When I took my kids to see The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants, I went into the new 2025 movie expecting to have a few laughs, eat some popcorn and snacks, and then go about my day. While all of that went down, something very unexpected happened a few minutes into the movie: a long-buried childhood memory was unlocked and flooded my brain with nostalgia for something I hadn’t thought about in nearly 25 years.
It wasn’t some memory of watching SpongeBob SquarePants back when the all-time great animated series premiered back in 1999, nor was it introducing my kids to that burger-flipping Nickelodeon character. Instead, it involves the biggest roller coaster in Texas, or at least the tallest at the time of this writing. Let me explain.
