Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years Review — A Warm Prequel That Never Quite Grows Up

Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years premiered on Paramount+ on March 4, 2021. The series is a prequel and spin-off of Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants, created by Stephen Hillenburg. It ran two seasons and 75 episodes, with the last episode airing July 10, 2024.

The pitch is simple. SpongeBob is 10 years old, spending his summer at a sleepaway camp called Kamp Koral in the Kelp Forest. He catches jellyfish, builds campfires, and swims in Lake Yuckymuck. That’s the whole engine, and for a while it’s enough.

Trailer, via Paramount Plus.

A 10-Year-Old SpongeBob and the Cabin He Bunks In

The premise does the work of a pilot in every episode. Mr. Krabs runs Kamp Koral as a single father raising his baby daughter, Pearl. Mrs. Puff is the scoutmaster and arts-and-crafts teacher. SpongeBob shares a cabin with Patrick Star and Sandy Cheeks. Squidward Tentacles, slightly older than the others and almost a teenager, is their junior counselor. He is a pessimist, which is to say he is the same Squidward, only shorter.

That’s the trick of a prequel, and Kamp Koral commits to it. The characters are younger versions of themselves, not new ones. Sandy has braces. Plankton is the chef at the camp’s Krusty Kanteen, and underneath the camp he runs a secret laboratory where his computer assistant Karen helps him build inventions meant to take over the world. The campers do not know about the lab, and the show plays that gap for laughs.

The voice cast returns nearly intact, which matters more than it sounds. Tom Kenny as SpongeBob, Bill Fagerbakke as Patrick, Rodger Bumpass as Squidward, Clancy Brown as Mr. Krabs, Carolyn Lawrence as Sandy, Mr. Lawrence as Plankton, Lori Alan as Pearl, Mary Jo Catlett as Mrs. Puff. Jill Talley voices Karen. Carlos Alazraqui and Kate Higgins play Nobby and Narlene, two hillbilly narwhals who live near the camp. Kidferatu is a camp counselor and the child version of Nosferatu.

The Flashback That Became a Series

Kamp Koral did not start as a series. The idea came from the flashback scenes in The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, released in 2020. In October 2018, during his first days as president of Nickelodeon, Brian Robbins put a room together to brainstorm ideas for potential SpongeBob spin-offs. By February 2019, a spin-off was reported to be in the works. In June 2019, the series was officially announced with a 13-episode first season. That order was expanded to 26 episodes in March 2021.

The show was developed by Luke Brookshier, Marc Ceccarelli, Andrew Goodman, Kaz, Mr. Lawrence, and Vincent Waller. In August 2021, it was renewed for a second 13-episode season. That season premiered on Paramount+ on July 10, 2024, three years after the first. The last episode aired the same day.

Here is the run, for anyone tracking how a spin-off actually rolls out:

What the Camp Actually Does With 75 Episodes

Episodes focus on SpongeBob and his friends learning about the campsite, exploring new places, and taking part in summertime activities. That is a narrow brief, and 75 episodes is a lot of room to fill inside it. The show knows this. It leans on the camp structure — activities, cabins, counselors, a lake with a bad name — and lets the characters be smaller, louder versions of who they become.

The Krusty Kanteen and the laboratory under it are the best idea in the show. Plankton as camp chef, plotting world domination from a basement nobody visits, is a joke that works because the audience is in on it and the campers are not. It gives the series a second floor, literally, when the surface-level summer-camp stories run thin.

Kidferatu is the other good swing. A camp counselor who is the child version of Nosferatu is the kind of gag the show can only pull because it is animated and because it is a prequel and because nobody is protecting the brand that hard. Nobby and Narlene, the narwhals, give the camp an outside. They are a reminder that Kamp Koral sits in a forest with things in it.

Where the Prequel Runs Out of Summer

The problem is not the cast or the premise. It is that Kamp Koral is a prequel, and prequels have a ceiling. The characters cannot change much, because we know who they become. Squidward is pessimistic here because he is pessimistic later. Plankton schemes here because he schemes later. The show can show us how they got that way, but it mostly doesn’t. It shows us them being that way, smaller.

That is fine for a season. Across 75 episodes it starts to feel like a loop. The camp activities repeat, the cabins repeat, the lake repeats. The flashback scenes in Sponge on the Run worked because they were short — a glimpse of who these characters were before. Stretched to a series, the glimpse becomes the whole view, and the view is a summer that never quite ends.

The second season arrived in July 2024, three years after the first. The renewal in August 2021 was a vote of confidence. The long wait between seasons is harder to read as anything but a stall.

What Kamp Koral Gets Right, and What It Doesn’t

The show’s best asset is its cast, and it uses them well. Kenny, Fagerbakke and Bumpass slip back into younger versions of their characters without missing. Brown’s Mr. Krabs as a single father is a warmer read than the later version, and Pearl as a baby is a small, funny addition. Lawrence’s Plankton gets the most to do, because the lab gives him a plot in every episode while everyone else gets an activity.

What Kamp Koral does not do is justify itself as more than a spin-off. It is a prequel that fills in a summer nobody asked about, and it fills it in pleasantly. The camp is well-built, the characters are intact, the jokes land often enough. But there is no episode here that changes how you watch SpongeBob SquarePants. There is no moment that reframes Squidward or explains Plankton or deepens Mr. Krabs. The show is a warm, competent extension of a thing you already like.

That is not nothing. Paramount+ needed original content, and Kamp Koral was there, and it worked. It is a good show for a kid who has run out of SpongeBob episodes and wants more time in that world. It is a lesser show for anyone hoping the prequel would say something the original didn’t.

The published critical score is 7.2/10, based on a TMDB audience score of 523 votes. That number is about right. Kamp Koral is a solid, likable series that never quite becomes more than its premise. It earns the score it got, and it earns a place in the SpongeBob catalog without ever threatening the top of it.

animation · Kamp Koral · Nickelodeon · Paramount+ · SpongeBob SquarePants · TV Review