Kamp Koral: SpongeBob's Under Years
Kamp Koral: SpongeBob's Under Years
SpongeBob and his friends spend the summer at the craziest camp in the Kelp Forest, Kamp Koral.
Alex reviewedMay 11, 2025
Oh boy! This is gonna be a long one.
This statement I'm going to make in this paragraph is not me defending the series, but I have to mention that the online discussion of the show bothered me so much due to how often "Steve's Wishes" kept being slung without talking about the actual show's content. I am saying this as somebody who has a huge nostalgic attachment to the classic era of SpongeBob - there's something really annoying about the fact that nobody in the animation space even cares to have nuance in any animation discussion and will make contradictory statements that don't encourage intellectual thought or actual engagement. As a result, I decided to sit myself down and watch all 39 episodes of this series, hoping there would be something worth talking about or having a serious discussion about. And man, do I have a lot to say.
The synopsis is self explanatory - this is about young SpongeBob going to summer camp with his friends and getting into wacky antics, continuing off of the ideas placed on the third SpongeBob movie. You see these characters doing a lot of young kid stuff, doing various camp activities. The older characters like Mr. Krabs, Mrs. Puff and a few others are also younger, but still adults that lead the camp. The premise itself is not a bad thing either. My issue lays in the fact that this series is the equivalent of accidentally, and comically, making a basic, frozen microwave meal out of fresh ingredients.
The animation is really bad, sadly, and really makes the series hard to keep watching. There are definitely funny gags and jokes lifted by the talented writers of this series, and very interesting episode story-lines that the main series could not do. Sadly, those positive aspects are unfortunately worsened by the CGi rendering looking like a PS3 game at best. What is worse; in MULTIPLE episodes of this series, almost nothing is going on in the background. The camp setting is rendered to be extremely large and forest-like, but almost nothing is going on to make the setting feel more fitting. I rarely see campers in the background doing stuff during the main episode plot to make this feel less of a wasteland. This is very easy to pass off in a 2D animated show where more detail can be done in a flat looking picture, but it is very upsetting how empty this series feels on occasion. I mean, just look at the main poster on Plex - not a great first impression to a lot of people.
I wanna make one thing clear to everyone: There are 3D animated shows on Nickelodeon airing RIGHT NOW that look 10x better than this, including the very recent "Max and the Midknights" and Fairly OddParents's revival series. There's also Big Nate, The Smurfs reboot, and even the Monster High 2022 reboot that utilize limited CGi animation to their fullest potential. Even Jimmy Neutron, which was released in the 2000s with the bulgy and lower fidelity animation, STILL looks better than this due to the character designs fitting extremely well for 3D. I also never liked how the SpongeBob characters looked in CG, and the only times it has worked very well for me would be is in the movies due to them incorporating 2D style elements in some capacity (especially in Sponge On the Run, the best example). The only thing close to them doing that in this series is the squash and stretch, but it isn't even executed that well here. This has to be an art direction failure or something at the executive level to keep this from looking the best it can possibly be, which almost makes me feel like this series was mandated.
Unfortunately the only characters in this series that I had a fun time with in episodes I liked were the "aged down" versions of the original characters, as so much of that charm comes from their relationships that started from the original series, and some of their designs for this were also clever (such as Karen being a calculator, which was also carried into the better well-recieved Plankton Movie's flashback sequences). All of the original characters created for this spinoff are, sadly, not memorable in any way. The narwhals are annoying, and the child Nosferatu made no sense to me. Very dull characters.
In short, this is a cartoon I really wish was good... There's good ideas on paper that are worsened by bad CGi and possible internal factors/executive mandation. If you want "SpongeBob at Camp", you are better off just watching Camp Lazlo from Cartoon Network (It is made by Joe Murray, creator of "Rocko" that worked with Steve Hillenburg and Mr. Lawrence in the past, and it pretty much checks off all of the boxes that Kamp Koral was trying to do). The best thing that this series offered was not even in the spinoff itself, rather the "KK reunion" special in the mainline show (Kreepaway Kamp) as the storyline was much more fun and had utilized the camp setting way better.
If you're morbidly curious to see what this series has, do check out this show in your own discretion, but if you are a diehard classic era fan I hope you can bare keeping your expectations into the lowest bar you can possibly put them in. It's not the worst thing to come out of the SpongeBob franchise (that title goes to its horrible abandon ware video games and heavy commercialization). Though it is unfortunately very unremarkable, mediocre, with not a lot of great things to scream home about, which is worse than bad honestly.