Squidward Tentacles raises his baton but can’t bear to watch. In the moments before his makeshift marching band performs the Bubble Bowl halftime show, the anxious conductor can only anticipate a worst-case scenario. After just four days of practice, he’s understandably failed to turn a bunch of random Bikini Bottom residents into classically trained musicians. Nightly rehearsals have resulted in property damage, fistfights, and the deaths of two flag twirlers. The only thing left is nationally televised embarrassment.
The Ringer’s Streaming Guide
There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.
This kind of comeuppance would seem appropriate for SpongeBob SquarePants’ cynical antagonist, but “Band Geeks,” part of the 15th episode of the show’s second season, makes an unexpected pivot. To Squidward’s surprise, a row of brass players begins an ascending fanfare; Plankton delivers a soulful piano intro; the stage lights dim. Then, SpongeBob emerges into the spotlight. Clutching a microphone, he tilts his head up, opens his eyes, and begins to croon the opening melodramatic lyrics to “Sweet Victory.”
“Winner takes alllllll,” he sings in an unnaturally coarse baritone, staring into the crowd. Suddenly, a triumphant upswing as he squeezes his fist: “It’s the thrill of one more kill…”
The song kicks into overdrive. Patrick Star supplies a drum fill, Sandy Cheeks shreds on guitar, the stage bursts with pyrotechnics. Squidward can’t believe it. Within moments, his presumed folly has become a head-swaying arena anthem in the vein of Van Halen or Foreigner. Squilliam, Squidward’s longtime rival who tried to set him up for failure, can only faint in disbelief. In victorious glee, the band leader literally jumps for joy.
Wednesday marks the 25th anniversary of SpongeBob’s official series premiere. When this particular episode first aired in 2001, 8-year-old India Eisley sprinted into her family’s living room and shouted, “Dad, I’m watching SpongeBob, and he’s singing your song!” Several years earlier, veteran hard rocker David Glen Eisley and his Grammy Award–winning producer, Bob Kulick, had written and recorded “Sweet Victory” for the APM Music catalog—a vast library of tracks that have acquired both their publishing and master licenses, making it easy for media producers to purchase them for use in film and television. To that point, “I’d heard nothing about it being used anywhere,” Eisley says. Then his daughter shared the surprising news. “I run in, and sure enough there’s the Sponge singing—and it’s my voice, and it’s our track.”
Like most other Nickelodeon viewers both young and old, Eisley couldn’t have anticipated an ode to ’80s glam bands popping up in a kids cartoon. But the juxtaposition of a giggly underwater sponge belting out lyrics like he’s Journey’s Steve Perry proved to be a transcendent and hilarious musical moment. In the years since “Band Geeks” debuted on television, the song has remained a beloved and iconic part of the show’s history. Synonymous with the series’ absurdist comedy and real-life, momentous, winning occasions, it still circulates through various sporting events (including this year’s Super Bowl simulcast), Nick mockumentaries, commercials, and video games, catering to its grown-up millennial fans.
Ironically, the creators behind “Band Geeks” never set out to find a rock anthem for the show’s hardcore ending. As the episode’s cowriter C.H. Greenblatt recalls, “Sweet Victory” was one big happy accident. “We just sort of stumbled across it,” he says.
Throughout the mid-’90s, Bruton Music, a British record label and production catalog under the APM umbrella, had tasked Jonathan Firstenberg with building out its U.S. song library. As the producer got to work, he had an idea for an album called American Games, a soundtrack of the country’s sporting events, which he aimed to fill with organ medleys and familiar audience cheers. Still, he needed someone to write a couple of true jock jams, so he had an executive from Zomba Group (Bruton’s parent company) introduce him to Kulick, a successful producer and guitarist who had worked with Lou Reed and KISS, among other high-profile bands.
“I want music like Queen,” Firstenberg said to Kulick. “I need anthemic rock.”
Kulick knew just the guy to help them. A few years earlier, he’d met Eisley, the frontman of ’80s bands Giuffria and Dirty White Boy, in a Los Angeles celebrity softball league (which featured Ricky Phillips from Styx and Michael Bolton), and they immediately hit it off. The pair soon collaborated on an album called Murderer’s Row, in which Eisley supplied vocals to a variety of instrumental tracks. Kulick loved his new partner’s rough-edged voice and figured Eisley would be perfect for the American Games assignment. “These guys knew how to produce this kind of music,” Firstenberg says. “They’re rockers. This was in their blood.”
As soon as Kulick gave him the prompt, Eisley started to play around with a piano lick he had already brainstormed. Over the next couple of days, he sketched out the rest of the melody with his keyboard and wrote out the lyrics. (“My favorite line in the whole song is You don’t win no silver. You only lose the gold,” Eisley says.) Then Kulick came to his house to lay down a respectable four-track demo with more guitar and drums. Upon listening for the first time, Firstenberg was blown away. “I did not have to overproduce this,” he says. “This was a very natural song, and I think one of the reasons it works so well is that it feels like it’s a live performance.”
After Firstenberg sent them a couple of notes and tweaks, the pair rerecorded the song on a DigiTape eight-track, first in a professional studio in Van Nuys, then in a fellow engineer’s garage, where Eisley sang his own backup vocals. Before wrapping production, Firstenberg got the pair to conceive and record “Can’t Stop the Rock,” another beat-heavy crowd-pleaser adjacent to “We Will Rock You” that also features Eisley’s signature vocals. “The thing that really makes rock songs work is gravel in the voice, and David Glen Eisley has more gravel than most people I know,” Firstenberg says. “He was the perfect voice to really nail this.”
The album—full of marching band standards and clap-along favorites—was eventually released in the summer of 1998. Kulick and Eisley shared writing credits, signed their APM contract, sold the publishing rights for cash, and moved on to other projects. “It was just like, we did this crummy little deal and got a crummy amount of money,” Eisley says, “and then we just kind of forgot about it.”
A couple of years later, Greenblatt also needed a song. SpongeBob creator Stephen Hillenburg had recently handed him the story outline for “Band Geeks,” but the ending wasn’t set in stone. When the sea creature gang is elevated into a football stadium above the surface, all Greenblatt remembers reading was that “they just perform an amazing marching band song.”
Next to his office inside a storage room in Nickelodeon’s Burbank studios, Greenblatt began rummaging through a cabinet filled with CDs of licensed music, hoping to find a marching band tune that would somehow blow people’s minds. Nothing seemed to work. Then he popped American Games into his stereo and heard Eisley’s voice. He cracked up. “Imagining that voice coming out of SpongeBob seemed hilarious,” he says. “You just wouldn’t expect the stadium-rock vibe of it.”
The writer was eager to share his discovery, so he burst into Aaron Springer’s office next door to play the track. The episode’s director quickly lit up. “That’s amazing,” Springer told him. Moments later, the pair raced down the hallway to show Hillenburg their potential musical kicker. It wasn’t a hard sell. “He’s like … ‘Yes!’” Greenblatt remembers, prompting them to start storyboarding the episode.
To Greenblatt, “Band Geeks” works as a narrative on multiple levels. It has its share of puns and ludicrous comedy (“Is mayonnaise an instrument?” Patrick asks at one point) and embodies a classic underdog structure, but “it really just comes down to music and animation always going together really well,” he says. Greenblatt also appreciates that Squidward, for the first time, isn’t just an impediment to SpongeBob’s shenanigans. “Usually you don’t feel that bad for Squidward—he’s kind of annoying and he sets up his own demise,” Greenblatt says. But in this case, “you feel empathy for him.”
That leads to a big musical payoff, which Springer stylized with abstract backdrops and a spectrum of bold colors once the song goes up another level. “Having that explosion is such a reveal because the audience doesn’t know what’s coming at that point,” Greenblatt says. “The song has a story to it that really lends itself well to the story of the episode.”
Springer also made room for comedic flourishes, giving Patrick slick rock star sunglasses and inserting live-action interstitials of face-painted fans (which the show’s crew members shot in a bleacher-filled studio) weeping to the song’s emotional themes. “Part of the fun of working on the show was you could go a little crazy and be a little silly and just go for it if it felt funny,” Greenblatt says.
As he reflects on it today, Greenblatt knows if he had chosen a traditional marching band song, “it’s not as funny, it’s not as surprising,” he says. “There’s something very sweet about everybody coming together for Squidward in the weirdest way possible, which is totally SpongeBob.”
After “Band Geeks” aired, “Sweet Victory” only grew in esteem, becoming the blueprint for other animated shows interested in needle-dropping random musical numbers. The song was included on SpongeBob Squarepants: The Yellow Album in 2005, and two years later, the scene was named the no. 1 moment in Nicktoons history, beating out a host of other clips from SpongeBob, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and The Fairly OddParents.
But the song gained a second wind within its millennial demographic after Hillenburg passed away at 57 from ALS in November 2018. In his honor, Isreal Colunga, a SpongeBob superfan, posted a petition on Change.org asking that the NFL implement “Sweet Victory” into the upcoming Super Bowl halftime show featuring Maroon 5 and Travis Scott. A kind gesture and perhaps an inside joke, the petition quickly went viral, with nearly a million fans signing it three weeks after the original posting.
Though online momentum built, and a behind-the-scenes featurette teased some SpongeBob imagery, the song (mostly) never made it to the stage. Instead, Scott, whose song “Sicko Mode” had recently been mashed up with the ending of “Band Geeks,” only used the episode’s opening brass line to introduce his performance. The decision disappointed fans, leading other sports leagues and teams to capitalize on the song and its audience in creative ways. (NASCAR put together a Daytona 500 promotional video, while the Dallas Stars concocted an entire light and jumbotron display around it at a 2019 home game.)
In February, when CBS aired the first Super Bowl simulcast on Nickelodeon, “Sweet Victory” finally got its moment to shine, popping up in a pregame show that recreated the “Band Geeks” scene with brand-new CGI animation. “When we were given the incredible opportunity this year to bring the first-ever alternate telecast to SpongeBob’s Bikini Bottom, we knew we had to meet that demand and deliver,” Ashley Kaplan, executive vice president of Nickelodeon’s unscripted and digital studio, wrote in an email.
The two-decade-plus phenomenon has been bittersweet for Eisley. Kulick passed away in 2020, and Eisley has struggled to negotiate a new contract, which severely limits his compensation whenever the song is used. Still, he loves “Band Geeks” and can’t believe the sustained appreciation and nostalgia for the tune so many years later. “It means everything,” the singer-songwriter says. “If you manage to hit a chord in anybody’s heart, that’s something special. That’s something nobody can take away from me.”
To this day, Eisley has performed the song only once in front of people—at a holiday party hosted by Kelsey Grammer. The actor had become a good family friend and invited Eisley to his home a few years ago for a holiday party. During the karaoke portion of the night, Grammer slyly cued up “Sweet Victory” and asked the rocker to serenade the crowd. Eisley obliged, calling the experience “a bit of a shock.” It reestablished a strange truth.
“I’m a sponge,” he says. “That’s my legacy.”