. Adventure Time is second place for the show with the most inconsistent animation since the color pallet changes a lot in that show as well.
The oldest looking episode from season 2 is Sailor Mouth. When I was little I thought it was cel animated.
Dexter’s Lab had a lot of color pallet changes but they were linear and not instantaneous. Although there were episodes in mid season 2 that possibility aired out of production order, around the midway point of the season, we have some episodes that have the late season 1 art style, other episodes that are hybrids, and then other episodes that have the late s2 Ego Trip style. I think Star Trek Unconventional was the first to have the 1998 style of late season 2, while Ocean Commotion was the last to have the style from late season 1.
I will post photos of the different art styles of season 2 of Dexter’s Lab later. But at least three quarters of that season have the 1998 style that looks like Ego Trip, which is honestly my favorite style since those episodes were shown the most during the 2011 reruns on Cartoon Network I saw as a kid. Sadly it was rare for me to catch Dexter since it was on when I was in school, so I was only able to see it on Snow Days. They showed Johnny Test on holidays in place of Dexter and that used to piss me off, since Johnny Test was my generation’s version of Teen Titans Go. Gen Z had Johnny Test, Gen Alpha has Teen Titans Go.
The Savino seasons are rather consistent as season 3 looks the same from start to finish. Minus the bad dot crawl in the first half of the season. Season 4 has no dot crawl, and the colors are extremely bright in this season, making it look 5 or 6 years newer than it actually was.
